#83: Breathing and (un)familiarity

Section 9: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a

Building our expressivity around the breath made a vast difference to how close we were able to get to the Czech Quartet’s feel for ensemble, if not necessarily to the specific performance they recorded. When playing in this way, we had noticed that we were generally more likely to hold onto our breathing, and to become physically tighter. This may be related to our attention being focused on executing novel — and thus comparatively pre-planned, or consciously considered — gestures. Simply noticing this tendency was enough to give our playing a more synthesised feeling; not in the sense of being more ‘structural’, but in the way our individual gestures had greater continuity, and were more contextual and responsive.

Imagining rhythmic nuance as closely related to the breath was also very helpful in finding more of that elusive specificity in our inégale. This meant overcoming the temptation to count or measure what one was doing too explicitly; or even to think about how we were doing it at all. The obvious problem in doing this was that was one risked reversion to a more habituated (i.e. modern) expressive style; on the other hand, this arguably told us something important about the sorts of things that are hardest to capture when copying performance styles from early recordings.

A special challenge of experimenting with historical ensemble is that to play individually in a style that is distant from one’s own – however long this has been practiced – already requires a great deal of conscious attention. In practice, maintaining a normal amount of sensitivity towards others at the same time is simply not possible. Clearly, this situation does not reflect the original circumstances. When this is factored in alongside the slightly chaotic impression of some early recorded styles, the result is a ratcheting effect, whereby interactions become dominated by individualistic (and interventionist) gestures that are rarely counterbalanced by mutual awareness. (We saw an example of this in #73). It is possible that this could form an effective basis for performance in its own right, but it is not really an adequate explanation of the Czech Quartet’s ensemble paradigm.