Los Molinos.
Breakfast: a triumph of organisation. Everyone in within 10 minutes.
10.23 Kitchen Team meeting at 09.00. The question: how to become a Team? Some comments presented on how to approach this. Then to practicalities.
Meeting with Level One at 09.30. Extending the picking over 4 strings. Moving the First Primary towards fingerboard knowledge & music by establishing a point of certainty; then extending this towards a second point of certainty, while maintaining the principles embodied within the First Primary.
A counting exercise.
12.45 Levels Two & L2.5 met at 10.30 and discussed the first components of the How-To-Make-A-Fortune Beginners' Guide To Guitar Playing - easy open strum-along chords to accompany feeble folk songs. Open C with 2 fingers is a cinch but F is not so easy. The dominant 7th. on G, with 2 fingers on 5 strings, is also easy but sounds a little wimpy. In response to a request, we added Am to the primary triads & Blue Moon is now available to the repertoire of droning folkies.
But to really squeeze the pennies from aspiring beginners, we moved to a 12 bar blues on C with dominant 7th. chords & added a boogie bass line. A massive hit - Play In A Lifetime -is on the way & will replace all other current best-selling tutors.
Finally, the eternal search for that elusive C major scale went on, around the circle, from high G to low C and back again. I left after 45 minutes of unfulfilled searching.
19.02 Good comments at lunchtime.
One of the team-in-search-of-C major suggested that he had felt privileged to be a part of the group: he knew the group would stay there until they got it, and he also knew they would get it. An alternative way of putting it: the group had balls. He also commented that the exercise succeeded shortly after I left.
A Level One commented on last night's houseful-of-guitars meeting in the ballroom, with inner & outer circulating circles. The inner-circle circulation ended, and the L1 knew that the outer-circle circulation was also going to end, and that it was going to end with them. And it did. Far more than the note came to rest with them on this completion of the exercise. They found this powerful & moving.
A true observation: there are more than notes being moved around the people & seats in a GC Circle.
The question was asked: how do you transmit the principles embodied in an exercise? The answer: by internalising them. That is, by having made the exercise your own. Otherwise, all that may be passed on is the functionality of the exercise. If the transmission is clean, this has a value; but a functional value.
The Mentor Buddies have been conducting personal meetings this afternoon, with an Alexander meeting for Level One after tea. A few words of introduction to the morning sitting at 18.15.
22.10 At dinner: a stunning performance by The League of Gauchos. This was met by the ultimate accolade an audience can give: silence. Or maybe everyone in the dining room were just stunned. The Hell Boys (of even newer formation) gave TLOG a close run for their money, but there were less of them.
Good comments from the team.
The Hopefuls met at 20.15 to address developing variations, musically & calisthenically. For many, hope was not only unreasonable but unlikely; and for those for whom hope was closer, it was still a distance away. I include myself in this category. The new series of exercises are as difficult as the now-established-if-still-not-played-well exercises presented at Claymont almost 19 years ago.
Leslie & Her Guitar Buddies followed The Hopefuls into the ballroom and circulated in C hexatonic and G major scales simultaneously. Then to new-formation thrakking rhythms:
Group One: 17 bars of 5;
rhythm hits 1+3 and 1+4 on alternating bars;
bar 17 tacet;
the magic chord: any chord with a relationship (however distant) to C.
Group Two: 11 bars of 9;
rythym hits 1+3+5 and 1+4+7 on alternating bars;
bar 11 tacet;
the magic chord (of Frank's choice): F#m7flat9.
An energising meeting for me.
I miss my Wife very much.
