Full Company Rehearsal at the Wilsons

A Tuning the Air Journal

Monday February 8, 2010 – Full Company Rehearsal at the Wilsons

Continuing the work with the full company. A slightly smaller group than recently, and some confusion about the schedule meant one player arriving on the late side. We were 10, and then 11 in the circle. Jaxie, just back from the GC Intro course in NJ, initiated some polyrhythmic work that had been addressed at the course. Working in 5 pairs of players, each pair circulating in a specific assigned rhythm, the result began rather chaotically and only once or twice emerged into something discernibly coherent. Silly, and a bit of fun, but Music was hard pressed to make itself known. When we moved into two groups of 5, (or maybe 5 and 6, as I believe Ian had arrived by then), there was much more ease in the playing, and so playful and even occasionally musical result.

49 Notes had been knocking on my door all night. I initiated some circulation work in C Harmonic Minor, which is enharmonically identical to the scale used in that piece, with the idea of setting it up. I was still struggling with whether or not it was time to introduce repertoire into our rehearsals – except for some experiments with Neptune and A Day In The Life which were really for the benefit of the arrangers who needed to test their approaches, we have been specifically avoiding repertoire so far. In the end, I chose not to ignore the knock on the door, which was getting louder. The “performance team” followed the House Circle’s lead on this one, as they have been working on it rather intensively in recent weeks. Afterward, the next words out of my mouth were “Eye of the Needle”, which Taylor then brought in. It seemed bass-heavy, so I switched to the running lines with Chris about halfway through the piece.

A short break. We then met without guitars to discuss and develop an overview of the next weeks, in terms of the simple practicalities of getting a reliable schedule on the calendar, as well as a number of tasks that need to be accomplished. We also compared notes on personal schedules, including travel to Italy for the GC completion course. We hammered out a workable schedule that includes the Performance Team getting down to work, but continues the work with Frank and the full company circle as well. So for now, we are focused on the Performance Team on Mondays, the full company on Saturdays, and Performance Team/Tech Work on Thursdays.

One important decision to come out of this came from the realization that between Italy and some personal vacation times, if we opened on April 8 it would be with a team that had not rehearsed all together for 3 weeks. So we decided to push opening night back to April 15.

Everyone hates meetings, and no one more than me. Nevertheless, they are necessary and useful, and much more efficient than consensus-by-email.