#84: Description privileges singular reductions

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

Overly concrete descriptions of the Czech Quartet’s performances risked neglecting the extent to which tone (and its specific affective qualities) was always in flux — to such an extent that we found it was resistant, in practice, to singular ‘re-presentational’ descriptions. In certain places we thought we had found exactly the right kind of tension. But in such cases it was sometimes tempting to double down on that success, and to hold onto that tone for an artificially long time. In fact, we needed to let that feeling pass much more quickly when it was no longer demanded by the context, and always be ready to allow one’s sound to transform (itself) into something different in the next moment. Again, integration was the central challenge here: we often felt that the timing had been convincing, but that the tone was too static, and so the two did not coalesce.

Our experiment suggested that it is entirely possible to track one’s understanding of (a) performance style in relatively confined terms – of mood, affect, bow use, rubato, etc. – but that this is sometimes misleading, in terms of how well (or for how long) those descriptions accurately reflect the original. This applies especially when dealing with musicians whose inclinations lay in the direction of uniqueness: our descriptions of the Czech Quartet’s sound were sometimes accurate only for moments at a time. There is an obvious, even banal point here about the difficulty of expressing music in language. The more interesting implication, for me, is about the extent of performers’ sensitivity to changes in mood and feel, and the specificity and precision with which a player experiences those changing states, in spite of the impossibility of verbalisation.