#61: ‘Not dropping the thread of a thought’
Section 7: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
The metaphor of storytelling was often indispensable for replicating specifics of performance, because it allowed us to capture more integrated details than any attempt to ‘apply’ generalised concepts. We had the vivid sense that in in b.21-23, for instance, the first violinist “never drops the thread of that thought”. This slightly oblique metaphor embraces the fact that the musician constantly juggles difference and change, yet sometimes needs to connect potentially diffuse moments into flowing sequences. This is very difficult to achieve when particular details become the explicit focus of attention. The idea of a ‘field of options’ was sometimes useful here; but this image implies discrete choices (or even checkboxes) in a way that does not capture some crucial dimensions of that ‘flow’, or the space ‘between’ particular decisions.
A narrative sensibility, by contrast, is always entwined with a performer’s habitual gestures, and ‘feel’ for the motion of the music. As elsewhere, we identified a characteristically suspended quality to Hoffmann’s bowing here: the sound is rarely allowed to settle, but continues to ‘spin’. An important aspect of this effect is the unusual manner of ‘phrasing off’ within slurs (as in #60 above). In some cases, the ‘from here’ emphasis on the beginning of a group is generated by lengthening the first note, but the contact in the bow remains comparatively strong through the pair. In many cases the Czech players clip slurs in a more extreme way, but sometimes they sustain the contact all the way through the group. These gestures are so specific that they are probably most accurately described through the lens of characterisation: in other words, through analogy with other aspects of experience.
There is a special place in their style for lifted gestures which nonetheless act as a continuation. These can be strung together, which gives the effect of suspension. (It is like keeping a balloon in the air by occasionally tapping it from below). This concept is subtly different to most codified ‘HIP’ conventions for lifting between figures, which are more likely to emphasise breaks over continuities. Such details are perfectly suited to oral — even ‘experiential’ — transmission, but are almost in principle elusive to writing. (Indeed the clunkiness of my explanation, by comparison with the example below, makes this point by itself).
The ability to ‘carry’ phrases in this manner while also taking in detail ‘on the way’ was one of the most challenging aspects of the process. Momentum-generating gestures seem to have allowed the Czech players to compensate for their occasionally extravagant ‘weightiness’. Their style thus involves an intuitive sense of ‘spring-back’: a balancing impulse that is never confined to a single ‘parameter’ – such as tempo – but which resembles a longer-term sensitivity to fine-grained feeling states (e.g. simplicity vs. complexity; weight vs. flight). The metaphor of the storyteller is probably closer to this, then, than measured parameters, however ‘interlocking’ they are thought to be.
