Sitting, Rehearsal and House Circle

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday September 12, 2009 – Sitting, Rehearsal and House Circle

All of today’s activities took place at my apartment, since Fremont Abbey was otherwise booked. Folks arrived for the 8:30 sitting. After that and a coffee break, rehearsal commenced. We began by sending good wishes to the group gathered with Tony in NJ, who were meeting more or less concurrently. We went on to examine three things we can take on in an ongoing way in order to be in the best possible condition to work with Robert when he joins us in October.

The first is “Eye of the Needle”. This piece is pivotal in the history of Tuning the Air. At a feast at the Trinity space in December 2004, the five of us who were providing music for the event acted on an impulse, fanned out and surrounded the assembled feasters for this piece. It was a very moving experience, and was the singular spark that got us exploring the potential of performance in a circle, and eventually to the creation of Tuning the Air. We have not performed it as part of our repertoire for some time, but it is never far away, and it has recently reappeared. The idea here is that we can go back to the basics with this piece, not only the performance team, but the house circle as well, and bring our understanding and command of the piece up to a level that might make it possible to work with Robert to take it much further.

The second thing we can do is to recommit to the morning sitting, and in particular an exercise that was presented last June.

And the third is to push as far as we are able on a specific division of attention exercise that the performance team was presented with, also last June. Putting some work on this into our daily practice, as well as working a bit on it together when possible, should make it possible to begin our work with Robert further down the road. We then used this exercise as a beginning for our rehearsal.

Jaxie needed to depart at 10:45, so we did not have a lot of time. In the Great Hall the other night, we had again noted that the room responds very well to music that rocks. The middle section of “Sigh and a Kiss” and the Bonham inspired Whiz in the Zeppelin medley are just stunning, and the thought was that some kind of thrakking ought to be looked at. Though “Thrak” itself may not ultimately be the right choice, it seemed like a good place to begin, so we reviewed it a bit and then determined to do the necessary personal work so that we can put it together at the next rehearsal. Howard noted that Robert had been accompanying the League on “Thrak” in recent performances in Europe, and so having it available within this group seems to be a good idea.

We reviewed some circulation and zither parts of various pieces, and then took a pretty serious look at the rhythm section for “Scorched Air,” and worked on the “balalaika part” for “The Bus Artist.”

Jaxie departed, and while we had a bit of time before Bob would arrive, I asked Howard to present Luciano’s piece, which he brought back from Barcelona. It involves two parts, each to be played in circulation; one 3-person part that is pretty fast, and a 6-person part that is very fast. Without all 9 of us present we couldn’t really work out or commit to a full arrangement, but we were able to test the feasibility of each part, and brainstorm on some circulation schemes. We got the first section up and running very quickly, and so when Bob arrived we were able to demonstrate it at tempo. Even I was impressed. We will look at this again when we are all together, and should be able to consider it for inclusion in the repertoire in fairly short order.

With Bob we continued detail work on existing repertoire. We ran “Cultivating the Beat” – Ian is fully up to speed and will be performing that part right away. Travis is about 75% on his new part, and it will likely still be a couple of weeks before he feels solid enough with it to consider performing it. It will sound great with a third cello player on this piece. We also did some very detailed work on the flow and timing of the intro to the Zeppelin medley. We ran the entire piece with the metronome as well.

I grabbed a quick snack after rehearsal, and then Greg, Andrew, Mary Beth and Christina arrived for the House Circle meeting. We dedicated then entire meeting to dissecting and reassembling C Minor. Began with an open improvisation in that key, and then moved on to circulating the scale through 4 octaves. From there to a circulation of the diatonic triads of C Minor, and finally a scale/triad combination exercise. When there was about 30 minutes left, I began to introduce the first melody line of Tony’s “Lament”, which is also in C Minor. One more open improvisation in C Minor, and the meeting came to a close.

On Monday night we will be at Bob and Jaxie’s, and will begin in a full group with the House Circle, looking at how we will approach “Eye of the Needle” together, and then break off into separate rooms so the performance team can rehearse and the house circle can continue their work together.