#10: Tone, trajectory, and ensemble
Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
A well-known nuance of ensemble playing concerns how a musician ‘shows’ to others how the trajectory of a note is likely to unfold. A good example of this was the unison A played by both violins in b.32 (beat 4) of Suk’s Meditation, where a practically imperceptible change in the depth of contact from both players ‘telegraphed’ not just where the next note might happen, but where it inevitably had to fall. The player’s job, in many ways, is simply to match that projected, anticipated shape with what they actually go on to do. In terms of experience, it is vital that this process is not the object of explicit attention. It works at its best when it is left implicit. The specific manner of that integration is a key part of what is meant by a ‘native’ performance style.
As one might expect, then, many of the differences between our own conventions and those of the Czech Quartet lay in this kind of nuance. Such fluctuations are often so subtle as to be imperceptible to a listener outside the ensemble, but an experienced player is extremely sensitive to their presence, and still more to their absence. (This is also closely related to the balance of simultaneous contribution and sensitivity discussed in #6). It is of course tempting to imagine that these ‘integrated trajectories’ are only ever directed towards ‘improving’ the temporal alignment of transitions between individual notes: in other words, that it maps directly onto ‘synchronisation’. Our experimentation suggested that failing to offer these ‘developmental hooks’ yielded results that were much less convincing, whether the next note was synchronous or not. The Czech Quartet’s sensitivity in this respect clearly went considerably further than the concern to ‘maintain alignment’, and so we found that this concept had to be repurposed in various different ways.
