Full Team with Frank at Fremont Abbey

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday February 20, 2010 – Full Team with Frank at Fremont Abbey

Virtually all hands on deck this morning. Bob was home with the family. Frank had recovered from whatever had him under the weather last week, so we began by working with him. Continuing on the theme of the “critical moment” that occurs as we begin to “do” something. Today, the focus was on keeping contact with the breath. To explore this, he directed us in a number of exercises that superficially looked/sounded as if they were about music, but in fact were about observing what is happening at that critical moment. This generated a lot of observations, and carried through the rest of the rehearsal for me.

After an hour, we took a short break, and then came back to revisit some of the work we did last week. I had missed having Frank there last week to help us through the challenges of these exercises, so I thought it would be useful to have another go this week. We began with the exercise of repeating notes in the C Major scale. For some reason this felt even more difficult this week, and when we got to the point of moving to any note within the range, it really never quite took wing. Another short break and we were on to the exercise of bi-directional circulating, a clockwise drone of open D’s under a counterclockwise circulation of notes from A Harmonic Minor. I noticed again that when this became musical rather than mechanical, the mechanics tended to take care of themselves. We moved from the melody in time to the melody on the off-beats, and eventually to the melody in double-time.

After rehearsal, Greg and a small team remained to do upgrades on the risers, adding an additional brace.