#67: Weave (II)
Section 7: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
In #36 we encountered the ability to conceptualise, or even to ‘see’ the weave of contrapuntal textures. This is a familiar trope of string quartet ideology, and throughout the process we found that we needed to repurpose (rather than dismantle) this form of awareness, in order to account for the Czech Quartet’s conventional modes of interaction. As I implied earlier, the key to this was often a ‘stretched’ linearity: the way in which each player ‘lives’ the distance between each interval. This sensation was constantly in flux: some intervals seemed to need really ‘playing’, but others could simply be allowed to ‘be there’. The dramatization of these distances is witnessed with singular clarity at the point of contact between bow and string.
These embodied patterns of tension and release in the tone are experienced in constant tension with the ‘vertical’ (i.e. harmonic) dimensions of a particular texture. We were most successful in capturing their ensemble interaction – and especially the character of their ‘asynchrony’ – when those ‘discrepancies’ between the voices resulted from true commitment to this melodic ‘betweenness’ in the trajectories of the voices. I am unconvinced, therefore, that the Czech Quartet’s ensemble is captured by a monolithic term like ‘dislocation’ – or even ‘asynchrony’. In this model of interaction, asynchronous onsets are manifestly not a result of mutual disinterest, but are witnessed with the sort of sensitivity to nuance that is reminiscent of more everyday interpersonal relationships.
A central challenge in understanding their ensemble, then, was the fact that such relations can never be explicitly choreographed in the way that ‘dislocation’ implies. That is to say, such a named concept is simply incapable of sufficiently fine calibration, nor of truly contextual sensitivity. Instead, the core of this expressive mode can be more usefully grounded in attention, and the way in which a player commits to their own sense of melodic/linear tension – and, relatedly, characterisation – while always seeing that in the context of a constantly shifting harmonic ‘betweenness’. Each line requires both ‘logic’ and openness simultaneously: collectively negotiated conventions, options, and habits – but not decisions. We felt that to ‘weave’ in this way depended on one’s attention being ‘locked into’ the melodic motion of each other’s parts, and being entirely captured (and captivated) by them at the same time as one offers motion, ‘angles’ and imagination in the other direction.
