CoLab 2013 Day 3

We had left yesterday's session knowing that the piece of music we had devised needed to be changed, but we'd had overnight to think about it and were able to discuss ideas with Tony before today's session began fully. We agreed the main problem is that the bass line is too strong. We had previously agreed the bass line would be one of the riffs in 4/4, but Tony made the point that everyone naturally listens to the bass, and if this is in 4/4 then the whole piece will feel like it's in 4/4 - despite other musicians playing in 3/4, 5/4 and 7/4 over the top. Another issue was simply being too firmly centred in C major. Luckily, we were able to solve both these problems with one solution: rather than having George play a bass riff, he could instead do long held notes with random pitches, on random beats. This would help the piece lose its 4/4 feel and also its strong C major feel. We also agreed that we could take on board the dancers' idea of accumulation, building up not only in dynamic and texture but also in harmonic instability. In practical terms, this meant gradually introducing chromatic notes into your riff until it is entirely different from the riff you started with. With these ideas agreed upon, we felt a lot happier about our piece fitting better with the dance, and felt that implementing them would not be too much of a problem.
When the Brighton teenagers arrived, we did our normal dance warm-ups, although in a slightly shortened form as Tony was aware of time. This was the last session we would have and while we had a number of strong ideas, we had not yet brought them together into one performance. Immediately after warm-ups we broke off into separate music and dance groups, giving the dancers the opportunity to rehearse their group accumulation routine (which they had not been ever so happy with yesterday), and musicians the opportunity to introduce our new ideas for adapting our existing piece. I was pleased with how quickly the group adapted to the changes, and within about an hour's rehearsal space we had vastly improved our piece, implementing the changes previously discussed and also some collective group "silences".
We brought the music and dance groups back together just before lunch and ran through the accumulation routine. Both groups had hugely improved on yesterday and Tony was satisfied with our adapted piece of music. The challenge now was bringing together all the ideas we'd had up until now into a sufficiently long performance. Tony's approach to this was as it had been throughout the whole project: run it and see what happens. He briefly outlined a vague structure: a new dance "exhaustion" exercise the dancers had worked on (unaccompanied), accumultion routines, then into the "duos". As we ran this through I felt quite uncomfortable, feeling that we hadn't been given enough information to know what we were meant to be playing, and when. The dancers, however, seemed happy with this approach. This way of working once again highlighted to me the differences between how dancers and musicians approach rehearsing and working together. While I was happy to try new ways of working, in this instance I just didn't feel anyone really knew what outcome we were working towards as we ran it through. Eventually the first run-through ground to a halt when we finally reached a point of indecision for both musicians and dancers, and we broke off for lunch, giving us Trinity musicians an opportunity to voice our concerns and establish a better understanding of what the final performance would look like. As we spoke with Tony over lunch, he too showed concerns that there was uncertainty amongst the group and we worked together on helping each other understand what we were aiming towards. As the group came together again over lunch we had a much clearer idea of what the final performance would look like and I was much happier during the subsequent run-throughs.

Rehearsing our performance


After running through the material we had so far several times, Tony came to the conclusion that we needed to put together something more, as the performance was only just reaching 10 minutes as it was. Time was especially tight as we were doing an informal "showing" of our work at 4.00pm to parents of the Brighton teenagers. We had half an hour to compile a few more minutes' worth of material and we separated once more, with the task of devising a few more minutes of music. We had about half an hour to do this so the pressure was on, but luckily Sarah took the lead, using one of the ideas we had discussed together in our planning before coming to Brighton: word music. We wrote down a list of words formed from the letters A-G and Sarah explained the concept: every musician must simply play through this list of words in their own time, listening carefully to the others and changing note when you feel it would be harmonically appropriate. Someone pointed out that clarinet, saxophone and horn would have to transpose and suggested quickly writing out the words again in their respective keys, but I felt this was unnecessary for several reasons: this would mean writing the list out in full three more times (in B flat, E flat and F) when we're already pushed for time, and then the words wouldn't be words anyway. (For example, the word "CAGE" transposed into F reads "GEDB" - not a word.) I also felt we should just trust in the abilities of the transposing players - I had heard them play enough to judge that they were both good musicians and reckoned they'd be up for it. We gave this word music an initial run through and were surprised with the result - it sounded amazing! Admittedly we were playing in an extremely echoey sports hall at the time and Fred made the very good point that the acoustic was doing a lot of work for us, helping tone quality and meaning we didn't need to worry about staggered breathing. However despite this we were still pleased with how quickly we'd devised a new bit of musical material and were keen to put it together with the dancers.
As the dancers came in, we had a very hurried run through of this new section together, and then it was time for our first "performance". A few parents had come along to watch so we took the opportunity to test the whole performance in front of an audience, before the main performances tomorrow at Laban. The final structure for our performance was as follows:

Our four pieces which we had composed on day 1 were not included in our final performance plan.
The initial performance went well, with no mistakes and very positive feedback from the small audience. The session ended with a brief round-up and feedback session led by Tony, as there would not be much opportunity for that tomorrow at Laban. After seeing our trial performance go so well, everyone was excited and looking forward to tomorrow's trip to Laban! This marked the end of the actual rehearsing and collaborating part of the project, as tomorrow's trip would be solely performance, and in a way I was sad for it to finish - I had really learnt a lot from the dancers and thoroughly enjoyed working with them.
We were supposed to meet Tony after this session for a little debriefing, but due to a miscommunication we were unable to do so. We made our way back to London ready for tomorrow's performance at Laban.