Full Team at Fremont Abbey and Work Day (Afternoon)

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday February 13, 2010 – Full Team at Fremont Abbey and Work Day (Afternoon)

We were once again a full team for the Saturday morning work. Unfortunately, Frank was a bit under the weather so we weren’t able to continue our specifically Alexander focused work this week. And Bill is in Humans-land and was not able to be their either. Our sense, nevertheless, was that the lines of work we have been taking so far are doing us a lot of good and should be continued.

I took up the task of leading the group on Bill’s work with intention in note choices. Decided to remain in my own seat and direct from there, as my sense was that I need this work as much as anyone else. I had two exercises in mind, and began with the second. This was a return to some work we did rather extensively when I first moved to Seattle. It has to do with bidirectional circulating. The challenge is to follow and really hear each circulation distinctly, and in particular to be present when we are sitting in the seat where the circulations cross. We began with an open D circulated to the left, and then added a free circulation in D Harmonic Minor moving to the right at the same tempo. This eventually moved to having the free circulation go to a double time. Never quite got to triplets. Perhaps another time.

After a break, I introduced the other exercise I had in mind. In this one we worked with C Major in one octave, beginning on middle C. To begin with we circulated the first C. Once that had gone around at least once, anyone was free to move us up to D. Again, after a minimum of one circuit, whoever chose could move us up to E. Etc. Obviously, the person just after the person who made the change was in the hot seat, since the rest of us had a little more time to respond. From here the game modified, allowing the change to occur a little more quickly, and eventually we moved to choosing to move to any note within the scale. I found this a very useful ear training exercise.

Another short break. For the final hour Bob took over and presented the next incarnation of the exercise he has been working with us on involving a rather swift set of changes, with improvisations. This came together remarkably quickly – a sign of improvement I would hope, and not just dumb luck – and at moments became extremely musical.

We departed Fremont Abbey and headed home. I had some lunch and gathered gear. A smaller group of us gathered at Igor A’s house to spend the afternoon building three more risers. Having gone through this a couple of years ago (at that time we built 9 in a day), we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. I had already amassed the raw materials, and the more handy among us had all of the power tools we needed. We worked outside under a carport, and things went very fast. In 2 hours we had 3 more risers. Painting will have to come later. We took the new ones (and 1 old one we had with us to use as our template) down to Ballard to the new storage space, and declared the task complete.