#25: Rawness

Section 2: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka

Loosening the synchronisation imperative demonstrated how far many of our own technical capabilities had been grounded in that convention, and were in many ways dependent on it. The (related) sensitivities to intonation and tonal shaping, for instance, were affected by the removing the ‘safety net’ of blend and coherence that had been provided by aiming for predictable, synchronous timing. In part, this was probably because we had to pay attention to many new concerns at once, and so our priorities did not initially lie in accuracy or consistency. But attention was not the only reason: we felt that both the rhythmic idiom, and the new manner of interrelation which it demanded, removed some of that technical and systematic security almost ‘by itself’. This gave us new-found respect for the Czech Quartet’s accuracy. The more capricious nature of their bowing, for instance, suggested that the conventionally systematic approaches to the many challenges of string quartet intonation – usually built on agreed reference points – seemed an awkward fit for this expressive style. We felt that it would be more reliant on quick, instinctive adjustments, arranged around a rather looser – but undoubtedly well-practised – system. Importantly, we recognised that the original players would have built their collective sense of pitch in tandem with their conventions of tonal inflection and expressive timing. These would therefore have been integrated over several decades, in a manner that was obviously not available to us in a short period of intense experimentation.