#9: Finding reasons
Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
In these early stages we used the technique described in #3 to ‘scout’ harmonically dense passages slowly, freely, but intensely. This was partly an aid to accuracy and familiarity, but it also allowed us to experience ‘betweenness’ in the relationships of individual players, as well as tones.
This approach was motivated by reflections on early efforts in which we tried to jump ‘directly’ into the less synchronised ensemble paradigm. Those attempts seemed to miss something vital about how the Czech Quartet were experiencing the music’s potentialities of resistance, and we quickly found that imagining our own playing consciously in terms of ‘relaxing the synchronisation imperative’ was far too negative a disposition to yield effective results. In its place, we would need to build an embodied, implicit basis for expressive intent, but which remained implicitly ‘open’, and would not easily be stifled by detail that was inflexible to the point of paralysis. Slowly and collectively negotiating harmonies gave us a way of accessing ‘reasons’ for expressiveness that felt much more intrinsic, because they were always grounded in that (very physical) ‘betweenness’.
The idea of ‘having a reason’, no matter how implicit, was crucial to the broad disposition we adopted in recalibrating our understanding of ensemble. In some ways a focus on ‘underlying’ motivations can seem to lead inexorably to the model of ‘expressive devices’, because understanding horizons for their ‘use’ is clearly a useful way of conceptualising performance, at least retrospectively. (No researcher has ever claimed that those horizons are irrelevant, in invoking ‘devices’). But we found that emphasising justifications of one ‘decision’ in favour of another usually leads down ‘re-presentational’ paths: to analysis, to systems, and to limits. That ‘pull’ seemed not to correlate with the evidence we were attempting to understand. This is why we adopted an approach to ‘expressive intent’ that was built from a very different type of logic: something much more embodied and implicit, in which the idea of ‘using’ something barely featured at all.
