Full Team Circle with Frank, Performance Team Rehearsal and Music Lab

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday May 22, 2010 – Full Team Circle with Frank, Performance Team Rehearsal and Music Lab

The only Saturday this month that Fremont Abbey has been available on Saturday morning, so we were finally able to get back with the program. My apartment is too small for the full company to meet, especially if we are working with Frank. It was a treat to be able to get back to the Great Hall for our work today.

I arrived at the Abbey shortly after 9am, to see if the space needed any preparation. The calendar indicated a concert of some sort in the Great Hall last night, and sometimes after these we find the space less than fully restored in the morning. No big deal today. Some chairs for the audience still set up, but no gear in the way or anything like that, so arranging the room for ourselves was a snap.

For the first part of the morning, it was the full company in the circle with guitars, working at Frank’s direction. Bob was home with the girls, and Joel and Charles were not able to make it today. I am beginning to think that Frank is psychic. For the second meeting in a row, the work he has put us through has precisely mirrored the musical work we are doing in performance rehearsals. He has been working with us on a consistent unfolding theme since we began rehearsals for this season in January. Somehow, though, the particulars of the exercises he presents have an uncanny way of being exactly what we are concerned with at the moment, even though he hasn’t been to many shows lately. Go figure. Last time around it was all about listening and blending when playing notes together, which perfectly spoke to the exploration we were doing of parts like the “piano” section of A Day In The Life, in which 4 players are playing together as if they were a piano player doing chords. Today, after revisiting a recently presented preparation exercise involving holding the guitar over our heads as we lower ourselves into the chair, he focused entirely on listening exercises that exactly mirror the work we have been doing with themes in the “spontaneous compositions” Chris has been including in every set.

Wonderful.

After a short break, the performance team, sans Bob, reconvened to rehearse with Frank supporting by moving around the circle and working with individuals as he saw fit. Most of our time was invested in getting the Charles Ives piece up on its feet. By the end of the rehearsal, this one had reached that inevitable point where the end is in sight, but is feeling unreachable. One more solid rehearsal and that sahara will have been crossed. Unfortunately we have to usurp Monday’s rehearsal time for the annual Seattle Circle board meeting, so this will have to wait another week.

A little stretch break, and on to practical matters. A couple of observations about A Day In The Life from Thursday’s performance, and we worked through it with the metronome several times, and without after that. More metronome work followed, with Space Zombies! From Outer Space! on our feet, acoustically, as it is actually being performed in the gig, and then with Eye of the Needle, also in performance format.

At 12:30 we moved out of Fremont Abbey. I went back to may place for the Music Lab, which was attended by Christina, IgorK, Mary Beth and Ian. Again this week, after sitting quietly before we began, on a strong impulse I did an abrupt right turn from what I thought I would be presenting. I had the quartet do some free circulating in D Lydian (that had been the “key of the day” in our work with Frank earlier). My sense was that D Lydian was not really being presented, but that it quickly settled into A Major. I then assigned notes to each of the players, beginning on D and moving in thirds until a full D Maj13 #11 was spelled out. The aim of this was to hear in the basic triad the most rudimentary quality of the Lydian mode. By adding the major seventh, further refinement. And then the ninth, the augmented eleventh and the major thirteenth, each contributing a color or facet that, when taken together, establishes the character and quality of this mode. The they circulated again. This time Lydian managed to present itself. It then slipped away, but to some degree found itself once again.

We employed the same tactics with D Mixolydian, D Aeolian and D Dorian, each with varying degrees of success. Natural minor was the clearest, likely as it is the most familiar.

A short break, and then back to the ear-training exercise begun a few weeks ago. Today we worked with recognizing and being able to find perfect fourths and perfect fifths. This was what I had originally planned to work with today, and I was glad to have some time to at least touch on it, as it strikes me as central right now. Given the short time available, we didn’t review seconds and thirds as I had thought we would, nor did we push it as far as we might. More on this in the future, to be sure.