Thacher Montessori Gym, 3/10/2013

In attendance:  Victor, Rick, Chris, Brad.  Dev arrives at a later time.

Pre-meeting, Chris and Brad (and with a bit of help from Rick as he arrives) de-chair the gym, leaving a mostly clear floor.  Some tuning, warming up, and then a quiet moment to open the meeting.  Warming up with the 1st Secondary, in 3 string chromatic form.  Bumping this up to division of attention, counting the exercise in 7, twelve times through.  A bit of a struggle, but we get it after a few tries.

Next, expanding on the C Major exercise from the week before:  a crosspicking exercise that entails a simple 6/9 chord, or a bass note, a sixth above, and then a ninth above that.  In CMaj, a chord built on an A would be, low to high, A F B.  The simple version would be to cross pick the three-note chord, low to high, up and down the neck:

g------------------------------------------------------------
E------------------------------------------------------------
A------2-----3-----5-----7------8-------10-------12----------
D----3-----5-----7-----9-----10------12-------14-------------
G--2-----4-----5-----7-----9------10-------12----------------
C------------------------------------------------------------

There are many variations to this.

The importance of working creatively, and of trying things that you're not sure of, is brought up; Victor makes the suggestion that we make this part of our practice, especially in light of the Orchestra work.  This is necessarily different from the work of developing and maintaining craft, wherein one might work to perfect a particular skill--this is more the work of constantly doing something new ("Can I do this?  Now can I do it backwards?  Now can I run through this while maintaining a different count and engaging a different center of the body?").

Around this time, Dev arrives, just in time for a break.

After the break, Dev takes the lead to bring everyone up to date on logistics for the OCG tour in May.  Some tasks will be getting handed out to others, soon.

Victor brings Dev up to date on what he missed in the first part of the meeting.

Up on our feet, on the other side of the gym, we work with circulating in alphabetic order in a rotating pattern (1 2 3 4 5, 2 3 4 5 1, 3 4 5 1 2, 4 5 1 2 3, 5 1 2 3 4).  Concurrently, we're to be paying attention to our breathing, as well as the sound of our feet on the floor.  It's a little tough, but we eventually get it.  We then move to a standing circulation, with the same idea, but running the 60 points, one point per cycle around the group (standing still).  Some difficulty getting through the exercise leads to a repetition with the lights out, which is noticeably easier.  At the completion of another circuit, there is a moment of silence, followed by spontaneous ambulant improvisation, still with the lights off.  Roughly 12 minutes.

After a long moment, the lights go back on, and we head back to the circle for a bit of discussion.  The meeting closes shortly after.