#59: Homogenous bowing independent of timing synchronisation

Section 7: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka

A loosened attitude to timing synchronisation can be entirely consistent with homogeneity in matters of bowing technique and sound production. In passages where the same material is passed around the group we often found it useful to develop a shared physical basis. This does not mean playing notes, gestures or phrases in an agreed manner, but building the group’s collective priorities around a shared (bodily) disposition towards our instruments. This imaginative-physical reciprocity is also unlike a technical ‘school’, in that it never behaves like a recipe.

This idea proved very helpful for understanding the behaviour of our historical ensemble — not least because it does not depend on ‘decisions’, but goes more directly to the mysterious way in which imaginative options ‘appear’ in the mind at each moment. It was possible to calibrate those kinds of horizons as a collective, independently of specifying particular decisions, or ‘expressive manipulations’.