IAAD VII: EYE OF THE NEEDLE DIARY

Week 6

Monday February 17 2025

2:15pm

The 20th anniversary of “Performance Zero” of Tuning the Air – the trial run exploring the viability of building a show based on guitarists sitting in a circle with the audience in the middle (spoiler alert: It was, and seven years later we brought down the curtain on the final performance) – and I find myself a little consumed with one of the nuttiest ideas I’ve ever had for a circulated arrangement of a classical work. There is also a Plan B should it prove unworkable, but I really want Plan A to work. Total madness.

But that’s not part of this project in any relevant way, other than the fact that any time I begin working on it I am in danger of going down the rabbit hole for hours, which makes ensuring I stay up on my IAAD commitments a bit more of a struggle.

Up reasonably early. Morning routine and directly to the guitar. Gave the Practice Room a shot, and found one other person already there, and within the hour two more joined in. Still experimenting with camera-on vs off. Not sure. I notice that with the camera on I am a little more aware of the performative aspects and find that distracting, and at the moment that isn’t feeling useful. But it also may just be something I need to work through and past. We’ll see.

Began with the collection of IAAD-material-based cross-picking calisthenic warmups. Good stuff and it is clearly showing improvement, if glacially slow.

From there, back to Calliope. This was not practice, but research. Turned off the camera, opened the score, and went through it bar by bar taking note of precisely where the mirrors in the lead appear. It is all there, back in some dusty corner of my memory, but pulling it up at will with precision not so much. Ran the WMMR performance at 85% tempo, and when listening I pretty much always hear these details coming and know where to expect them. So I think for the purposes of this inquiry I’m good. Back to the guitar, I played the bass part along at 85%, 95%, and 100% tempos. Mostly there on the actual bass parts. By the time I was up to 100%, though, the high bits up in the lead range were pretty ugly. Considering the fact that whenever I hear this piece played these days it’s even faster than that, it is pretty clear that I’m not going to be in a performance team for Calliope any time soon. If ever.

Closed the book, turned the camera back on, and back to calisthenics for the remainder of the hour.

Breakfast, first student of the day, and then a doctor’s appointment. Consequently writing up my notes about 5 hours after the fact. Not ideal, but whatcha gonna do?

Tomorrow on to Askesis.

Tuesday February 18 2025

3:30pm

As of today, the guy on the left is officially retired. And the lovely sunburst 1968 ES-335 he is cradling is his wife’s “happy retirement” gift to him. A bunch of his very jealous guitar playing friends wanted to see it, and more importantly hear it, and much more importantly, play it, so I hosted a small gathering at my place last night for that purpose. There was pizza. There were vintage amplifiers turned up real loud. And there was tequila.

All of which is to say the today began a bit later and a bit more slowly than usual. 

Consequently, my IAAD work for the day was segmented. After the morning routine I only had about an hour before the arrival of my first student. Made a cup of coffee, tuned my guitar, pulled up the pdf of Askesis that I got my hands on yesterday, and logged into the Practice Room.

I was alone in the practice room, but elected to keep my camera off for today. Did a little generic warmup and then went to work on the Askesis parts. This is a fascinating one. For this half-hour session I worked my way through both parts on the score, simply remembering how they go. Along with Third Relation and Calliope, this is part of a trio of GC Themes in which the distinction between “lead” and “bass” parts is academic at most. Both parts are all over the place. I also seem to have known both parts equally well, though in performance I was almost always on Team Bass. For every section and every figure, regardless of which part, the relearning curve was short. I’d slowly work my way through the pattern, and on the third or fourth clumsy and awkward repetition my hands would suddenly take over. So it’s all in there somewhere. This score has quite a lot of picking indications, a couple of which surprised me a little. But in thirty minutes I had everything back in accessible memory. Even found one or two mistakes in the score. And there is one bar that is either wrong in the score or I used to play it incorrectly. I need to consult with the composer to determine whether the score or my is wrong. We didn’t work from scores when this material was emerging. Basically we used one another as living breathing loopers until the composer was satisfied. 

The most surprising thing I encountered during the reacquaintance session was the time signature changes. I am willing to bet that if I ever knew what the time signature of a given passage was, it was fleeting anecdotal information that I tossed aside once I could play the part.

