#21: Dovetails
Section 2: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
The Dumka’s frequent handovers of melodic material presented an opportunity to explore the way in which the Czech players elided one instrument’s phrase ends into the beginnings of another. (Indeed they sometimes seek these joins even when it is rhythmically incorrect, technically speaking, to do so). This attitude, and the role of anticipation in achieving it, is easy to hear in the opening melodic exchanges between first violin and viola, but that willingness characterised many other moments. In general, we were struck by three things: a) that they perform such elisions quite ‘smoothly’ at a large scale, despite the frequently uneven rhythmic surface; b) they often have a curiously ‘sneaky’, de-emphasised character, certainly in relation to our own efforts; and c) such elisions (or anticipations) often meant that attention was drawn away from structural boundaries, but without undermining the sense of guiding a listener through the narrative. (The latter was especially true at cadences, or in passages of rapid or dense harmonic motion, where we felt it was very easy for our own dovetails to result only in confusion).
All of these can be related to the idea that the culmination or direction of a phrase is implicitly contained ‘within’ its first moments, as we saw in #10 and #12. But while this is a kind of trajectory, it is importantly different from a pre-ordained, arch-shaped structure, for it usually involves more twists and turns along the way. It made sense to locate such localised ‘twists’ in the potential qualities of the melodic intervals. (Sometimes we also experienced a ‘domino effect’ of reactions to each other’s subtle nuances of tone and timing during the span of a phrase). Again, we had to be sensitive to the distinction between systematic description of their conventions, and more fragile metaphors, patterns and heuristics. We generally found that the latter offered the best tools for diagnosing their approach in specific situations — but precisely because of this fragility, it took us a long time to acquire a more intuitive sense of how they would handle transitions between moments or phrases.
