Rehearsal at the Wilsons

A Tuning the Air Journal

Monday October 5, 2009 – Rehearsal at the Wilsons

Gathered at Bob and Jaxie’s at 8:30. Chris’ tai chi class was running a little late, so we worked the Performance Team’s division of attention exercise for a few minutes until he arrived.

Took advantage of having the compete team in one room at one time, and looked at circulated pieces, specifically the Shostakovich prelude as well as some detailed work on the cascades and zithers in “In My Room”. Recapped some of the work from Saturday with rhythmic issues of timing, specifically the Bonham Whiz from the Zeppelin medley, and “Thrak”.

After a short break, we moved on to learning “La Rueda” in earnest. Chris, Jaxie and I form the “rhythm section” and we moved to another room with the score and worked out our circulation, while Howard worked with the remaining 6 on the main circulated arpeggio. This work moved pretty quickly. The rhythm section had our part together in about 30 minutes, and when we joined the arpeggiators we found them about ready to go, with only the coda left to learn. Putting it together was not difficult, working with the metronome at a slightly down tempo. With the context, Jaxie and I came up with a good working bass line for 2 sections that needed filling out. The arpeggiators learned the coda, and we were able to run the entire piece several times. Working without the metronome shone a light on some difficulties we will still need to overcome, and a little research into reconciling the recording with the score to iron out some details and subtleties. But I am hoping it will be ready for performance in a week or two – this largely depending on our available rehearsal time and in particular our opportunities to run it in the performance space, which is crucial.