#87: Perception of beats

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

By the end of the process we had much greater insight into the relationship between tonal intensity in the bow, and the feeling that the next beat ‘could’ always fall somewhere that was indistinct, distributed, and not pre-determined. It had been easy to revert to a very different, more ‘given’ concept of beat, even when one was ostensibly performing the same kinds of slides and rhythmic variations as the Czech Quartet. This shift in beat concept proved to be one of the most practical ways of overcoming modern ensemble conventions — conventions which could be surprisingly resilient, even when multifarious historical ‘devices’ were more consciously in play.

In certain situations, then, we ‘leaned in’ to this idea of tactility and resistance in the beat. The key concept was that the pulse would not just ‘be there’, ticking away consistently, but that the idea of beat itself was only ever emergent from what we do. We needed to treat it in a much more ‘right hemisphere’ manner: as if it had its own width, uncertainty, and ‘quality’ (rather than quantity). When we felt frustrated that we had not yet managed to transcend our ‘modern’ sound, that could often be associated with a feeling that beats were ‘decreed’ from above, and existed independently of our rhythmic inflections. When we felt closer to the Czech Quartet’s rhythmic feeling, the sensation was often more like we were reshaping plasticine. That kind of timing was ultimately grounded in continuum, rather than disciplined by a pre-existing sense of counting.