Wednesday, September 2, 2009

One of the interesting (and appealing) aspects of Guitar Craft, to me, is the matter of 'repertoire'. There are quite a few compositions (I suspect they number in the low triple digits) that are considered 'Craft repertoire', beginning with Theme I, and proceeding to Theme II, Theme III, etc. Theme III is more commonly known as Eye of the Needle, and has been one of the major focuses in my practice, the past few weeks. While not an extremely demanding piece, it is still quite difficult, in part because of the counting, and in part because of some of the fingerings.

I can play the piece, front to back. The problem I have been having with it, and that was pointed out by Victor, is a problem that surfaces in pretty much everything I play: on the numerous occasions that I brick a note, I tense up, and then try to fix the mistake by playing the next couple of notes really in their spot to make up for the mistake. Needless to say, this snowballs fast, and a passage that's only four bars long can get hosed fast. In my aim to 'get it right' (Victor's words), I am missing the music.

A couple of times that I played it, tonight (I have been working Eye very hard, lately, probably to the dismay of my neighbors), I actually found that it came out pretty well, with only a couple of spots that were unsatisfactory. Later, however, while playing something entirely different--something that I wrote--I had a very interesting revelation. Eye is a piece that I have known for at least a year and a half, through listening to recordings of it. I already had a sort of fuzzy map of the piece before I ever started actually playing it, and knew how it sounded. With other things that I've been shown, however, such as a simple A minor exercise, or the bassline to Third Relation, I don't quite feel the same restriction and tension, because I am the first person that I've heard play it all the way through. This is not to say that I'm infinitely more confident with other things--not by a long shot. But there is a different feeling, a need to get it 'right' that perturbs, when I get it wrong. "That's not how Victor played it!" "That's not how it's played on Intergalactic Boogie Express!" "That's not how I wrote the damn thing!"

That last is especially interesting, in relation to a few things that I've written that came out of an aleatory process, or out of a complete accident. How do you repeat an accident? Or, perhaps more appropriately, how do you play everything as if it were being composed on the spot, each time? How do you open yourself to that sense of chance?

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