GCNE Meeting, 10-03-2010, The Loft

In attendance: Victor McSurely, Chris Paquette, Brad Hogg, Glenn Hughes.

As Glenn arrives at around 7:45 or so, Victor, Chris, and Brad are beginning to play through Calliope. We play through it once, and Glenn is able to join in for the last bit of it. Another run through (at about 74 bpm), and we move on to working with the staccato-legato exercise. An initial run through the fingering at a higher speed prompts us to back it down to 69 bpm, running at 16ths through the patterns (1st finger legato, then 2nd finger, etc.). We also find that certain patterns want to be rushed more, with respect to where the legato note falls within the beat--something that welcomes a personal practice approach.

Moving on from this, we jump into actual section work with Calliope. There is only one bass player tonight (Chris), but he is doing a pretty heroic job of keeping up with three lead players. With respect to the leads, the dynamics and accenting of the high melody are what seem to jump out as most necessary to work on--Victor does mention that this used to be accent picked, and that it might be useful to reapproach this piece as such. Most of the work with this is running at 78 bpm or so, but we'll need to bring it up to around 84-88.

Here, there be breaks to be had.

Back in the circle, more circulation work. Victor has us work with arpeggiating a Cmaj chord, and then presents an exercise: starting from Glenn and moving to Victor, each person will be the "one" for four beats, as we circulate in turn (changing our note as necessary). This turns out to be a little trickier than we anticipated, so we fall back to clapping in time. Eventually, we move to running notes, in order to get the feel of each position, and running the exercise as originally intended. It's actually very interesting to hear when we "get" the exercise and start playing musicially, as well as hearing the difference between permutation as the one gets shifted around the circle.

This work takes us up to 10 p.m., when we close the meeting. Next week, we'll likely be working with Opening again (with a 3-person circulation in the bass).