Rehearsal at the Wilsons

A Tuning the Air Journal

Monday June 7, 2010 – Rehearsal at the Wilsons

Travis had a scheduling conflict (the nature of which was the source of much humor throughout the evening), so we were eight in the circle tonight. Sandra Bain Cushman, in town for a week of fun with Alexander Technique, was in attendance as well (until her east coast time orientation caught up with her about halfway through the rehearsal).

Twofold task for the evening… to sketch out a slightly shorter set than usual for Thursday night’s show with the Kids Circle, and to ensure that The Children’s Hour is presentable and ready for primetime.

The Children’s Hour was up first. Ran it cold, to test our true command of the piece first… in performance there is no warm-up or practice run. Quite good. The work we did on Saturday was evident, and there were no snags that we could not maneuver around. The difficult bits, particularly transitions, remain difficult, but no longer daunting. We engaged the metronome and got down to work. There was one short section where I was not hearing the melody clearly. It involves Jaxie and Chris playing lines that are partly unison and partly contrapuntal, and joining them into a single statement. A little work, a little analysis, and a little more work, and the passage was transformed. A few other details addressed, and the piece was declared ready, and to be included in Thursday’s set. We played it a couple times again in the evening, once as part of the set run through and again at the end of the night with us on our feet as we will be at the gig.

A Day In The Life was next. Travis plays the rhythm guitar part on this, and it is very much the skeleton on which the rest of the parts hang, so this was an opportunity for us to see how well we have internalized the music. Kind of a strange way for Sandra to hear the piece for the first time, but for the players a very informative experience. Space Zombies! From Outer Space! was also an interesting challenge without Travis holding down the middle.

On to set creation. From the weekend, we had already decided the musical content of the crossover from the Kids Circle to the TTA team. Chris laid out the plan he had in mind. Some suggestions and a bit of tweakage and we had a working set. We ran it for time (allowing some estimates for the selections from the Hat). The form an flow of the set seemed pretty good, but it ran a bit long. We looked at what could be dropped, and that inspired a little re-orging as well, and in the end we had a set that will work well in the shorter format: still complete, and without any kind of compromise, but running at a length that will not overtax the good will of an audience that will very likely include a number young people out on a school night; and their parents.