thirteen ways

Today’s rehearsal involved just two pieces, Adès Catch and Hartke The Horse with the Lavender Eye, allowing Tim and Matthew to luxuriate in a well-deserved day off while the rest of us slaved away. We’ve been performing the Adès since September, and it’s a rough piece, probably the hardest I’ve played with the group in a long time. I know, that’s a ridiculous statement, but my part’s pretty damn hard. Anyone else who’s played Adès knows what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, that’s fine, just trust me.

Our recent performances have been inconsistent: some things go well, some things don’t, and we haven’t been able to tell why. So today we went back to basics, plugging our metronome into our guitar amp and going through the trickiest parts under tempo. Nick and I figured out some cues, Michael and Lisa went over their parts together, we had discussions about decrescendos and tempo modulations… In brief, we rehearsed. And by the end, the piece felt better. It’s easy to forget when you’re performing a lot that you’ve still got to put the time in, even for a ten minute piece that you rehearsed for thirty hours back in August and that you’ve played in concert at least eight times since then. You REALLY REALLY want it to stay awesome on its own. But it doesn’t. I guess this won’t come as a surprise to the Michael Phelpses of the world. Hey, what is the plural of Phelps?

So, rehearsing works.

After Adès came Hartke, so Nick went home to play scales (or Metal Gear Solid), and the three of us began reading through a piece we hadn’t touched since June. (I think it was June, because that’s the last date I put in my part. (Yes, I put dates in my part: when we finally come to an agreement about a tempo or a dynamic or a balance for a passage, I write it down and put the date in, as some kind of referential evidence in case (when) the topic comes up again. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. (And if anyone knows how to do footnotes in wordpress, let me know, I’d love to get all DFW on this blog’s ass.)))¹ And here’s the thing: it was good. Rough in some places, but no problems that took more than an airing out or two to fix. Michael and I had fewer intonation problems than usual, and the coordination involving Lisa’s whacked-out part in the last movement came together pretty easily. I left rehearsal feeling good about our upcoming performance of the piece at Harris in February.

So, not rehearsing works.

Kind of confusing. I heart predictability, with linear sets of actions taken leading to dependable outcomes. Thanks, today’s rehearsal, for dashing my hopes at understanding a rational world. Love you. Mean it.

Or, I guess I could be even more rational, and say that the time put in on the Adès likely had an effect on the Hartke. We knew the Hartke well last June, so challenging ourselves to learn something even more difficult in August made the piece better in January. And if that’s true, eventually we’ll be able to put the Adès aside and it’ll get better on its own, too. But we’re not there, yet.

Two last thoughts for tonight:

1) I’m tired of typing “è.” Tommy, darling, your name’s kind of pretentious.

2) For John Pippen: Ellen?!?!?!??!!????