by Serguey Shinder
Eleven songs, six weeks of rehearsal, and on the night the singer had almost nothing left by the ninth one. She got through it. Anybody who did not know the songs would have said it went fine. From where I was standing it was the worst thing we did that year, and it was entirely our own arrangement that did it to her.
Songs seven through ten all sat at the top of her range. Not one of them unreasonably, and each one perfectly comfortable on its own. Put four of them consecutively, with no gap larger than the time it takes to say thank you, and by the fourth she was singing on whatever was left rather than on anything she had chosen.
Here is what we had actually rehearsed for six weeks. We had rehearsed the songs. We ran whichever ones needed work, in whatever order somebody suggested, and between each one we talked for two or three minutes about what we had just done. Every individual song was in good shape. The set had never been played.
I think about that distinction constantly now. We had tested every component thoroughly and we had never once run the system under the conditions it was built for. The conditions were not the notes. They were the order, the duration, and above all the absence of the gaps, and every one of those things existed only in the sequence.
The other detail that stays with me is that several of us had a vague sense the second half felt heavy. Nobody could say why, and nobody said anything, because a feeling with no evidence behind it does not survive contact with a rehearsal room. There was no way for the problem to become visible while we kept experiencing the material as eleven separate things.
The two rehearsals before the next run we played the whole set start to finish, standing up, in order, with no stopping and no talking, and only discussed it afterwards. It found three problems in one evening. The vocal cluster, obviously, which we fixed by moving two songs. An instrument change that needed about forty seconds and had never needed it before, because in rehearsal there had always been a conversation covering it. And one song that all of us were quietly sick of, which only became apparent when we had to play it in its real position rather than as the thing we practised first while people were still arriving.
Nothing about that rehearsal was more work. It was the same three hours. The only difference was that we experienced it in the order the audience would, which is the one arrangement we had somehow never tried.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply