In attendance: Victor, Glenn, Brad, Dev, Scott, Chris
Victor and Brad arrive ahead of everyone else; Chris and Dev arrive shortly after at exactly the same time. With word that Glenn and Scott will be arriving a little later, we all head inside to the gym.
After some pick-up basketball between Chris and Dev, and Scott arriving in the meantime, we all find our way to a circle, and begin the meeting by reviewing Sandra Bain Cushman's work on the Five Relations as it was presented last month. Glenn arrives right as we finish up with this, just as we move to warming up the hands with the Staccato-Legato Exercise. Victor brings Glenn up to speed, and then walks everyone through a quick summation of the Five Relations.
This leads into an appropriation of Frank Sheldon's "filling" exercise: with guitars, we endeavour to fill a space as much as possible while constantly remaining in motion, and passing notes around, while also maintaining contact with each other. At one point, a melody gets played across all of us that is just incredible.
This moves to improvisation instead of passing notes. After some time, Victor kills the lights, and we continue to improvise while ambulating. Interestingly, we all know to end at the same time--Victor walks back through the relations, and then brings the lights back up.
Seated back in the circle, we all have some good observations to share. This leads into a discussion that ranges over several topics, including the structure of a process, and how it relates to music. This is followed by a quick break.
Post-break, we talk a bit about repertoire. 49 Notes gets a performance for Victor and Dev, with some useful commentary for everyone. This moves into a discussion about repertoire that would be useful for the Orchestra project coming this May, including a rather bold idea from Victor. This does get somewhat tangential for a bit, but we come back to Where Is The Nurse? and run this 3 times. More discussion follows from this: Victor relates an experience that involved meeting a teacher on a trip to India, and that teacher's complete "ubiquity". The phrase, "How can you hope to see everything if you don't love everything?" makes an appearance.
"Eye of the Needle", once through. On a whim, Victor has us move back to the filling exercise, and we play it again while ambulating in the dark. Some missed notes (due to big jumps and not being able to see), but a useful and informative run.
Back in the circle, and a short completion with the relations, once more.
1 comment:
A couple personal observations from myself:
- During the initial exercise of "filling" and circulating at the same time, I remember seeing several of us heading towards the same spot at once, and then suddenly "startling" and heading in disparate directions.
- While the lights were out the first time, I remember having the experience of focusing on the breath and sensing it as a jumping off point, as opposed to an isolated event.
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