Performance team rehearsal

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday, October 15, 2011 – Performance team rehearsal

A number of us had worked on the crew for the Elan Sicroff/Katharina Paul concert of de Hartmann music on Friday night, and we concluded that rather than try to fit ourselves into the performance space for today’s rehearsal, it would be better to just move to my apartment. Carl was under the weather and elected not to infect his band mates. Bill was on hand to lend his ear and observations.

Today was the day for digging in deep. We have learned the new material, and have successfully performed the material, so two hurtles crossed. With what we have learned from these performances, we began looking in detail at ways to deepen our connection to the music.

We began with the B Minor Prelude. The plan was to circulate just the left hand, in order to hear the independent lines more clearly. With Carl absent, this was a challenge, in particular because he is holding the downbeat. Running composed circulations with missing players, in our experience, can actually be a very useful exercise. After some time, however, we felt that we were not getting what we needed from this. We went on to working the entire piece, breaking it up into phrases, and this was much more productive – the missing player was not quite such a distraction. We will continue this on Monday.

“I Am The Walrus” next. Bill had some very good observations to share about the character of this piece, and the Beatles approach to it, and we began to craft the piece and how we approach our individual parts. We looked at details of phrasing for the cello and string players, as well as articulation on the various “sound effects” that are used in the arrangement.

On to “Mad World”, again exploring and refining the ensemble play, as well as making and adjustment to the working tempo.

A great deal of attention then put on the melody of “Gnossienne” – how to connect the phrases played by different players, and maintain a musical through-line.

More on all of this, Monday.