The Guitar Circle I
Guitar Craft 25th Anniversary Completion Course
Special Project: The Orchestra Of Crafty Guitarists III
Convento La Pace, Sassoferrato (Ancona), Italy
6:58am
As predicted, almost needed my alarm clock this morning.
9:39am
A brief look into the church, where the performance will take place on Friday. Work is under way to clear it out and set it up. Found myself chuckling a bit, for entirely personal reasons. Now Martin, Victor and I are off to Day 2 of “Guitar Circle I” from 10-noon.
5:56pm
Very good work in the Guitar Circle classes. We all met in the ballroom, and then part of the team went off with Victor, part of the team with Martin, and the rest stayed with me. The suggestion in choosing which group to join was to work with an instructor you haven’t worked with before, or rarely. For my group, we worked with circulating the 5 and 7 rhythms from Thrak, but with rests “played”. That is, we moved around the circle playing 1-rest-rest-4-rest, and when a rest fell on our position, we simply raised our hand. This was not something I had in mind when I entered the room, or even when we began, it simply presented itself. Eventually, we had 2 circles, one playing in 5 with rests indicated by raised hands, and the other doing the same in 7. Once he flow of the patterns became internalized enough that the players no longer needed to say or whisper the count, but could turn their attention more outward, the Music began to appear, at least for moments.
After an hour, we all came back together, acknowledged our work, and took a 10-minute break. When we came back together, we once again split up into 3 groups, but different ones. For this hour, my group worked with bi-directional circulation, much as we have done in Seattle, focusing on what happens and where we tend to disappear to in the critical moment when two melodies approach us from different directions.
Tai Chi with Leonora, out on the football field. She has a somewhat different approach from what I have become accustomed to with Luciano. I enjoy it very much. Just before lunch, Luciano arrived back at the house, with Lillian and Lucas, just arriving from Barcelona. A beautiful little boy, Lucas is. At lunch I’m afraid we gave him a start when we applauded a performance, and kind of freaked him out.
Directly after lunch, a Nafgoose meeting with Hernan, primarily filling one another in on the details of how and where things are at present, comparing notes and looking at the general direction for the near and more distant future. Not nearly enough time for that, but you grab what you can.
From there I ran down to one of the rehearsal rooms to work with the Mexican circle on circulation. They felt that “flow” was the weakness they wished to address, but as l listened, my take was that the flow was just fine. For me, it was the note choice and general content that was lacking. So I worked with them on circulating through diatonic chord changes, beginning to develop a sense of the character of the various scale degrees; what they bring to the circulation, what they imply, and what repercussions might come from choosing one note over another. Very important work for them, I think. In the early stages of circulating, playing no wrong notes is a major triumph, and occasionally magic happens that we haven’t earned and don’t deserve. But eventually, simple competence and a little good luck just isn’t going to get the job done. If spontaneous composition by a group is the aim, then competence needs to become command (and eventually mastery), and luck replaced by attention with intension. Then something of a much higher order than mere luck has the opportunity to make its way into the Music.
Tea time, and then a long walk and talk on life matters. I’m afraid this caused me to miss a TTA+ rehearsal, but it was important. Got to the rehearsal just in time to learn that we are performing tonight after dinner and before desert; Lament with Cathy on viola. Tony came up to my room to review the arrangement we will be using, so I think I am good to go.
I am very sleepy right now.
9:37pm
For some reason we didn’t perform at dinner. I’m told it is because the decision was that there had been enough music, but that doesn’t ring true for me. I saw the moment that opened wide for us, but when I looked down the table I just got shaking heads. Something out of kilter.
SSG meeting directly after dinner. Two new members, and the discussion was lively and useful. I am pretty sure I have no future in reading chapters and typing up reports. I will fulfill the commitment, of course, but until we are in the same room, chatting (not quite accurate. Nothing trite about the discussion, but the word does convey a bit of the amiable conviviality and absence of formality in the occasion) it all seems contrived and head-heavy, and deciphering in this fashion is absolutely not my strength.
Orchestra rehearsal in a few minutes. I am working to reconcile the dread I feel every night before the rehearsal with the value of the experience. Even as we are working, I cannot say I enjoy it. I very definitely delight in moments, and feel happy and energized by the experience, though. And I very clearly recognize that I will likely only have a very small handful of these opportunities in my lifetime, so taking a “night off” is not an option. Still, when I saw “22:00 – Orchestra” on the schedule, I felt a moment of disappointment. Strange.
11:47pm
Okay, that was work. I have not the slightest idea if anything that happened tonight was worth a damn. Carolina said it was amazing. I trust here in these matters, and so I will take her word for it. Mostly, it was about choreography – kind of like a tech rehearsal where you deal with blocking, except this is dynamic and improvisational, so you practice making it up as you go. The idea being: the audience is going to be fixed in their seats, so all they will really hear or see is what is in front of them; ergo, what is in front of them needs to move. So it was all about moving… all the time, without pause. I really thought we were going to lose a few players. It was hot, and there was no air I the room. No more grueling than playing your average rock and roll gig, to be honest, but I am not sure how many people here have ever done that. No serious collisions. I saw a couple of broken strings, but I don’t think there were any guitar-related calamities. Given the level of movement, that in itself is a minor miracle. From my perspective, we play too much. We fill every available space; there is not much in the way of dynamics on the quiet end, and no silence whatsoever. And tonight there was not a moment of stillness, either. But, we are learning. Every night we explore a slightly different facet of how this might work. My job is basically to do what I’m asked to do, so that Robert can get the fairest possible representation of the idea he wants to get across, and so gather information for the next incarnation of the experiment. So, I can only guess by that standard at least tonight was a success.
I smell bad, but will have to wait until morning for a shower.
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For our final performance of the first Guitar Craft course, Saturday evening March 30 1985, we sat in a circle to perform. In order to keep the small groups seated together, in between pieces we did very carefully rehearsed seating arrangement shifts. Those about to play got up and moved to whichever seats they needed to occupy, and the people occupying those seats got up and moved to the players old seats. All of the “rules” about moving in the circle – move clockwise, don’t stop, never overtake, take the first available seat – came from working out these staging necessities.
When we entered the performance space – the ballroom at the Claymont Mansion – there were a couple of dozen Claymont residents in the audience sitting on cushions in the center of the circle. A few I recognized from the work weekend I did there a some months earlier. Others I had seen working the kitchen during the course. One person I didn’t recognize stood out for me. He was on the tall side and sat very still with a remarkable and natural presence and alertness. It was nearly a year before I met Frank Sheldon, but the minute he walked in the room I recognized him as the one I had seen in the audience that night. To this day, he says that the first thing that attracted him to Guitar Craft was not the music, but the way we moved in the Circle.
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I arrived at Claymont Court on the afternoon of Monday March 25, 1985. Supper was at 7pm, or so, and then our opening meeting. So, by my calculation, and taking into account time zone shifts, I have been in Guitar Craft now for 24 years and 364 days. Tomorrow at this time, it will be gone.
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