Saturday June 26, 2010 – Full Company with Frank, Performance Team Rehearsal and Music Lab
Our final Saturday guitar circle/rehearsal of the season. We will complete the season next week with the Monthly Open Circle, a bit of practical work and then our final meeting. We began with the full team, with Frank and Teo. Frank recapitulated the themes he has been focused on with us since we began the season in January. We looked at the critical moment, and the ways we have to make choices at that moment, in particular the practice of observing the way our bodies move with our breath. He then set up a small performance challenge, so that we could look at this moment and these choices.
For me, this work with Frank (and the week with Sandra) has been one of the pivotal and defining elements in the evolution of the production this season.
After a break, the Performance Team reconvened to rehearse. We began with a continuation of the work with the opening section of Neptune. This was our first opportunity to hear it in the Great Hall, and that alone was amazing. It features very gentle and quiet tremolos that become magical in that space.
On to a look at The Children’s Hour. In the last week we moved to a slightly faster tempo and found that it was an improvement. We wanted to quantify the change. The original tempo was 50bpm, and the new tempo felt significantly brisker. So we set the metronome at 56bpm and ran it. This was clearly too fast. Backed it off to 54bpm, and this still seemed fast. 52bpm turned out to be the new tempo. Strange that such a small change could make such a marked qualitative difference.
Eye of the Needle was next. We ran it once with the metronome, and in general were startled that the determined tempo was so much fast than we ever perform it. Once we settled in, it felt right, but the first two or three sections were definitely a race against our habit. When we ran it a second time, it was much more solid. After some discussion, we agreed to make the commitment to make work with the piece at tempo a part of our daily practice this week, addressing it with the same kind of care we apply to learning new material.
On to Space Zombies! From Outer Space! We gave this some focused attention, working at a slightly slower tempo, and working in pairs, one bass player and one lead player, to sharpen the timing and feel issues.
At about this point, the next tenants began showing up and beginning to set the room up for their event, even though we had an hour to go for rehearsal. We explained the misunderstanding to them, and they gave us our space. But others continued arrive, and they were piling gear up outside the door waiting to get into the Great Hall, so we wrapped up early and moved on.
The Music Lab was at my place; Greg, Mary Beth and Ian in attendance. The House Circle is working on an arrangement of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and I decided to use this material for an exercise in voice leading for chords. Rather intense work, as it turns out. By the end we had added the task of developing bass lines as well.
For the last half hour, we looked at one of the scales used in Ian’s Voodoo Situation: C-C#-E-F-G#-A. Essentially a C augmented triad and a C# augmented triad. I worked out a circulated version of this that explored all of the triads available in this scale, beginning with the C augmented and then changing one note at a time until it had morphed into the C# augmented, then moving back to the next inversion of the C aug. This created the following sequence of triads:
- C aug
- A min
- F maj
- C# aug
- E aug
- C# min
- A maj
- F aug
- Ab (G#) aug
- F min
- Db (C#) maj
- A aug
- C aug and the cycle repeats.
There is a slightly different route that incorporates another set of minor triads, and a more complex arrangement that would actually hit on all 15 of the possible triads. But time was short, and so those will have to wait for another time.
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