#27: Historical styles are not evenly unfamiliar
Section 2: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
Although we had intentionally limited the range of the pieces chosen for the experiment to a narrow historical and geographical band, the variations in their character were still sufficient to reveal some fascinating differences in how we responded to the Czech Quartet’s performances. For example, their playing in the Dumka seemed closer to our own imaginative instincts than it did in other cases: we felt as though many of these gestural ‘types’ were not so far from those upon which we might have alighted ourselves. The differences, then, were more in magnitude than in kind: the trajectories of their shapes, and the places in which they rushed, anticipated, or lifted, seemed somewhat familiar to both our hands and our minds. Their ‘manipulations’ of timing were certainly more extreme, and they were obviously more accustomed to rhythmic distribution between players. But their inflections in this case seemed to be further along a path that we recognised, for our training, modern though it was, had given us ways of internalising the motions of this dancelike material which were already very unlike a baldly ‘literal’ execution of the rhythm. (These responses gestured, at least, to the intersection of so-called ‘art music’ and folk traditions; indeed this metaphor is still common in WAM performance teaching).
This was not true of our encounters with the Czech Quartet’s playing in song-like or contrapuntal material, where they felt much further away from our own conventions. Interestingly, this differential in our familiarity with their various expressive modes affected the intensity with which we experienced their ‘asynchronous’ style. That manner was far more intuitive to us in lighter, dancing gestures, than in songful or heavier ones.
Undermining a black-and-white synchronisation imperative was always going to mean extending ‘togetherness’ into a rich three-dimensional spectrum. But as will be clear from the last few paragraphs, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish between cause and effect. Our sense of these differences was often a product of variation not just of the Czech Quartet’s gestures in a particular situation, but of our familiarity with that expressive ‘type’. (For instance, we were more accustomed to early bass notes than to late ones, and so we generally experienced the former as more immediately palatable forms of ‘untogether ensemble’). Our own training and experience, then, was (and is) always entangled with the notation’s ‘affordances’. This relational quality should not be taken as a bland theoretical caveat, for we witnessed it at first hand during the experiment.
Our understanding of this spectrum of ‘togetherness’ increasingly coalesced around physicality and embodiment, one key aspect of which was the amount of contact — a sense of hold vs. lightness — experienced in the bow-string relationship. In some cases we recognised the Czech Quartet’s instincts, and may well have adopted a similar feeling in the bow ourselves; but in other cases they adopted a physicality on which we would simply never have alighted. This is further evidence for the irreducible specificity of performance style. The comfort or discomfort we felt with their approach to ensemble was so irregular (and dependent on context) that we soon had to discard any notion that it could be reduced to generally applicable rules or principles.
