#8: Transcending instincts vs. retaining ownership of intention
Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
Copying early recordings implies a certain antagonism towards one’s contemporary instincts: that these are ideally barriers to be overcome, or (often bad) habits to be resisted. There is an element of paradox here, however. For excessive repudiation of such instincts – perhaps in favour of a more detached model, inhering in the application of ‘stylistic features’ – may divorce one’s music-making from the kinds of creative utterances that are genuinely felt and experienced.
In undertaking this work, we hoped to learn how to feel, think and relate to one another in terms of a different paradigm, and especially to reorient our judgement on the basis of that alternative imaginative universe. This was more important than creating ‘accurate’ copies. We were therefore relatively open to blending our own imaginative instincts ‘with’ the historical evidence, and sometimes emphasised our potential closeness to the Czech Quartet’s expressivity, as well as the (more obvious) distance. In other words, we embraced the fact that our involvement could not be ‘neutral’, and that this was a relational encounter.
This meant that we were comfortable to play or rehearse more closely to our ‘normal way’, and to treat the resulting tension as another tool of research. It certainly clarified which aspects of their style were more easily integrated with our own conventions, and which remained in the realm of ventriloquism. Over the course of the process, these distinctions became somewhat blurred, and our embodied sense of intention became less easy to distinguish from ‘theirs’. The idea of ownership of musical intention and feeling is of course a complex issue, and historical ‘collisions’ of this kind may offer a productive tool for further investigations.
