August 20, 2015: practice Thursday

Today I had a rehearsal on a piece I've been practicing for a while; the piece, Gradient, is for alto sax and piano and was written by Baljinder Sekhon, a composer in Tampa. The piano part involves placing books and sheets of paper inside the piano to create a "buzzy" sound that matches, more or less, the sound of the slap tonguing in the saxophone.

In our rehearsal, we soon found that choreography will be a major issue in this piece! Within a fairly short time, I need to remove three books from the inside of the piano and replace them with two large sheets of corrugated paper. The books must be placed so they cover all the strings in the piano's lower register; I'm still working on finding a way to side the paper in that doesn't make any distracting sounds, since the saxophone is playing. Fortunately, we have a video of the piece to refer to; I've been studying this performance on YouTube to see how this pianist manages the logistics of the piece. The differences in my performance will be that I will have a page turner (I'm not sure how this guy manages to turn his own pages in this particular piece!); the music desk on the piano I'll be playing doesn't lie flat like the one in this video; and since the pianist here seems to be rather tall, it's a bit easier for him to reach into the piano to place the books (I will probably be walking around to the side of the piano). 

We have a few more rehearsals before the performance, and we need to get all the logistics ironed out, in addition to the music, which is quite challenging! It's a great piece, and completely worth the work we're putting into it.