#19: Committing to progression of ideas

Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a

In the first phase, we had radically changed our attitude to synchronisation but had not yet embarked on a more explicit process of archaeology, and so we soon began to struggle with committing to expressive intention. It was not such a problem to adopt different responses to the notation as individuals, for greater lengthening of emphasised notes, more extravagant projection of shapes, and so on, was comparatively intuitive. Much more problematic was our latent inclination to adjust to others. The desire to be influenced — specifically towards the ‘safety’ of synchronisation — was especially interesting for the way it compromised our ability to follow gestures through to their conclusion. We would often set out on a path/trajectory, fully intending to shape it in a certain way, only to quickly ‘revert’ to the patterns of colleagues. We were unfamiliar with the mental state that enabled the Czech Quartet always to commit to the full progression of an individual’s imaginative idea, yet while continuing to listen and respond to one another. Despite that awareness, they were far less inclined than us to ‘embed’ those contributions within a collective, generalised timing profile, and retained more of a sense of linear ‘streaming’ in tandem with those ongoing relationships.

We felt that individual shaping instincts would need to be automated more comprehensively in the body, and ideally to cease to be deliberate, or a focus of explicit, ‘left hemisphere’ attention. The significance of that hierarchy was self-evident in ‘our own’ style — indeed it is analogous to the disposition towards one’s instrument described in Chapter 4 of the thesis. To approximate the subtleties of the Czech Quartet’s main mode(s) of interaction, we needed to recalibrate that awareness according to a radically different set of priorities, judgements, and conventions.