Thacher Music Room, 01-25-2014

Attending:  Rick, Dev, Brad, Chris, Victor, Scott

Dev and Scott are each running a bit late, so the meeting begins with Victor leading a simple warm-up: playing Flying Home, but only playing one bar of each section before moving to the next.  The tempo is set to "slowish", and the direction is for light and equal touch, and very staccato.  Three runs through, with the exercise establishing itself, and then moving to a slightly faster tempo.  Two more runs, and then we are fairly close to performance tempo, with one or two more runthroughs.

Moving to Calliope, with the same approach, but we have to reconfigure the sections to figure out what the bar counts will be.  This ends up becoming:

-  half of the intro
-  2 bars of CMaj
-  2 bars of EMaj/C#Min
-  2 bars of CMaj
-  The entirety of the "Chinese" section,

and then the same for the second half of the chart, subbing the bars of EMaj/C#Min with DMin.

We begin in roughly the same fashion:  a slowish tempo, and gradually increasing to looping at concert tempo.  Enough work comes out of this that we find ourselves really digging in and refining different parts of this; this is also a challenging enough piece that we begin to tire, though this is also because this moves from becoming a warmup to a good 40 minutes of intensive work.  Dev arrives during this time, and we fold him into the proceedings.  Scott comes in as well, and we break about the time he shows up, as we've been working for some time.

Post break, there's a bit of discussion of work that Dev, Chris, and Brad did during the previous meeting, and what the next push might need to be.  Dev reveals that he might have a few ideas, and the discussion gets a little tangential; it comes back, though, and Dev suggests that we film ourselves tonight, to see where we are from a visual standpoint.  Rick has brought a camera for this, and we quickly set the room.

With camera now running, we choose to do the whole bit, with an entry from the hallway, and then play a short set.

Eye of the Needle
Circulation
Voices of Ancient Children
Where is the Nurse?
Improv
Flying Home

After Flying Home, we decide to stop here and watch the footage, so that Chris will have enough time to see this and then head home.

Lots of comments as we watch the footage; some of the moments are genuinely funny ("I look like a prairie dog!"), but there is some good music that happens.  There are also some moments that are clearly instructive.  Dev's general impression is that we look better than he had expected, but there is also a general feeling that we're still moving a bit as six disparate people, and not quite as a group.  There is some discussion about how to work with this, as well as some of the necessary musical points that need to be made.

As we're tearing down, there's a bit of discussion about bringing Fugue no. 1 from the Well-Tempered Clavier back into the fold; Chris has reconfigured this as simply 4 voices playing 4 parts.  Parts are assigned, and there is a promise to e-mail measure assignments for next week.  Some post-meeting discussion and joking, and we all head into the night.