Full Company Rehearsal at Fremont Abbey

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday January 30, 2010 – Full Company Rehearsal at Fremont Abbey

Nearly all-hands this week. Chris had a small emergency at home that necessitated a slightly late arrival, and Bob was home with the children. Pablo was visiting from Vancouver and joined us.

Finally able to get back into Fremont Abbey for a Saturday rehearsal. For scheduling reasons we have had to use the Phinney Neighborhood Center the past two weeks. Phinney is a great facility, in many ways more practical than Fremont for the particular work we have been doing, particularly the Alexander work which involves a certain amount of talking. But playing guitar in the Great Hall is something we need to do as much as possible so that we can begin to adjust to its demands. And the sound really is glorious.

For the first part of the rehearsal, Frank worked with us on the Alexander Technique in a slightly more traditional format. We sat in a semicircle facing him, and he talked about the practice of releasing habits. He asked for volunteers to demonstrate. Greg went first, and presented something he had noticed about tension in the right arm, as it relates to releasing tension in the right wrist. At one point Frank worked directly with his head and neck, of course, his back, as well as his right shoulder and upper arm. Someone (Jaxie, I think) observed that while the upper part of the right arm was being addressed, something happened to the right hand: “he had a new hand”. I was the next volunteer. My question had to do the transition from not playing guitar to playing guitar. My observation had been that when it “comes time to play” I go through a great deal of adjustment in my body, in preparation. My thought/wish was that it is possible to let go of the unnecessary intermediate steps and simply move from being in a state of active rest to applying myself to this particular activity. Frank talked at length about this. It has been, in some ways, the topic of his presentations since we began this season. He offered me a number of opportunities to chose to begin or not to begin, remembering that not to begin is a real option. Eventually we applied this to the first few bars of a piece of music that I know very well. I noticed that in letting go of a number of habitual quirks and ticks I was also letting go of my ability to play the piece with reliability. I rely on my habits for my competence.

Bill was next up. We continued the exercise of bringing some intention to the notes we chose. He began by asking if anyone knew the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Most of us raised our hands. He then asked for someone to briefly recapitulate the story. No one raised their hand. Jaxie, being a parent, was prevailed upon. The exercise, then, was for the group to tell the story, in circulation, one word at a time. Simultaneously we circulated notes from the A Minor Pentatonic scale. Much hilarity ensued. We repeated the exercise, this time with the circulation of notes doing the exercise of “play the note the person to your left played”, moving to one single note played the entire circle. Further hilarity. There was a lot of information in this exercise, but the acoustics of the Great Hall make discussion very difficult, and I observed that during the break there was a great deal of ad hoc discussion in small clusters of people.

For the final 30 minutes we returned to experiments for Taylor’s benefit of various ways or arranging and playing the “Neptune” movement of Holst’s The Planets. More to follow on this.

I am off to Vancouver (BC) in the morning for the Vancouver Guitar Circle.