Monthly Open Circle and TTA Rehearsal

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday September 11, 2010 – Monthly Open Circle and TTA Rehearsal

Not a terribly early beginning. This season the Saturday morning group sitting will be at 9am on Open Circle days (8:30am on regular rehearsal Saturdays), so it was an easy morning. After the sitting, we migrated to Fremont Abbey (by way of assorted coffee shops), for the 10am Open Circle. Eight in attendance, all from the TTA company. Two newcomers had signed up, but they did not show. Since this was a group of players with circle experience, I decided to sit in the circle myself rather than direct the work from my feet. One of the plans for this season is to set aside the first hour of every Saturday rehearsal for the full group, not just the performance team, and to work on more challenging circulation work and other exercises. With no newcomers, this felt more like that than an Open Circle, and I decided to go with it.

We circulated for two hours, taking several different strategies for contending with dual circulations – bidirectional circulating, bidirectional with one on the off-beat, bidirectonal with one moving at double-time, and two circulations in the same direction with one at double-time. Interesting to look at the difference in experience between working to perceive and enter into the circulation, and actually breaking it down in terms of counting in order to execute it with some reliable accuracy.

At noon, out the door and back to my place (by way of various grocery stores for snacks and sustenance). Chris had made a mistake in the scheduling email, listing rehearsal time as 1pm rather than 12:30, so those of us who had been at the morning circle chilled out and snacked at leisure until 1pm when the others arrived. Wishing to keep to the 3-hour rehearsal plan, we determined that everyone was available to 4pm, and then dove in.

This was reality check day. We began with the new material from last season: The Children’s Hour, A Day In The Life, and Space Zombies! From Outer Space! Chris’ sense was that these would be the most difficult to get back, and his intuition was borne out. Sobering. Most of us had to dig for our scores. Several times through each, getting them up and running, reviewing target tempos and remembering musical indications. Our work is cut out for us.

A break, and then into our core repertoire; pieces we have been playing for some time. We simply ran these as a way to begin to reconnect and take inventory of the work ahead. Here we revealed mostly rust, and it was clear that there is both individual and group work to be done.

Another short break, followed by a bit of discussion about some work we could consider taking on for this season, as a group. This rather naturally moved us to an arrangement Chris is working on of a de Hartmann piano piece, one of the pieces of new material that we have been playing with off and on during the August “R&D” rehearsals. Lovely, and full of potential. Next was a down and dirty look at Vroom, showing improvement but still needing some very focused work supported by a lot of personal work. We skipped past Neptune, as Taylor has not completed the arrangement, but took the opportunity to nag him to get on it since there is very strong support for getting it up and running for this season. We also passed on the Voodoo Situation for this week. For the last 15 minutes we looked at learning a few bars of Bob’s anagrammatical opus. In August we had been focusing on a specific section involving some structured group improvisation, but we had not yet heard any of the music that will surround it, so this was our first exposure.