#26: ‘It doesn’t need to be with you, but you need to know that I have it’
Section 2: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
Learning to play ‘together’ in this way meant severing the link between awareness of another’s figure, and the intention to synchronise those figures in time. Consider the energising viola gesture at the beginning of the Vivace section (b.88-95): following a semiquaver after the other instruments, the Czech Quartet’s violist plays this pair of notes as a vocal swoop, and certainly not as a ‘tight’ rhythmic reactionto the first beat of his colleagues. There is no sense that it is intended to fit smoothly into the rest of the ensemble: it is not a polite accompanimental colouring, but is more destabilising. In spite of this characterisation, we found that the other three instruments needed to interact with that eccentric gesture – if not exactly to ‘go with it’. This was grounded in mutual intention and relation, however, rather than temporal synchronisation (or the related imperative to project structural clarity). The two experimental takes included here give an indication of how finely this was balanced, in terms of motion; they capture some of the original, but seem to lack an important dimension of poise.
Playing that was asynchronous but always aware – and thus able to anticipate and account for others – always had a very different experiential quality from playing that was asynchronous for reasons of uninterest or selfinvolvement. These evaluations were unmistakable from within the group. It goes without saying, however, that while they might result in measurable differences in performance parameters, the quality of those differences as experience cannot be reduced to those values. We found that when synchronisation no longer regulated our ensemble interaction in a straightforward way, this sensitivity – and the fine-grained, quasi-social distinctions with which it is associated – came more clearly into focus.
