Thacher Music Room, 12/2/2012

In attendance:  Victor, Brad, Glenn, Wayne, Rick, Chris

The meeting opens with a moment of silence, broken as Brad moves to let Glenn into the building.  Once Glenn has situated himself into the circle, a bit of circulation to soundcheck.

Some improv exercises to warm up:  first, four beats each, with the aim to continue the phrase as it is passed from player to player.  This gets expanded to picking up a phrase before the previous player has completely finished playing (i.e., Brad picks up the torch as Victor is coming to the end of his phrase, and then Glenn does the same as Brad is finishing up).  Longer phrases are invited.  This is expanded even further to a three-player chain:  Victor begins, Brad joins in, Glenn follows suit, and Wayne picks up where Victor leaves off; Rick will then pick up where Brad leaves off, Chris picks up Glenn's thread, and Victor takes over as Wayne is finishing up.  Some interesting work.

(Brad:  One thing I noticed about this was how the number of players in this exercise also created some interesting dyads [Victor/Wayne, Brad/Rick, Glenn/Chris].  Personally, it became a bit difficult to pay attention to the other players, as I was listening to keep track of what Rick was playing.)

Moving to working on Crescent Study.  Mostly getting a feel for the pace of the piece; the spatial circulation order is easy enough to pick up, and so the work is largely focused on remembering notes and the shift from a 6/8 (duple triplets) feel to half-speed (quarter note) feel.  A few runs of the first two pages, and the next two pages are slotted for the following week.

A break for the hindquarters.

Working on Peaches.  Some spot work on the diddly bits going back into the restatement of the main theme, the slinky bits in the guitar solo, and a couple of runs through the piece as a whole.

Glenn asks to try a couple of ideas out regarding the arrangement of Sigh and a Kiss.  Nothing concrete, but some good ideas that needed to be heard in order to be continued.

Victor asks everyone what they've been working on; Chris demonstrates a bit of the C Major Cello Prelude that he's been refining over the past month.

A final circulation to close the night.