#88: Twin modes
Section 9: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
Having become familiar with the idea of ‘tactile beats’, the next stage was to see it is as a capacity, and not as a blanket disposition. We eventually considered this to be one of two possible poles, for in other situations we found we needed the reliability and consistency afforded by a more ‘given’ beat concept. We imagined the latter state as ‘being the wheel’: in this mode, one lets the beat ‘tick along’, not necessarily always completely metronomically, but with the groove reminiscent of a rhythm section. It is a much cleaner sensation than the ‘plasticine’ concept discussed in previous posts: more straightforward, and perhaps more brittle. We found that ensemble roles could then be grounded in this newly-available spectrum of dispositions towards time.
Consider the textural contrast between b.17-19 and b.20-22, in which the lower two voices move from arco to pizzicato, leaving the violins to their understated conversational exchange. In the Czech Quartet’s performance, the lower parts seem to transform their whole concept of time – and with it, their function in the ensemble – as they switch from inégale, tactile flexibility in the bowed material (b.17 onwards), to a much more ‘wheel-like’, regular concept of beat from b.194 (beat 4). The change to pizzicato makes this change especially audible, but the really crucial dimension of this transformation is not in the technique, but in their attitude towards the beat. (In principle, the same contrasting effect is easily achieved with the bow.)
A complicating factor here is that the viola and cello embrace regularity — their disposition is not remotely ‘flighty’ — and yet they do not play at the same time. This may sound paradoxical, given that I am arguing that this ‘straighter’ mode depends on a more discrete, extrinsic beat ‘origin’. Our attempts to copy this peculiar combination suggested, first, that it was not possible to replicate this unevenly distributed pizzicato by deliberately attempting to separate them. Recall the point from #73 about asynchrony in such situations being importantly ‘unmarked’, and never the object of explicit attention (or intention). In this situation, we realised that self-conscious ‘deviations’ of timing, however small, often compromised the feeling of groove that was critical to this accompaniment. It was more effective to set down only the general principle that the lowest part would be the firmest — the most ‘extrinsic’ — in how it laid down a regular beat structure. The viola would sit inside that rhythm, but have a fraction more imaginative leeway to account for the changing harmonies in her placement of the pizzicati.
This more implicit tactic was an improvement, but we still found it difficult to capture the precise ‘feel’ of their accompaniment. But our struggles once more bred insight, because the Czech Quartet’s version increasingly resembled an early twentieth-century incarnation of something that was familiar from our own experience: of a timing pattern that is shared by two (or more) players, and which has been repeated and internalised for so long that the shape merely emerges, mutually, without any real awareness of agency. If we had been working within our own conventions here, that was precisely the feeling we would have looked for (and expected).
As we have seen throughout, one of the biggest challenges for modern players experimenting with historical style is to reconcile the impression of imaginative spontaneity with their care in handling hypermeter. (See also posts #17 and #74). The ability to ground one’s ‘active but accompanying’ role in a regular, ‘sitting-back’ rhythmic feel provides another counterbalance to the tendency for collective expressive imagination to result in too great a consciousness of individual beats and bar-lines. We found that if a more rhythmic ‘groove’ sat underneath the irregular melodic expressivity of the surface, that significantly mitigated the tendency for the collective’s imaginative disposition to saturate the texture with frequent ‘down’ impulses.* The latter is not the inevitable outcome of playing that sets out to embrace spontaneity; but in our experience, it can be a common result.
Arguing that it is better to see those improvisational qualities as ‘synthesised’ in this way does not need to undermine the impression of spontaneity one gets from early recordings. Clearly, these players had been through ‘explicit’ rehearsal processes together, and had made it to ‘the other side’. (Alternatively, following McGilchrist (2012), one might say that experience had been returned to the right hemisphere, enriched by the encounter with the left). We felt this to be the crux of the difference between playing that aims to play ‘loosely’ and imaginatively, and the performances that were captured on record in the late 1920s.
Like almost everything else I have discussed, the two ‘modes’ we extrapolated from this process should never be thought of as monolithic theories to be ‘applied’. They are intrinsically ‘whole’ states, and they can only be felt (and transmitted) in the moment of performance; and their physical, embodied dimensions are key to that flexibility. We found that there is often a greater sense of tonal relaxation — in short, a sense of ease — in the second (‘given’) mode, than in the more unpredictable first. This realisation provided another ‘way in’ to understanding the Czech Quartet’s fluctuations in intensity. It provided an alternative basis for our musical relationships, in the absence of a simpler synchronisation imperative. It brings notions of ‘affect’ and ‘shape’ into direct contact with a fluid ‘feel’ for ensemble roles; crucially, however, it does so indirectly.
This was an apt distillation of our findings overall: one ceases to think of playing either evenly or unevenly, and instead aims attention at a specific conceptualisation of time, and witnesses the music unfold in relation to it. It is a spectrum that never needs to be decreed or scripted, but instead, can remain implicit, emerging, coexisting, and freely circulating among fellow musicians.
*The similarities with ‘contrametric rubato’ are obvious (Hudson 1994), though it should also be clear why we have chosen not described this phenomenon in those terms.
Focused Examples
Hudson, Richard. 1994. Stolen Time: The History of Tempo Rubato (Clarendon Press: Oxford)
McGilchrist, Iain. 2012. The Master and His Emissary (Yale University Press: London)
