First Rehearsal

First rehearsal on Paul Lansky’s Threads this week. Rehearsal room, shorts and sneakers, whiteboard still ruled with somebody else’s staves from an earlier class. One player behind a stack of drums, one at the marimba, timpani parked at the back.

Nobody plays music at a first rehearsal. I don’t know why we pretend otherwise.

What actually happens is inventory. Where does that instrument live so the person who needs it in the fourth movement can get to it. Whose stand is blocking whose sightline. How many bars of rest before you have to be somewhere else in the room, and can you physically make it. A percussion quartet is a logistics problem wearing a piece of music, and until the logistics resolve, nothing about the sound is real.

The reward is that it flips. Somewhere around the third or fourth rehearsal the room stops being a floor plan and starts being a piece, and you can never quite locate the moment it happened.

That’s the part I’ve never gotten tired of in twenty-odd years of doing this. Not the concert. The week where it turns.

Threads goes up November 8th with the Tennessee Percussion Group, alongside Reich’s Sextet.