Having become familiar with the idea of ‘tactile beats’, the next stage was to see it is as a capacity, and not as a blanket disposition. We eventually considered this to be one of two possible poles, for in other situations we found we needed the reliability and consistency afforded by a more ‘given’ beat concept. We imagined the latter state as ‘being the wheel’: in this mode, one lets the beat ‘tick along’, not necessarily always completely metronomically, but with the groove reminiscent of a rhythm section. It is a much cleaner sensation than the ‘plasticine’ concept discussed in previous posts: more straightforward, and perhaps more brittle. We found that ensemble roles could then be grounded in this newly-available spectrum of dispositions towards time.

By the end of the process we had much greater insight into the relationship between tonal intensity in the bow, and the feeling that the next beat ‘could’ always fall somewhere that was indistinct, distributed, and not pre-determined. It had been easy to revert to a very different, more ‘given’ concept of beat, even when one was ostensibly performing the same kinds of slides and rhythmic variations as the Czech Quartet. This shift in beat concept proved to be one of the most practical ways of overcoming modern ensemble conventions — conventions which could be surprisingly resilient, even when multifarious historical ‘devices’ were more consciously in play.

An important question that has been lurking throughout these posts is whether it is possible for modern players to embody these early recorded sounds fully enough that genuinely felt emotion can start to take the place of self-conscious experimentation (with performance style ‘features’). How far could we keep hold of this unfamiliar manner while also trying to recast it as emergent from ‘real’ feelings of our own? Was it possible to channel C.P.E. Bach’s notion of the performer ‘letting themselves be moved’ by the music, even in an idiom that was so unusual to us?

In an effort to mitigate the problem of too many concerns being held in awareness, on occasion we temporarily focused conscious attention on single ‘dimensions’ of our playing. The obvious pair of candidates for such ‘streamlining’ were tone and timing. And so we tried one version that deliberately directed attention towards ‘when we play, not so much how…’ This intermediate tactic emerged organically out of rehearsal conversation, rather than being a pre-planned exercise.

Overly concrete descriptions of the Czech Quartet’s performances risked neglecting the extent to which tone (and its specific affective qualities) was always in flux — to such an extent that we found it was resistant, in practice, to singular ‘re-presentational’ descriptions. In certain places we thought we had found exactly the right kind of tension. But in such cases it was sometimes tempting to double down on that success, and to ‘hold onto’ that tone for an artificially long time. In fact, we needed to let that feeling pass much more quickly when it was no longer demanded by the context, and always be ready to allow one’s sound to transform (itself) into something different in the next moment.

Building our expressivity around the breath made a vast difference to how close we were able to get to the Czech Quartet’s ‘feel’ for ensemble, if not necessarily to the specific performance they recorded. When playing in this way, we had noticed that we were generally more likely to ‘hold onto’ our breathing, and to become physically tighter. This may be related to our attention being focused on executing novel — and thus comparatively pre-planned, or consciously considered — gestures. Simply noticing this tendency was enough to give our playing a more ‘synthesised’ feeling; not in the sense of being more ‘structural’, but in the way our individual gestures had greater continuity, and were more contextual and responsive.

The Czech Quartet viola player completely changes persona between b.1-2 — where he is a thoughtful, imaginative orator — and b.3, when he becomes a supportive harmonic pivot. This transition has a delightfully grammatical quality: the bow makes an ‘envelope’ that hands over responsibility in a manner that is simultaneously distinct and flowing, rather like a semicolon, and which sees him arrive at a gentler, less ‘present’ sound quality precisely at the moment at which his colleagues enter. This is another example of how one can show with a kind of integrated trajectory — in this case, that related to the last note’s intensity — when another player’s phrase has to begin.

It is time to deal with the seed that was planted in #65, about there ultimately being no hard distinction between inégale and tempo change. (It should be noted that this is a practical observation derived from experience, rather than an analytical or empirical one). In b.14, the timing of the local rhythmic figures in beats 2 and 3 in the inner parts — a telling lingering on each of the melodic quavers, with a spring-back in the final semiquaver — was particularly interesting because it does not slow the overall tempo, but still imbues the bar with a feeling of heaviness. We found that inégale often gave rise to a productive contradiction between ‘affect’ and the more obvious conclusions that one might extrapolate, for instance from measuring timing profiles.

Our experience of the Czech Quartet’s sound production sometimes changed quite significantly over time. This was especially true when we were experimenting with our instruments in parallel with our listening, and coming back to one recording after time spent with another. These re-evaluations generally tended towards greater focus and core — as in the opening viola statement of the Meditation. The initial ‘softness’ of contact was potentially misleading: we had sometimes read into their tone a more diffuse, silvery body than was actually the case, on the basis of that initial articulation.

We usually felt better equipped to record immediately after doing detailed ‘detective work’ on particular passages. I had expected the opposite. In retrospect, that expectation was derived from the faulty assumption that detailed work would likely be somewhat ‘left hemisphere’ in character. (See thesis Chapter 1). In fact, because we were encountering such unique sounds, and because our manner of relating to them had to be so direct – if often heavily metaphorical – we found it relatively easy to go from that exploration into committed takes of our own.