The weather is being unkind, tonight, with a fairly strong rain coming down. Brad, Rick, and Glenn all arrive together, and walk up to the loft to find Victor already there, warming up. Some items exchange hands. Chris and Alex arrive a few minutes later, and the word is that Dev is on his way, but running late due to traffic. Andy Cahill will be taking some time for personal practice, study, and preparation for joining the circle proper, so to speak.
After a short silence, we begin at about 7:45 p.m. Victor mentions good wishes sent our way from both Curt Golden and Elan Sicroff, earlier that night. Warming up begins with a subdivision exercise presented by Victor. The metronome set at 48 bpm, we play:
One note to the beat, for four beats
Two notes to the beat, for four beats
Three notes to the beat, for four beats
Four notes to the beat, for four beats
Five notes to the beat, for four beats
Six notes to the beat, for four beats
Seven notes to the beat, for four beats
Eight notes to the beat, for four beats,
and start over.
There is a general understanding that, to begin with, the 7 and 8 beats will sound like an aural soup. And, true to form, they start out sounding pretty murky, and continue to do so. What is interesting, though, is that over the course of maybe five minutes or so, the "ones" begin to really come together and really have a solidity to them.
From this, we move on to a second warm-up, which hasn't been presented in this circle: the 28-bar exercise. This is a chordal sequence in G-minor, with a strict alternate picking pattern of 5-2-2-2-4-2-2-2-3-2-2-2-4-2-2-2-3-2-2-2-4-2-2-2-3-2-2-2 (the number implies the string), with each note being a 32nd note. As he presents this, Victor notes that there are three ways to present this exercise: playing it as sixteenths (5-2-4-2-3-2-4-2-3-2-4-2-3-2), playing it as 32nds, and playing it while visualizing the count of the 28 bars. We play through the sequence once, slowly. Victor then mentions that there is a fourth way to play this exercise--one can play it in honor of the dead. He also notes that, incidentally, it is the 35th anniversary of J.G. Bennett's death. With this in mind, we play it at a more performance-minded tempo, twice through, pause for a moment, and then circulate.
Victor calls Eye of the Needle. Played once.
Victor then calls 3rd Relation. We play this, and there is considerable rushing throughout. In an effort to work on this, we first attempt to play it slower. Failing this, the metronome comes back out. This still doesn't quite work, so we pair off and play the piece. Going through each pair, Victor then asks what note is on count 2, and what note is on count 3. When we hesitate, Victor points out that we need to know the map precisely, and know what note is where, in the piece, so that we can put it right in where it needs to be. He also stresses the relation of that note to the big "macro-beat", and notes how, in the opening exercise, the "one" was impossible to deny (my paraphrasing), and how we need to bring that into other things that we play.
With this, we take a longish break, with a couple different conversations going around, mostly centered on numbers, the Dead String Quartet, and the Bassomatic. Glenn also takes the time to take a picture of the circle, sans players:
Returning to the circle, we revisit the Prelude circulation, starting with the last 4 bars (the trickiest part of the piece). The work on the prelude generally involves playing in time, more than anything; the notes have not been a problem for a couple of weeks. Eventually, the plan is to be able to move this into a more expressive tempo feel (not metronomic), but we first need to be able to nail it metronomically first. After some pretty intensive work with the metronome, this begins to pull together more, and we make it up to somewhere in the vicinity of 88-94 bpm.
Where is the Nurse is next. Played twice, with a little more attention to tempo the second time, but otherwise played quite well. It's not as fast as some versions out there, but it feels right, and it's good to really be able to say that we've essentially got it. Batrachomyomachy, next. Some tuning inconsistencies in the bass, but not much else. This is followed by Bicycling, with some dropping out occuring due to lack of time spent with the piece, but still nothing difficult to address. We next play Intergalactic Boogie Express, and Flying Home. The meeting ends in silence at roughly 10:30 p.m., with some discussion of a slightly earlier meeting time next week following.
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