Sitting, Rehearsal, and House Circle

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday October 10, 2009 – Sitting, Rehearsal, and House Circle

Good turnout for the sitting. Tony here, and Bill back from the road.

To Fremont Abbey Arts Center for rehearsal. Eight in the circle, with Bob AAD. Bill, Tony and Christina in the center. The group felt a little scattered to me, so we warmed up with 15 minutes of right hand work on a single string, gathering in the energy. From there to some circulation work with the metronome, beginning with eighth notes on a 120bpm setting, and working our way up to 156bpm.

My observation from Thursday, which kept coming back to me all day yesterday, had to do with projecting notes, and the difference between that and simply playing louder. I saw on Thursday that we need to put some intention into notes in order to carry them out into the room, and that this is qualitatively different from simply turning up the volume. We began experimenting with this on the Shostokovich prelude. We began with the left hand, played by Travis, Ian and myself, with the intention to have our notes converge in the center of the circle; to send them to this very specific spot. Quickly remembered that we also need to play to one another, and included that in the intention. Moved to the circulated right hand part, playing it with the same kind of intention to send the note out, but somewhat more complex in that the circulation vectorizes around a star-shaped pattern and that connection needs to be attended to. I listened from various parts of the room, and made some suggestions about keeping the level of all six guitars the same.

For my ears, this work made a huge difference in the vitality of the piece.

Moved on to the closing circulation of the Zeppelin medley, which has not been satisfactory yet this season. My answer, and the feeling seemed to be generally shared, was that the parts needed to be redistributed so that it is no longer vectorized and back into a straight circulation. Not the first time we have had to do this, so we made pretty short work of it. Ian sat in for Bob, and will teach him his part on Monday. We should be good to go.

After a short break, Bill took off and we moved on to a rather intensive look at the rhythm section for the “King for a Day” solos. In the Great Hall, this has been the scariest thing we play. We have managed to dodge any train wrecks, but we have definitely rounded a few corners up on two wheels, and I always come out of that part breathing a major sigh of relief, which is not really the feeling I am aiming for when performing a piece of music. We dissected it and then reassembled it in an array of forms. Extremely informative. In the end, I didn’t feel as though we had come up with a “different” way to play it, but I was very definitely hearing it differently, with a much better grasp of what to listen for as we sync these parts together.

Another short break, and in the final half hour we took advantage of Tony’s presence to review some details and correct a couple of misapprehensions on both “Batrachomyomachy” and “Lament”. If he can come on Monday, when we are all together, I’d like to run “Where Is The Nurse?” by him as well.

Primary plan for Monday, however, is “Scorched Air” and “La Rueda”.

On to my place for a meeting with the House Circle; Greg, Mary Beth, Igor K and Christina on board for today. For the first half, we took another look at how note choices affect a circulation. Working in A Minor, I moved the team from Aeolian/natural minor to Dorian to Phrygian, and then to both Melodic and Harmonic Minor. In the HM work we focused on listening for the seventh, and responding with the E7 chord.

A break, and then on to learning the basics of the six-note phrase the Performance Team is using for the Division of Attention exercise, working through the six forward and the six retrograde displacements.

A good day of work.