In Attendance: Victor, MB, David, Martin, Chris, Alex
The team arrives, makes the climb up to the 5
th floor and sets up for the meeting. Some hum is in the stage-left speaker that Victor can't drive away, so we leave it as is and press on.
After tuning, we begin with an attempt at circulating the C Major scale in 4 octaves. After three unsuccessful attempts, Victor redirects us to a series of games:
- First, circulating up and down in three octaves. At any time, one of the
circulators may play their note twice - this will reverse the direction of the circulation through the players. We worked through this fairly well, but it really began to become comfortable when Victor asked that we say the name of the note as we circulated. As we gained facility with this, Victor had us move on to...
- Second, same as the above, with the addition that a player could play three notes, their note, the one above it or below it, depending on the direction of the circulation, and then their note again. This would change the direction of the circulation in the scale, but not through the players. For example, playing an ascending scale, if my note were an A, I play A-B-A, then the next person would play the G below my A.
(
Note taker's aside: The second game proved interesting, and there were moments where the exercise and the scale really began to click for all of us as a group. For me,
experientially, these two games, while taxing, were very fun. I also witnessed where an intention had a palpable effect - in this case, when a change in circulation direction was indicated, and the guitarist looked as if to change the direction of the players. The circulation halted completely at that moment, not just because the player looked in that direction, but because the
intent to go that direction was there.)
Break.
We returned after the break, and circulated in thirds up and down four octaves. We then attempted circulating triads up four octaves, but were not able to get much past the third octave. Victor noted some ways to approach these triads, particularly working across two s
trings, as a way to expand what is available to us on the fretboard. He also noted that this was likely the most difficult thing we would be doing in this stage of scale work, and that once this became second nature, would make the whole fretboard available. He also likened the awkwardness to that stage where we first learned the basics of the C Major scale.
We then worked some on Victor's new (unnamed) piece, at a bit higher tempo than usual - the singing quality of the piece is now beginning to come through. A (shaky) attempt at
Askesis, and an incomplete pass at the
Bartók Hommage concluded the meeting.
Labels: Circulation, Circulation Games, Scale Maps
