#37: Pairs helped structure imaginative response

Section 5: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a

Rehearsing in pairs is a common convention within string quartets, and we often used it here, albeit in an unusual way. Here we were not aiming to improve accuracy, but to generate new ‘baselines’ of convention: a kind of embodied understanding of harmonic resistance which would increase the likelihood that spontaneous inflections would ‘make sense’ in context. Working in smaller groups was thus an enhancement of #3: it gave us a more detailed feel for the sorts of options that would present themselves when we played together.