#71: Recovery depends on tactile beat concept

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

Their manner of ‘recovering’ time often felt unfamiliar and unpredictable, probably because it was never formulaic. We felt was that the concept of recovery must have been important to them on some level, but it was remarkably difficult to generalise about their strategies. This difficulty encouraged us to look again at how we were conceptualising timing and beat structure. Theorising about the idea of recovery sometimes gives the impression of a functionally independent (and regular) timing framework lying ‘above’ the performance, where the process of ‘paying back’ time is underpinned by a metaphorical pendulum that swings between adherence and deviance. Though appealing in theory, we found that this model did not accurately reflect the musician’s relationship to time in each moment of performance.

The Czech players’ system of ‘payback’ — insofar as it could ever be called a system — became far more intelligible once we had alighted on an understanding of ‘beat’ that was a) tactile; and b) intrinsically continuous. From this point of view, ‘the beat’ is much more like time itself: it is never a ‘given’ quantity that is ‘imposed’ or divided, but is permanently in the process of being created/destroyed. The idea of an abstract aggregate of time, by contrast, was of little practical use. The Czech Quartet were clearly sensitive to the idea of ‘payback’ on some level, but we felt their concept must have functioned ‘from below’ rather than ‘from above’.

Cultivating a greater physicality in our perception of timing involved treating every moment of holding or yielding as if it had its own feeling of contextual inertia. This meant that we were never truly counting, but allowed the spring-back (in either direction) simply to ‘occur’ with inevitability, rather than calculation. We could feel it in this way because it was never solely a matter of timing, but was now allowed to behave as an implicit, integrated response to each moment and its context. This is vital for understanding how and why ‘asynchrony’ was allowable for the Czech Quartet, and for going beyond regarding ‘it’ only as a parametric manipulation.