#62: Imitative entries can challenge as well as affirm

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

The passage from b.14 required us to adjust how we built up textures from sequential or imitative entries. The difference often lay in the assertiveness of the contributions: in this case, we got closer to the Czech Quartet’s rendition by playing a little stronger, individually — to the extent of being more consciously ‘attention seeking’. In contrast to a notion of ensemble that always inheres in agreement, these contributions built up the whole by challenging those that had come before.

This suggested that their sense of ensemble commitment could not have involved hard distinctions between leaders and followers: certainly they do not seem to adopt one or the other specified ‘role’ on the basis of analytical assertions. Effective ensemble in this style relies on these poles being adopted broadly simultaneously: as we saw in Part 1, they ‘reverberate’. The Czech Quartet’s interactions here were not so far away from how our group might have conceptualised this passage. But a special subtlety was that those committed, quite individualistic, characterised affirmations successively build the intensity yet while also ‘allowing for’ the next entry.

They do this by slightly reducing the intensity of the bow’s contact once their initial gesture has been established: each leaves room in the tonal blend for the next entry. But as in #6, each does not become so passive as to give their colleague nothing to ‘play against’. This, in short, is simultaneity in action: ensemble as a two-way valve.