Back to the Zoom screen, where I found someone had joined me. Extra glad I left my camera off. Signed off, changed to a Telecaster in the old tuning, fired Zoom back up, and headed to suburban Chicago.

After the lesson, a quick and late breakfast, and on to Askesis part two.

In the earlier session I really had not done a whole lot of actual guitar playing, so for this half hour I used two passages from the lead part that have always tripped me up, and used them as practical material for what was basically 30 minutes of calisthenics.

Afterward, checked my phone and saw a message from Igor that he was out and about with Fernando, suggesting we get together to grab a coffee in the neighborhood. Called him, made a plan, and headed out the door. Always a joy to see Fernie. 

Have gotten zero real exercise in the past two days, and this is something that makes my doctor cranky, so now heading out for a long walk while there is still daylight. 

Wednesday February 19 2025

3:00pm

Up early enough to get my hour in first thing this morning. Shared the Practice Room with Patrick Smith. Camera off.

A short warmup with material from Invocation, Third Relation, and Calliope, at a medium tempo.

After double-checking and confirming the accuracy of the score for Askesis, I chose several sections, primarily from the “lead”, that have always been problematic for me, and used them as material for calisthenic practice. Two birds, one stone. Amped up the tempo as I settled in. I will still never be a guitar speed demon, but I am getting stronger and more reliable at the faster tempos that I can manage.

For the final quarter of hour it was back to Eye of the Needle. Through each of the 4 parts at performance tempo. While Guitar 2 is still not ready for prime time, it is beginning to sound more musical; less tense and fraught. Back through Guitar 1 and Guitar 3 again at a pushed tempo.

Tomorrow on to The Moving Force for a couple of days, and that will wrap up the recapitulation of the original Themes. 

Thursday February 20 2025

11:20am

Allowed myself to sleep in just a little this morning, as I have a 10pm gig tonight. That meant that I didn’t have time for IAAD practice before my first student at 9am. 

After signing off of that lesson, I picked up the Guitar Craft guitar and began. For the first time since this project began I really really wasn’t in the mood. My warmup was sloppy and didn’t really improve much. Resistance was very high.

But I stayed with it, as one does.

Opened the book to The Moving Force. This is a piece that I never, even on my very best day, played at tempo. And that certainly isn’t going to change right now. But, as with all of this material, I did learn it and was able to play it through, more or less as an etude.

So the first thing I did was to read through it slowly section by section, which really means bar by bar, playing the cross-picking pattern on open strings. This is a little odd, as you never really get a feel for the flow this way. The first thing I noticed was that I don’t really remember it changing time signatures at almost every bar. Or rather, I don’t remember learning it in terms of counting at all. I knew it had lots of tricky little twists and turns, but I always experienced them as melodic twists and turns rather than meter.

Then I read through it again, still bar by bar, slowly, actually playing the part. Clearly at one time in my life I put a great deal of work into this, because this came back more or less immediately. That is, my fingers knew what to do, albeit only rudimentally. And at that point all reference to “the count” went completely out of the picture.

Then I moved to the bass part, which is very sparse and only appears briefly in specific phrases to add color and a bit of harmonic depth. To look at it on the page, it made no sense to me. So I pulled up Show Of Hands, and just played along. Bang. All right there. I did notice one place where I hear a couple of the bass notes an octave lower than they appear on the score. This is the only “real” recording of the piece. It appears on Get Crafty, but that recording is a bit raw. I also have a ton of bootlegs of shows where we played it. So I just played along with each of them. And the low octave is audible in all of them. It’s possible that just one player is taking it down, much as the bass for the midtro of Eye of the Needle is often doubled at the low octave – it’s not really part of the composition, but rather one of the arrangement variations that are available.

What strikes me most about the bass part for this piece is that it takes the EotN approach to another level. In order to play it you really must KNOW how the lead goes. The bass is not holding the pulse. It is not driving the piece (compare it with Calliope or Third Relation). To say it is “decorative” would far understate its importance, but it is something like that. Whether someone working to learn the bass part learns the lead just by hearing it a million times or actually takes the time to learn to play it, that level of understanding is mandatory. It honestly can’t be counted. An isolated bar of 13/8 at 240bpm? Followed by a bar of 5/4, a bar of 2/4, a bar of 9/8, a bar of 3/4, and finally a bar of 4/4. Not really in the cards, at least not for me. But you still need to know where the downbeat of those bars are in the melody. And every bit as important, you need to know where the end of those bars is, because a long note that hangs on through a harmonic shift is enough to kill the piece – something that is also true of Eye of the Needle.

