Rehearsal at the Wilsons

A Tuning the Air Journal

Monday May 17, 2010 – Rehearsal at the Wilsons

Howard was down with a cold, and out for tonight. Jaxie and I were not in much better shape, and perhaps should have followed his lead, but a lot of work on the table.

Opened with a “spontaneous composition” in C whole tone, continuing the work with theme establishment, recognition and response.

Then, straight into the primary challenge: getting A Day In The Life ready for a Thursday debut. This largely involved revisiting details we identified on Saturday, and running the piece in its entirety with the metronome at the established tempo. For the bass players, still a bit of a stretch on the memorization side, but more or less ready to go.

Space Zombies! From Outer Space! was next on the docket; down to work. A bit of metronome work to find and establish the right group tempo. Then a bit of metronome work to get the piece – including the tricky bits – reliably in time. As this is now in the lead-off encore spot, it needs to be reliable without being precious, while remaining fun without being out of control.

A break, and then for the final segment we launched into the Charles Ives piece, The Children’s Hour. This was on the table last year, but shelved when our work took us in a slightly different direction, letting go of heavy rehearsal time committed to complex arrangements, and focusing our energy on arising performance issues. It has been hovering just out of our field of vision ever since then, and Bob took it on to re-visit our arrangement and mold it into something a bit more manageable. We did the preliminary read-through tonight, taking some time to establish the circulation and dealing with a little bit of the tricky timing. One 8-bar section went untouched, and I assume we’ll be back to that at our next rehearsal. But the overall sense was that this can be up and running in fairly short order. It’s all about being able to play triplets in duple time and duplets in triple time, seamlessly without stuttering and/or startling. When that happens, it is very organic music – virtually playing itself. When it doesn’t, it is a study in counting, which is not really something anyone wants to play or hear.