#85: Intermediate re-parameterisation

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

In an effort to mitigate the problem of too many concerns being held in awareness, on occasion we temporarily focused conscious attention on single dimensions of our playing. The obvious pair of candidates for such streamlining were tone and timing. And so we tried one version that deliberately directed attention towards ‘when we play, not so much how…’ This intermediate tactic emerged organically out of rehearsal conversation, rather than being a pre-planned exercise.

It offered a chance to prioritise looking for an inner logic in timing — the way the trajectories rose and fell in tempo only — and in a sense taking a brief holiday from other stylistic parameters, such that we could pay closer attention to rhythmic relationships between the voices. It was not meant to undermine the importance of tonal and instrumental details, but simply to allow us to witness the same notes with more of the freedom and awareness to which one has access when playing in a ‘native’ style.

The impact of these two parallel experiments was probably more keenly felt than it was heard, but it was useful calibration, first, of our perception of tonal and emotional intensity, and second, of the balance between ‘hold’ and ‘flow’.