Rehearsal at the Wilsons

A Tuning the Air Journal

Monday November 9, 2009 – Rehearsal at the Wilsons

The primary task of the night was to discuss our observations from last week’s show; to look at what worked, what didn’t, and what, if any changes were to be made. We realized very late in the game that this was a meeting that really involved the entire company and not just the performance team, but with less than an hour before rehearsal time Jaxie and I agreed to acknowledge that we had made a mistake, and move ahead as planned. We will make sure that an open invitation to the entire team is made for next Monday.

Chris was running a little late, so the rest of us began with a look at the Charles Ives piece, Children’s Hour. In looking over the piano score, I had noticed a couple of things that were different from the way we had arranged it, primarily related to the octave in which the circulated part is played. We made the adjustments and ran it a bit, with pretty stunning effect. Chris arrived, and it was time to get down to business. But frankly, all I wanted to do was dive deeper into this piece.

Very good discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the improvisational strategy we adopted for last week’s show. Clear and direct observations, and remarkable unanimity in terms of our experience. We threw around a very wide range of possible adjustments that we could adopt, but in the end adopted an approach articulated by Howard: change nothing. That is, continue another week with this strategy, but… attend the flow, which we generally agreed was the stickiest part of our first experiment. So the decisions for this week were enumerated as:

• Change nothing
  
• Attention on the flow
  
• Trust the hat – only 2 this week: The Hat of Repertoire and the Hat of Mystery
  
• Joel to move a little more quickly when the hat is called for
  
• Igor will watch for possible opportunities for improv during the Hat
  
• We will not know in advance the themes of the improvs in the Hat of Mystery

At last Monday’s rehearsal I had rather cavalierly declared that La Rueda would be ready for this week. So after a short break we moved on to that. The circulators remained in the living room and worked with their flow and timing, while the rhythm section (me, Jaxie and Chris) went to the den to work out some details on our part. When we came together, it was very close. The final section, which include a couple bars of 4/4 in a piece that is otherwise entirely in 6/4, continued to be a stumbling block. We worked backwards from the final bar, and it began to come together. It is a tough one. Clarity began to come when we did some simplification on the rhythm section part. By the end, we were really playing the end (always a significant moment when we move from “getting through” a piece to actually playing the Music). It is in the mix for Thursday. Whether in the Hat or in the pocket is over to Jaxie, although I suspect running it in the Great Hall during warmup on Thursday may make that decision a bit clearer.

During the final run through of the piece, a solution to the puzzle of how to arrange the middle section of Children’s Hour came to me. I have no idea what I was doing thinking about Ives while playing Pietrafesa, but sometimes associative thinking works in your favor. I ran the idea by Jaxie as we were packing to leave, and it seemed to resonate for her as well. Not sure when we will have time to test this arrangement, as next Saturday will be dominated by the Sherman/Abel nuptials. Soon, I hope.

Fernie popped in after I got home, for a short visit and nightcap, as he is going home tomorrow afternoon. I’m sure Moni and Uma will be happy to see him. I know he has been missing them badly. But I am sorry to see him go.