Not sure how much more work I’m going to put into this piece, but I anticipate cycling through all of the themes for another week, focusing on the guitar practice/calisthenic side of things, and there is certainly plenty of stuff in here that I could dig into.

Friday February 21 2025

5:45pm

How I spent my Thursday night: 

And by that I mean, from 10pm Thursday to 2am Friday. Came home, had a little snack, made myself a hot toddy (people don’t always realize how hard playing the harmonica is on your throat muscles). I cannot come home from a gig and just go to sleep. So I chilled and watched a little TV, and read a chapter of a book, and by about 4am I was ready to go to bed.

I absolutely did not set an alarm. Very deliberately and intentionally.

When I did climb out of bed it was after 9. Through the morning routine. Made a cup of coffee. Took a quick look at a very long to-do list for my regular Friday office/clerical day. Took care of a couple of items that could be checked off quickly, and then it was time for the 11am IAAD Buddy meeting. Some really good stuff came up there. 

At noon, as we signed off, I noticed I was hungry, so I made a little lunch and another cup of coffee and then “headed off to work”. A scintillating afternoon of paying bills, confirming the lesson schedule for next week and setting up necessary zoom appointments, chasing down and matching medical bills to Medicare statements, taking another dive at researching my flight options for Italy in April, etc, etc, et-freaking-c. 

It was almost 4pm by the time I could put all of that away. I was grumpy and totally not in the mood for guitar practice, and since a commitment to daily practice was not something I took on as part of this course I was completely at ease with that. Except I wasn’t. So, after some hemming and hawing I sat down for what was to be 30 reluctant minutes, but which stretched out to 45 highly engaged minutes. Go figure.

Right hand warmup on open strings at a reasonably brisk tempo meant to be for 5 or 10 minutes turned into almost 30. Nothing fancy. But it gave me some time to contemplate the Guitarist Inside, along with a couple of things discussed in the meeting this morning that felt related. At one point I took a shot at the “circulation of sensation”. Didn’t get very far. Sensation is something I have a strong relationship with, so the part of any of these exercises that involve bringing a part of my attention to some part of my body comes pretty readily. But I am still terrible about combining them with the task of playing Music, or even with a simple repetitive exercise. Sooner or later either my attention wanders away from the exercise, or my guitar playing begins to falter in tragic ways. With the limb rotation through Eye of the Needle I am constantly blanking on which limb is supposed to be active, and rely heavily on knowing where the exercise lines up with the composition to get myself back on track. I don’t think if I’ve made it through the piece with clear continuity in the limbs from beginning to end more than a handful of times since I was first introduced to the practice in late 2009.

Tomorrow my guitar work for the day is likely to be the Seattle Monthly Open Circle, and on Sunday an SGC rehearsal, and I did want to wrap up The Moving Force this week so that I can move on to something else beginning Monday. Getting the lead back into my hands is not part of the plan, other than to borrow bits as material for calisthenic practice. But the little flashes of insight I had yesterday are still intriguing to me. I played the bass line along with the Show of Hands recording, without referring to the score, and it was more or less there. A couple of times through and it was good. I recognize how I know “where” these lines are played; that is where in the form of the composition they appear. I know the piece well, and understand the harmonic rhythm of the composition. So know which harmonic segments include bass lines. But how I know precisely when, and for how long each note sounds, is still kind of mysterious to me. Something I wrote yesterday about note durations sticks with me and I pulled the score back out to double check my accuracy. I must have practiced the hell out of this thing at some point in my life because all of my note durations were spot on. Except for the very last note, and in exploring this today I realized that I didn’t really understand what the lead was doing rhythmically in that bar. So I slowed the recording down (they make software for that) and spent a couple of minutes playing the lead through the final 3 bars of the piece until I was confident I could hear and feel the downbeat that the bass needs to release just before, and voila. Deficiency eliminated. At least until the next time I play it.

I can’t believe it, but I really really need to begin dinner preparation now. Where did the day go?