#73: Asynchrony as ‘unmarked’

Section 8: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, iv. Vivace, ma non troppo

In #31, #32 and #33 we encountered accompanying bowstrokes that seem designed to invoke instability in timing and tone (e.g. b.25-29). The embrace of individual indeterminacy is significant for the copying process more generally, in that ‘planning to come apart here’ is a different kind of ‘strategy’ to that which likely generated the original performance. In the intervening time we generated many more insights into the potential modes of interaction between players.

We have already seen in previous posts how asynchronies, particularly in accompanying textures, were probably less ‘marked’ for the Czech Quartet than they seem to us in retrospect. This is surely true of the opening paragraph of the Vivace, where the sense of motion/energy is reminiscent of a ratchet, as the inner parts attempt to outdo each other for characterisation and momentum, albeit with their ‘two-way valve’ always hard at work. In other situations, the players’ gestures are integrated in a way that is far from independent, yet is distributed in time (as described in Chapter 4 of the thesis). There is no single recipe, then, for their asynchronous ‘strategies’ — if that word is even meaningful. We increasingly felt that the Czech Quartet were working within a very ‘open’, relational concept, and which was complex in ways that will remain opaque to categorisation. That is the heart of the hemisphere metaphor’s practical value to performance researchers who are so often forced to shoehorn our understanding of music — including alternative or obsolete approaches — into coarser-grained, inflexible ‘systems’. It also helps to contextualise the understandable focus on synchronisation within ensemble research.