Tuning the Air Season 11 Opening Meeting and Guitar Circle

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday January 15, 2011 – Tuning the Air Season 11 Opening Meeting and Guitar Circle

Good morning turnout. Ten in for the morning sitting at my place. Sitting in a group is qualitatively different than sitting alone. Sitting as part of an established personal practice is essential for us, and if that is alone, it is never really alone; we are connected by the commitment to the practice. For me, it is always apparent when we are at a point of Hazard in a process, because I find I am experiencing heavy resistance to maintaining the practice. I obviously can’t speak for anyone else, but it inevitably happens that at these points there is also a drastic drop off in attendance for the group sittings.

About the middle of the half hour a profound Silence descended. The flavor is always unmistakable. Much more than simply quiet, although the baseboard heater and the refrigerator were blissfully dormant at the time, and traffic in the neighborhood seemed to have ceased. Silence doesn’t actually require quiet, but when they coincide it is a little easier to notice, and a lot easier to enjoy. This kind of Silence, in my experience, tends to appear when sitting in a group more than when I am alone. I don’t actually know what the mechanics are, but for me it as if we collectively summon it. Or, perhaps, a group is more capable of generating the energy required to open up a space for it. Something like that, at least subjectively.

A bit of excitement as we moved to Fremont Abbey for rehearsal. First, the parking lot we usually use is no longer available, so parking was a little extra challenging, even on a Saturday morning. We need to take this into account on show nights. Then, just to keep things interesting, when I arrived and had found an ideal parking place, I realized that over the holiday I had removed the Abbey key from my overburdened key chain, so I had to abandon my ideal parking place in order to rush back home for the key.

Nevertheless, we were all there and gathered for the opening meeting. The first hour was without guitars. We welcomed 2 new players to the performance team, and acknowledged that we also have one departure. So, we are up one in the aggregate. It will be 10 performers for the first time since our first season. Still not the 12 that has always been my wish, but on the way. For the first couple of shows Tony will be in town, so we will be eleven. So close! For this season we have 10 shows and then a week off (the church needs the space for Easter week activities) and then 10 more weeks. A good run. Not the 40 weeks we did the first two years, but a substantial commitment. Very likely, the week before the Easter break we will have as many as 20 3rd and 4th graders joining us!

The biggest challenge for us is going to be practicalities. We have effectively raided the house team in the expansion of the performance team, so we are shorthanded. Some discussion of how this is going to be addressed. We are also without a publicist this season (she took on a real job with real pay), and so there are a lot of tasks to be filled. As Mary Beth expressed it, this needs to be an “all hands on deck” season, with everyone taking on additional responsibilities. Everyone involved is overcommitted to begin with, and this is not going to be easy. Necessary, but not easy.

A short break, and we moved to the circle with guitars; the full newly reconstituted performance team plus Joel, Bill and Rob. Without instruction, we opened with a circulation that, if such a thing can be considered a portent, spoke very well for a musical and creative season. Music was present from the very first note, the every evolution and variation organic and inevitable.

Bill will be working with the full company and the performance team this season on ways of practicing/rehearsing improvised pieces. This is something we have not addressed a lot in rehearsal. The collective experience and coherence of the group (the core of which has been playing together for about 12 years now) can be relied upon to make musical choices when the time comes. So rehearsal time has focused on the composed material. But the general observation at the end of last season was that if we aspire to taking the improvised part of the set up an octave, we need to find ways to practice improvising.

With that in mind we bounced around a number of exercises, games and strategies for generating improvs. It is apparent that when we set ourselves some simple parameters, we are a lot clearer in our statements and responses, and more musical in general. The specific nature of the parameter is almost irrelevant. It seems that if we can manage to cultivate a repertoire of improv strategies, it will serve to give us a somewhat higher platform to take off from. A couple of surprisingly simple possibilities suggested themselves as we worked this morning.

A good beginning.