Another full day and a feeling of too little done, yet I (and we) have not stopped, and remain aching all over from recent work.
Did more work on the Shakespeare drawing, and prepared the equipment for a Wonderland rehearsal. I needed to check the projector and how it worked. It remains stupid in operation, but usable. Another weak link in its chain is the complete reliance on a remote control. Lose it or have it not work (the buttons are not very reliable) and the whole performance can be jeopardised. Well, I'll wait until a final set-list before thinking about videos. 90% of a music show is carrying, unpacking, connecting, and sound checking. The actual performance is 10%, and despite needing to remember every note and nuance of each piece, the hardest work remains the physical carrying, setting up and technical aspects. I barely have any time to worry about playing the music.
In the afternoon we did our first rehearsal, a basic run through of each song and which instruments will be needed and which parts have music, where the speech comes in etc. Many of these songs will be performed live for the first time. Some, like Herr Kasperle, are quite advanced musically and will involve solos. I need to write down the music and words for these. I began our live performance career with a simple list, but now, 4 years later, I will soon need a page for each song.
A really long day, but I think a lot of progress has been made. If the music was all written out, and if I could read it fluently, there would be far less need for rehearsal time, but a lot more time spent writing it all out. In many ways, it's good that it has been so long since our last show. It has permitted some leaps which might not have happened if we had evolved slowly; Deb will play lots of guitar for the first time (in the recordings, I play all of the guitar, but can't do this live AND play all of the keyboards). I also realise that need to notate a lot more music, just so that I remember them all - without this I might merely remember it from the previous show, when, ideally, it would all be notated. In practice, that will never happen because at least half of the tracks are very complex and improvised in complex fancies.
Some of the most simple are the most beautiful. The Candle Burns is little more that a descent of four chords in arpeggios, from high on the keyboard, to low, and a dramatic melodic fantasy in those chords, yet it works so well. Some, Like The Cabinet of Dr. Eckelmann or Siamese Twin Domestic are more like musical sound effects or explosions in response to the words, and very different each time we perform them. Dead Hand is such a complex work (it's on our Apocalypse album) which I improvised in one take for the album, but which I'd have little hope of ever duplicating, though I could notate it by 'cheating' and transcribing the MIDI file. I know that, for posterity if not live performance, I should.
This one, 2-hour show will take us at least 8 full days and a lot of energy in between to rehearse. I can see how it is more efficient to arrange a tour with identical sets each evening.
