Rehearsal and House Circle

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday November 21, 2009 – Rehearsal and House Circle

Twenty years ago today I was in San Diego with the League of Crafty Guitarists. We were in a period of doldrums during what has come to be colloquially known as “The Bogo Tour”. No gigs scheduled for several weeks, we were vamping and improvising while camping out at Paul Richards’ family’s condo. I was awakened at dawn by a phone call, and the news that my mother had passed away. It was her 60th birthday. A few minutes later I was on my way to the airport, and back home to DC and my family.

This was the essential content my sitting. It is not a source of sadness, particularly, but November 21 is inevitably something of a contemplative day for me.

Triplets day in Tuning the Air-land.

Two of the team were running a bit late, and Jaxie was not available, so the six of us began by turning on the metronome and circulating in triplets (D Major – a current favorite; so much so it was both called and pulled from the hat on Thursday). With six in the circle, this went swimmingly well. Only when I needed to get up to take care of a phone call, leaving five in the circle, did it begin to get ugly. When I returned to my seat, the tension was palpable. Fortunately at about that point the two late-comers arrived and we moved on to other matters.

First, La Rueda. It went very well on Thursday, but is still new and falls into the short list of pieces that need to be played every time we get together in order to move on to something farther from beginner’s luck and enthusiasm and closer to reliability and, dare I hope, something approaching mastery. Chris and I formed a limping rhythm section without Jaxie, but solid work all around and the circulators got a workout.

Cultivating the Beat was next. A few observations re our recent performances. It is the opener, and that means we need to be sharp right out of the gate. Chris noted a difference between the way he and his section is playing a particular passage and the way it is on the score/midi. I pulled up the score and Bob verified that it is correct, so we worked on making that correction. It is subtle, but initially a little jarring for me, since I am accustomed to hearing it played “wrong”. Very cool, and clearly right, but it will take a little time before I can stop being startled by it.

On to In My Room, which has not been as reliable as it needs to be. It didn’t come out of the hat in the last performance, but it did the week before, and it was a bit of a train wreck. In particular, we drilled the cascade/zither section, but the tempo problem we are fighting is systemic. Travis put it fairly but bluntly that by the time we get to the cascades, it has already died. Good work with the metronome, and a discussion of one potential (but labor-intensive) arranging adjustment – not for this season, but to be considered for the future. Acknowledged that this one is also on te list of “must play” pieces for every rehearsal.

The Shostakovich Prelude next. This one hasn’t been particularly problematic lately, but has always been at the top of the “must play” list, and we can generally find nuances to address. The first run-through began extremely well, especially considering that Jaxie, the player in the poll position of the circulation, was absent, but about halfway through it just crashed and burned. No big deal, just one of those things. Subsequent runs went much better. We focused on one perennially difficult phrase and made a number of useful observations about how it works.

At some point in there we ran Onyx, mostly because I miss performing it. It got sidelined when we moved to the Great Hall due to the tempo and complexity and the difficulty of pulling it off in that acoustic environment. It is not the best or most creative piece in our repertoire, but it has something really wonderful that nothing else we play can really duplicate. Hoping now that we are more at home in the new performance space that we can begin to reintroduce a few pieces like this that got set aside.

The last 45-minutes were devoted to a little more research on an arrangement strategy for the middle section of Charles Ives’ Children’s Hour. Not rehearsal, but more of a “proof of concept”; will this approach work? Last week we looked at the first 4 bars of the section, and it took over an hour. Today we looked at the next 4 bars. This section, all of 12-bars long, is an orgy of disjointed triplets, and the reason I began the rehearsal with the circulated triplet exercise. It looks like Igor will be tuning his low string down to “A” for this one; strange and amazing chord voicings written for the piano, played by 6 guitarists. Like last week’s set of phrases, when approached through the minutia of the fragmented parts, this one is completely incomprehensible, but once heard as a whole it is remarkably simple and even obvious. It may take a while before we can get to that point without spending an hour ramping up to it. But we’ll get there.

A break and a snack, and then the House Circle, represented by Mary Beth, Christina and Greg, arrived.

Continuing the theme of triplets, we worked with an array of circulated and modulating 6-note pentatonic scale patterns, highlighting keeping the pulse of the 6/8 – 1-2-3 4-5-6 – while alternating with two slower sequences that sit on 1-2-3 4-5-6 and 1-2-3 4-5-6. Much like the work on the Ives piece, these patterns have a musical sense and even seem pretty simple and obvious, once we can rise just a little above the mechanics. After 90 minutes, the team was pretty much cruising, although I’m not sure they would concur.

On Monday we blow off rehearsal in order to head to Good Shepherd to see Joel perform. For the performance team, a real treat. He plays before the show every Thursday, but we are sequestered in the green room and can’t hear him. On Monday, we will not only hear him, but will be able to relax and enjoy him, since we won’t be moments away from performing ourselves. Hooray!