Performance Team Rehearsal and Music Lab

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday April 17, 2010 – Performance Team Rehearsal and Music Lab

The Music Director is unfortunately going to be working on Monday night, so once again the Performance Team needed to usurp the Saturday morning slot, which had been set aside for full team work with Frank during the rehearsal period. Plans under way to get that back on track for next Saturday, at least for part of the day.

We began by sitting down and talking through our reflections from Opening Night. Although we set aside 15-20 minutes for this, my observation on Thursday that there was “a lot of information” in the experience was on the mark. So we went a bit over the allotted time, all in a very good cause.

The bulk of this rehearsal was on getting the skeleton of A Day In The Life on its feet. The 4 folks doing the “piano” part had never played it in context, so we focused on getting that going. Jaxie and I are not quite ready to do the bass part without the score (I found myself sending good wishes to my mother, thanking her for “making” me learn to read music). Bob and Chris did a little honing on the phrasings for the vocal parts. I took the liberty of doing the Mal Evans audible count on the two climactic orchestral bits, and as of today it is an official part of the arrangement; now if we can find an alarm clock that can be triggered on cue. It was a working session, with corrections and tweaking going on in the new parts. For myself, however, it remained a kind of interesting experiment that I was not thoroughly convinced would work, right up until the moment Chris had a small, simple, and brilliant inspiration regarding the intro, and the moment I heard it played I thought, “Okay… this is really going to work.” We’ll do more grunt work on the parts on Monday.

After a short break, we reconvened to spend the final 45 minutes on musical issues from the show. We began by looking at the crisscross, through the audience circulation. Brainstorming a bit, we arrived at the first 3 of what I suspect will eventually become a whole pile of available strategies for this. Next, as I recall, was Cultivating the Beat. This is a piece that we have some concerns about in terms of balance and simple audibility. We looked at the balance, setting up a few approaches to remind ourselves of on gig night. The sense was also that when the level of the sound system is up where it should be (it was a little low last week, when there was an audience acting as baffles) there would be some relief as well. We then sat down and hammered through a number of pieces that just need to be played often. A quick look at the acoustic encores, and it was time to leave (actually, a few minutes beyond our time to leave).

I came home to the House Circle. Greg, IgorK, Christina and Mary Beth in attendance. We began by talking a little about what this group would like to be working on, which became a discussion of what work they could take on that would support the performances. I pondered what they said for a few moments, and an exploration of the inner workings of the Harmonic Minor scale bubbled to the surface. This involved looking very closely at what makes up the diatonic triads and seventh chords natural to this scale (I found myself sending good wishes to all of my sight singing and ear training teachers at Berklee, thanking them for making me take this seriously). Some interest had been expressed in Voices of Ancient Children, so in the final 15 minutes I presented a couple of preparatory right hand and counting exercises. I ended the day with an exercise I came up with in 1986 at Red Lion House – a quiet look at the Thrak polyrhythm, designed to exclude the mad physicalizations that seem to plague players addressing the piece.

In the discussions at the beginning of the meeting, someone (Mary Beth, maybe?) dubbed us the Tuning the Air Music Lab, and that appeals to me very much. I am testing it out as a more appropriate name, rather than House Circle which has always been a bit clunky, and funnily exclusive.