#13: Gesture, joins, and ‘grammar’
Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
A few bars earlier (than the passage discussed in #12) we saw how this desire to knit gestures together often took priority over the lengths of rests as notated. In b.31, they clearly imagined the rest as a join, rather than as a break: the length of the silence seemed to us to be directly connected to the quality (and the trajectory) of the preceding gesture. The silence, then, could not be ‘counted’ independently. We felt that the cello entered fractionally earlier than written, and that the first violin slightly anticipated the entry in b.39 in a similar way. Whether or not this was true in terms of measurement was beside the point: in both cases, we had to be considerably quicker on our feet than our normative feel for trajectory would have required. This aspect of the original performance was clearly motivated by a desire for continuity: the moment of silence is ‘carried’, in order to avoid the music’s fragmentation into straight edged, modular units.
The resistance to aggressive ‘down’ impulses I discussed in Chapter 4 also plays a role here. At b.30 (beat 3), for instance, their rhetorical emphasis generates a sense of arrival that almost ‘narrates’ the fact that the instruments are speaking ‘all together’ at last. The combination of a subtly propulsive gesture with a more consistent, ‘held’ bow speed in the rest of the note de-emphasises any separation between this idea, and the cello’s response (in the following bar (b.31, beat 2). The softness of the cellist’s initial articulation, and the straight tone, join the utterances even more closely. (It would be easy to make these distinct, if desired). We felt that this moment must have been conceptualised more conversationally than ‘analytically’, as if the cello supplies a final, individual – and thus more vulnerable and profound – affirmation of something that had already been expressed by the crowd. The more intimate repetition shows a different ‘face’ of the same basic gesture of agreement (b.31-2).
In the previous phrase the viola had connected the rising fifth D-A (b.29-30) with the confidence of public oration, but the same interval in the cello (b.31-2) is far simpler. With a knowledge of ‘period style’, this moment might seem an obvious candidate for an audible pitch-glide. This would have been easier to execute on the instrument, technically, than to ‘cover’ the shift of position, and could probably also be justified analytically, because it draws attention to the repetition (at the lower octave) of a line that had just been presented by the viola. But this is not what cellist Zelenka does at all: instead, he joins the two notes with impressive speed, covering the awkward distance with a clean shift of which any modern cellist would be proud. That quickness allows the viola, here acting as the bass, to take on the majority of the expressive work. Not only does the violist plays his A-D resolution (b.32) with telling direction – including a small slide – he also goes out of his way to avoid explicitly accenting the arrival note, which we perceived as notably more ‘sideways’ than ‘down’.
Although empirically the unevenness of the timing in b.32 is not so unlike that of its equivalent b.30, we understood the ‘affect’ of these two moments profoundly differently. An ever-present inégale ‘twist’ inside each note imparted an audibly diffuse feeling to b.32, heightening the pathos of its repeated statement. The internal timing of that bar is very unstable, too; yet the players begin at almost exactly the same time. Given how little preparation the cellist affords his shift, this is no mean feat.
This moment epitomised a ‘grammatical’ quality of their playing, insofar as their manner of connecting notes – or not – frequently seemed directed towards clarifying (‘showing’) harmonic content. The precise ways in which this was accomplished always dwelt in the ‘betweenness’ of bowing, and its intrinsic integration of tone, gesture and articulation. For this reason, it seems implausible that playing against the idea of clarification should be considered a ‘native’ – still less defining – feature of early recorded style. Our experiment suggested that the more accurate distinction is between the abstract character of paradigms like ‘structural interpretation’, and more embodied, even willingly anthropomorphic models. It seemed as though the idea of clarification needed to be treated as an optional capacity, more than a norm – in either direction – because the Czech Quartet’s impulses in this respect fluctuated so considerably. Harmonic density sometimes made it more likely that they would aim for a certain clarification, but this was far from inevitable. More colloquially, one might say that some passages required us to ‘walk through’ a listener for it to make sense, while others seemed to ‘play themselves’.
