Performance Team Rehearsal and Music Lab

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday May 8, 2010 – Performance Team Rehearsal and Music Lab

The Great Hall at Fremont Abbey was booked today, and we met at my place. My living room is not really big enough to contain a full-company circle, so a performance team rehearsal made the best sense. Jax is away for the weekend with the girls, so we were 8 today. Chris began with some circulating in E Harmonic Minor, which is the current key specificaction for the “spontaneous composition” in the set. Last Thursday it had been somewhat tentative. I can claim my own share of responsibility for that, since in the moment I completely forgot that we had changed keys and initially launched into D Minor – one would have to work pretty hard to be more wrong than that. A little E Harmonic Minor drill was definitely in order.

Mary Beth was ready to get herself performance certified on Ikada-Jima and Voices of Ancient Children, so we ran those. A small arrangement change for Taylor on Voices suggested itself, and that was rehearsed and incorporated. Chris then called for some work on My Precious Dream. Jaxie, although absent today, is pretty much ready to go on her new part, which was Igor’s part in an earlier incarnation. Earlier in the week she had worked with Mary Beth, teaching her the main melody, and so we needed to rehearse her on that part. And Howard is now playing the melody in the intro (Jaxie’s old part), and that also needed attention. We ran it several times with the metronome, reconnecting with the intended tempo. We have always begun this without a count, but in the new orchestration I had put the count back. Howard, Chris and I worked on the introduction a bit, and got it back to the point where the count can once again be dropped.

After a short break, we watched and listened to the video Christina had made of the run-through we did on Thursday of A Day In The Life. Not really a lot of “new” information here, but a number of things we already knew about the piece were driven home with a sharp clarity, and for the next hour we worked on a lot of the details that are going to make the difference in this piece. Very good progress made. I managed to make it through the entire rehearsal without ever resorting to the score; not that I truly have it memorized, but more a testament that I am sufficiently comfortable with the harmonic structure of the piece that when details fail me I can improvise my way through it with some authority. Of course, I was solo on the part, and this will not really fly when there are two of us playing. Nevertheless, a small milestone.

We still need to find a proper alarm clock that can be triggered on cue for the middle orchestral madness section. The “traditional telephone” ring on my iPhone comes close, but not quite convincing.

For the final half hour we addressed Space Zombies! From Outer Space!**. Mary Beth, Ian and I went into the back room with Travis to get the bass/rhythm part organized, while Chris, Howard, Bob and Taylor remained in the living room to get the lead part running. Basic pycho-surf music in a blues progression, iconic to the point of being nearly genetic, so we had it up and running in short order. It will be a fun thing to have jump out of the hat, I would think. Chris indicated that the Riddle String Trio version we are learning is not, according to the composer, precisely definitive. There is no mp3 or score of the intended version, but only a video of the League that was once on YouTube but has since been removed. Chris is going to contact Mariana to see if the video is in the Guitar Craft archive and available for us for our research.

Thinking about the kind of space-kitsch ambience of the piece, as folks were packing to go I began experimenting with a combination of glass slide and ebow that creates a pretty passable Theremin-like sound, and it looks like this may get incorporated into our arrangement.

For me, a short break for a snack, and then Greg, Christina, Mary Beth and Ian reconvened for the Music Lab. We opened with a free circulation in C major that was pretty impressive, and nearly convinced me to go a different direction than I had initially intended. After the last Music Lab, a couple of weeks ago, an ear-training exercise that the Seattle Guitar Circle had worked with quite seriously for a period of time shortly after I arrived here, re-presented itself to me. This is what I wanted to work with today, and I stuck to it. We began working with recognizing and recreating major and minor seconds, in a specific circulation exercise. I allowed this to stretch out a bit. In a way this doomed us to not getting as far with the exercise as I had envisioned, but I began to notice that there was measurable improvement happening, and felt that this was worth committing to. We moved on to the same exercise, but working with major and minor thirds, and again I let it run long in order to allow the players to really assimilate what they were learning about how they hear these intervals. We ended the no-break 90-minute exercise with an applied version of the exercise, circulating in C Major.

The final “free” circulation of the day, in C Major, interestingly, lacked much of the spontaneity and magic of the opening one. It is a notable phenomenon. Sometimes when I have worked the group hard on an exercise that requires a level of attention, contact and care that they may not be able to muster, cold, the final circulation displays a noticeable sensitivity that was not present in the opening circulation. In this case, the final circulation had something more akin to an increased self-consciousness that, creatively speaking, was not an improvement. My sense was that the skill we touched on today is going to take a while, and a certain amount of work, to show its benefits; ninety minutes only hints at the possibilities.

Whenever we do this kind of work in the Lab, I come out exhausted. I do not, generally, sit in the circle and participate, but take on responsibility for holding the entirety of the exercise. In a way, without a guitar in my hand, I am still playing every note, and this requires a level of sustained attention. Extremely valuable work for me, and I may arguably be the one in the room reaping the greatest benefit. But when it is done I am wrung out. Today’s response to this was an immediate shower and an afternoon sitting, and that seemed pretty effective in both assimilating what I had touched on, and at the same time letting the exercise go.

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**Title corrected per the composer.