chicago circle meeting

Post 44 of 90.

Up late again, and then a long drive to Chicago, but at least the meeting was at 1 pm instead of 9 am, so I got about five hours of sleep instead of two.

We had a particularly nice C major circulation. Don and I talked about it later on the drive back and agreed it had a nice quality. You could tell that everybody on the team was listening and allowing for phrasing with pauses to arise. It didn't feel like the straight major/Ionian mode of C. I'm not sure what it would divulge under analysis, but it felt exotic.

I could tell that the fretboard familiarity work I've been doing, as minimal as it is, has been helping. I've also taken to practicing my C major with a drone, either on the low C string or sustained on the keyboard, to give a more overt context to the major scale degrees.

We also worked on the "zither" exercise tabbed out by Scott, then stumbled our way through Intergalactic Boogie Express, followed by a free improv. During the improv I found myself playing a Dm->Am->C->Dm chordal figure in search of a Dorian tonal envelope for everything else going on. This felt like the appropriate role for me to take at the moment. Some part of me wished to whip out some hot licks, but another part felt the necessity of holding on to this progression. The thought came to me that it was more important to be making music rather than wiggling my fingers as fast as possible. Without some tonal center and flavor in place, I would just be playing the dreaded "gnat notes" that Zappa despised so much.

After about two hours of playing, I found my right hand wanting to collapse. I couldn't figure out why this uncomfortable feeling was arising, and then it occurred to me that the muscles needed to hold the ball of the thumb upright are perhaps not as strong and developed as they could be.

In a C major circulation, what would have to happen to effect a modulation to G major? If it's not done correctly, the raised F# would either just sound like a wrong note (and often does) or else would yield a C Lydian mode, which actually something altogether different from "G major.". I suppose it would have to be leading tone to a line rising to a G, but I don't know how we would get to that without some really big ears. It's rarely going to happen by accident, and if it did, would everybody there be able to recognize what had happened?

As I work on ear training and my ears begin to wake up ever so slightly over time, I find myself realizing how deeply asleep my musical ear really is.