#15: Hairpins and tempo-dynamic coupling
Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
While our own training had largely implored us to resist letting the tempo get faster when it gets louder, the Czech Quartet seem to have been comfortable with this coupling. This idea is familiar in historical performance circles, and as in the famous case of the ‘Brahmsian hairpin’, a general feeling of ‘more’ seems to have been a broadly conventionalised aspect of nineteenth-century notation (Kim 2012).
In our encounter with these recordings, however, that general principle proved exceedingly low-resolution. Sometimes it was indeed true that growth in intensity results in these players letting the music ‘go’ in several ways at once – of which their wild accelerations in parallel places in the Lento of Dvořák’s Op.96 are a perfect example (see thesis Chapter 5, p.118-23; click here for audio example; click here for full score). But this principle was not sufficiently sensitive to deal with the things that we witnessed them constantly ‘looking for’, independently of markings: unfolding tensions in resonance, ‘peels’ between instruments, melodic joins, pauses, lifts, rhythmic unevenness, de-accentuation, and the exchange of whole, ‘lived’ characterisations.
Moreover, in some places where our theoretical ‘nineteenth century-inspired’ instincts might have encouraged us to rush forward impetuously, we just as often found them holding the tempo back, choosing to create energy by other means. (This was another use for the metaphor of the sound’s tactile ‘spin’). Where we might have assumed a passage would be densely inflected, we sometimes found it rendered with striking simplicity. And in circumstances where one might expect individualistic expressivity and asynchronous chaos, we could be caught in admiration for the balance, discipline – and yes, even the structural clarity – of their rendition. From an early stage, then, it was clear to us that the process would demonstrate how far general, decontextualised claims about style would be insufficient, for learning to make music in anything close to the same manner.
