Monthly Open Circle and Performance Team Rehearsal

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday May 1, 2010 – Monthly Open Circle and Performance Team Rehearsal

There is a neighborhood festival happening today in the upper Fremont area, and there are a number of related events taking place at our Fremont Abbey home, so we went into the Open Circle not knowing exactly what we might find. Keeping the possibility open that there might be a number of walk-ins from the festival. As it turned out, at that point in the morning things were still pretty quiet in Fremont. The team that turned up for the Open Circle was more or less the usual suspects; most of the Tuning the Air company was there, a couple of our Open Circle regulars as well, and one second-timer who arrived just a little late.

As we began, there were 12 in the circle. Since this was primarily an experienced group, the sense that Frank and I had was that we could push a bit. I called “when ready, please begin.” Right out of the gate it was amazing. The first couple of chords sounded so composed that I think it startled the players; Travis and others later confirmed this experience. “When ready, please begin” was called three times, and each one had its own quality and character. Each had a very clear beginning, middle and end. Never did any of them run on once the end had presented itself. Fabulous.

With 12 in the circle, the Tone Clock was whispering to me, so I began to assign the notes of a chromatic scale through 4 octaves. At this point, the newcomer from last month’s circle arrived. He was more or less in tune, so after the group had circulated the scale several times, Jaxie agreed to step out, and the newcomer took her seat. We continued to circulate the scale up and down 4 octaves while the circle recalibrated to a new player. From there on to skipping players, dividing the circle into 6 equal parts and creating the two possible whole-tone scales. Then skipping 2 players, dividing the circle into 4 parts and creating the 3 possible diminished sevenths. I was tempted to work through all of the possible intervals, as we did several years ago at Camp Caravan, but I also remained aware of time constraints, so I moved on to creating major scales, all 12 of them, by skipping payers to create the necessary whole steps. It was very hard work, and I had a clear sense of the struggle, and how it was blocking the joy possible. I had about resigned myself to having the exercise be just an interesting experiment, but I asked them to run the entire sequence one more time, with the instruction to hold the entire pattern as best we could, and to be clear in where the notes were coming from and to whom they were being passed. This time I was immediately aware of a subtle but undeniable change in the group; a kind of ease and openness that allowed the challenge to be met with a musicality that I had not heard in any of the preliminary goes. The presence of a group.

A short break. I spoke with Frank, indicating that most in the circle had AT experience, but that there were a couple of people with little or no experience, and that they needed to be considered. I began to say that my sense was that work on maintaining a wide awareness within the circle seemed to be greatest need at that point, and he said that this was precisely what he had in mind to work with. So for the first part of the next segment, he worked with the group on opening up their field of vision and hearing, and maintaining that while doing a simple circulation and, eventually, some more complex circulations.

Looking at where the group had come to through this work, I decided in the final 20 minutes or so to revisit an exercise from the last circle (or was it the one before?) involving the team choosing notes from the key of C Major and chiming them gently in unison, changing notes as the spirit moved, to create a continuously changing harmonic world within a particular key. As they did this I reminded them of what Frank had been guiding them through and suggesting they continue this, taking in the whole group through both the eyes and the ears. I then asked them to move their attention, within the aural landscape, to other individual players within the circle, to blend their notes with that player in terms of tone and timbre, and then to move on to another player. I had a whole bag of strategies/tricks I was going to suggest, but none of them was necessary. What unfolded was one of the most remarkable examples of creative group listening I have encountered. I wanted it never to end, and really only the knowledge that another group needed the room right after us and would likely be beginning to arrive soon made me feel the need to bring the exercise to a close. But I didn’t need to. The composition came to its completion on its own.

The performance team moved on to my apartment for rehearsal. The Music Director had to work this afternoon, but he had given us some direction about what he hoped we would address; primarily continued work on A Day In The Life. Bob was running a few minutes late, so while we waited for him we took the opportunity to get Mary Beth up to speed on both Ikada-Jima and Voices of Ancient Children. Followed this up with My Precious Dream. Jaxie is just about up to speed on Igor’s part now, so it is close to being ready for primetime. Once Bob arrived we dove into ADITL, again focusing on fleshing out the McCartney and “Aaaah-aah-aah-aaah” sections. A lot of good work on individual and group phrasing. The work we did earlier in the Open Circle began to seem almost prescient. I had some questions on McCartney’s phrasing for the bass part, so during the break we listened to it. Wrapped up our work on the piece after the break and moved on to other pieces of repertoire from the set. Mary Beth had some observations about Eye of the Needle and Jaxie followed up with something RTM had said about our performance of the piece on Thursday. We took a look at the tempo for Lament, and eventually moved it up a bit from our current speed, closer to Tony’s tempo. The feeling is that with this year’s more Spartan arrangement, the quicker tempo works where in the large group arrangement it had not. Back to Eye of the Needle, this time to reestablish the group tempo with has been a little inconsistent lately. Discovered we were playing it a bit faster than before, and concluded that this works because we are closer together in performance, standing in an arc. So, with a little experimentation, a new group tempo was identified.

Tonight, off to Belltown to celebrate Igor’s birthday at midnight. Bob, Ian, Travis and I will be sitting in with Urban Achievers, banging out our best Led Zeppelin.