D-Day #2 for Gustav, followed by a Music Lab

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday October 30, 2010 – D-Day #2 for Gustav, followed by a Music Lab

Back to the living room again today for another rehearsal entirely dedicated to Neptune. This is very meticulous work. In three hours we worked our way backward from the end of the piece to the beginning, building it one block at a time until we were able to run it from beginning to end successfully. It is a deceptively simple sounding piece, and there is no room for any lapses of attention. The next step would seem to be to get completely “off book”, and to really begin to address the musical issues, in particular flow and continuity. It may take a while yet; we don’t have any full days to give to it in the next couple of weeks – Monthly Open Circle next Saturday, and the CGT in town the following week.

For the Music Lab we moved to looking at the harmonic material from earlier weeks, but this time coming from a “playing by ear” approach, rather than theory and/or fretboard knowledge (although having access to that information was certainly useful). The game involved one player choosing a note, any note, and pulsing it. That note is the tonic and it is up to the other players to add notes necessary to create a particular modality; for this session we stuck with major and natural minor. This is an exercise that works best when there are at least 7 or 8 players. With only 4 today, it was difficult. Not a lot of room for much more than the basics. Some good insights into choices of inversions, though. I would hope we could pick this up again with more players in the future, and move on to a wider selection of modes.

For me, the two high points of the Music Lab were the opening and closing circulations. Some of the best circulating I have heard in a long time. The opener was specifically C Major, and was singing right out of the gate. Wonderful listening and choices. The closer was “the note of your choice.” It began wonderfully, and got better. Several times it began to wind down, but it turned out these were just breathers, and it would spring back to life. We went about 10 minutes overtime, but there was no way I was going to do anything to interrupt; I would have been very happy to have it go on all afternoon.