#17: Flow, inaccuracy, and hypermeter
Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
Overall, the trajectory of our process had a similar shape to that of ‘normal’ rehearsing. Early stages are characterised by unfocused but imaginative openness; more ‘closed’, detailed work refines the details more sharply; and the process eventually culminates in a synthesis which allows one to work within a field of imaginative ‘options’ that are both unique and usefully delimited. Transitions between these phases are always experienced vividly, but working with an unfamiliar style heightened that awareness, even in a short experimental period.
At first, relaxing our attitude towards between-player synchronisation bred a palpable sense of liberation, and it was possible to approximate the Czech Quartet’s sound world relatively quickly. In this phase, some of our playing was quite technically inaccurate, and it was difficult to communicate and anticipate each other’s intentions effectively, when the carpet of shared expressive norms had been so comprehensively pulled from under us. But the novelty of this less synchronous style – including new gestures, different timings, and even new ways of balancing – gave rise to the experience of ‘flow’ on more than one occasion, perhaps because our mindset had not yet been coloured by excessive self-consciousness.
These early, ‘pre-detail’ renditions were inspired by a fairly general impression of the Czech Quartet’s conventions. We enthusiastically adopted elements of their expressivity, including rhythmic lengthening and clipping, as well as frequent sliding between notes. But it was not only technical inaccuracy that betrayed the naïveté of this phase: our playing lacked their sense of tension, and with it, any real sense of narrative coherence. (This is the best term I can conjure for this blend of embodied feeling states and analytical/structural communication!) When ‘released’ to individual expressive freedom, we missed the Czech Quartet’s ability to avoid emphases in certain (‘de-accented’) places in a phrase. For us, adopting a disposition that emphasised individual imagination often resulted in a dense patchwork of successive ‘down’ emphases. Our playing may have been effective as individuals, but as a whole, it had a relentless character than we never encountered in the original performances.
This failure was productive, however, because our diagnosis opened the door to fine details of ensemble that had barely registered in previous listening. In particular, it became clear that we would need to learn how to ‘carry’ patterns of emphases forward as a collective without the progression of expressive gestures becoming excessively fragmented. This goal is entwined with what we would now call ‘hypermetrical structure’; but it seems unlikely, for both historical and creative reasons, that the original musicians thought in such analytical terms. We felt that it may have resembled an embodied, collectively negotiated ‘feel’ for the moments that required linear continuity, against those that we felt as offering points of arrival or repose. In other words, this sensitivity was associated with motion, rather than theoretical descriptions of ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ bars.
