Discoveries
Inside the Czech Quartet, 1928
In this project the Florian Ensemble attempted to understand an unfamiliar attitude to musical togetherness from the distant past. This blog is your in-depth guide to what we discovered!
In a process that would challenge the very foundations of our musical upbringing, we aimed to assimilate these musicians’ remarkable style of making music together. That sense of connection is our own passion, so trying to develop a ‘radically historical’ model of that sensation was an incredibly rewarding experience. The project required us to rethink all sorts of things, from our attitudes to notation, to instrumental technique, and ultimately to our ears and musical judgement(s).
If you listen to the example below, It immediately stands out that the Czech Quartet musicians did not experience ensemble in the same way that modern players (or listeners) do. But their playing is so beautifully crafted, so passionate, and so subtle, that it makes no sense to argue that modern styles of chamber music performance are ‘better’. They were simply working with radically different assumptions. So, our aim was to try and find out what made these players ‘tick’ when playing together, but not always ‘together’. What sorts of conventions, relationships, and priorities could give rise to music-making like this?
We worked in detail on just four movements: three by Antonin Dvořák and one by Joseph Suk (who was also the ensemble’s second violinist).
If you are interested to read more about the context for our work, you can access the full text of Chris’s PhD thesis here. As well as explaining these practical findings about one historical group, it looks at the philosophical and cultural implications of adopting such a different attitude to ensemble.
The blog itself will walk you through our discoveries, one by one. It’s recommended that you start from #1, as they build on each other in a way that shadows our gradually increasing understanding. The subtitle of each post will tell you which piece each is referring to, and the original recording and full score is always given at the top for help with orientation. Some posts will also include more detailed audio and score examples.
We hope you enjoy exploring this fascinating material with us!
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Various musicians have experimented with the strikingly unfamiliar performance styles heard on early recordings. Sometimes this has been with the intention of making (almost) exact copies: Sigurd Slåttebrekk and Tony Harrison’s fascinating work from 2008 is a great example, which involved painstaking amounts of detailed listening, experimentation and technological wizardry. Our intention here was subtly different to theirs, partly for practical reasons, and partly for philosophical ones. We wanted to probe the dynamics of ensemble, and for this we felt that exact replication—typically involving lots of editing in post-production—would not be so interesting. We preferred a slightly looser process that acknowledged the vast distance between our musical upbringing on the one hand, and that of our historical subjects on the other.
Our method was relatively simple, and was mainly grounded in a lot of listening. We tried hard not to get bogged down in labelling, or an approach that replaced the subtle dynamics of experience with a bunch of static ‘objects’ or ‘devices’ that were ‘applied’ to the scores. We discussed all sorts of things verbally, of course; but we were primarily interested in what it felt like to make music ‘together’ in this startlingly pre-modern way. This approach made it easier to grasp the subtleties of the Czech Quartet’s style—and to understand why capturing them was so difficult. Incidentally, it yielded ways of describing musical performance that are richly metaphorical, thus providing yet mroe evidence of music’s ‘lifelike’ qualities, and ability to model the dynamics of human experience.
The insights set out below only scratch the surface of what we discovered in (only!) 12 hours of sessions. We had been familiar with these recordings for quite a few years, but made a conscious choice to confine this detailed archaeological process to a short, intense burst. Our efforts to embody this alien manner of playing meant we had to verbalise many things that normally go beneath the radar: aspects of performance that never usually need saying out loud because they are assimilated into the very foundations of a musician’s creative imagination. Sometimes the recorded results are quite rough, as you’ll hear. But it seemed much more interesting, in terms of finding things out, not to present a sanitized version, but actually to communicate the content of the process in all of its vulnerability.
For all these reasons, the posts will often grapple with aspects of the performer’s experience that are not easily captured by the normal 'perspective' of discussions about classical music. Our disposition very rarely intersected with claims about the (alleged) characteristics of musical works. And we found that generalisations, abstractions, lists of ‘valid’ practices, or other black-and-white distinctions, were actively unhelpful. By grounding our approach in embodied experience, we were able to bypass some of those familiar contentions, and start to explore very different kinds of insight.
The idea of going 'beyond abstraction' ultimately proved to be the crux of the whole project. It leads in some radical and rewarding directions, and many of these implications have yet to be explored. One of the most central is about the ideology of historicism in performance (usually referred to as 'HIP'). It is surely worth asking how far evidence of early recorded style, like that of the the Czech Quartet, has been treated in classical music’s court of opinion? Does that familiar historical-ethical grounding for critical response even have a coherent basis, given that this kind of evidence has been so roundly ignored?
In the face of all sorts of competing claims for the territory of ‘how nineteenth century music ought to go’, then, we have taken a very different route. We do not propose that this research should lead anybody to police performance on the basis of the evidence. What we discovered here suggests something broader and more interesting: that almost every layer of classical music culture incentivises an attitude that, when one looks more closely, is essentially upside-down. The verbal trappings of classical culture persuade us to start ‘looking at’ music from the wrong end of the telescope, because it believes that the abstract ‘work’ is more real, more solid, more reliable, than musical experience. This makes sense up to a point. But if you look at it in enough detail it starts to fall apart.
Historical evidence does not need to be a stick with which to beat performers. It can act as a stimulus not just to recovery of some sanctified, imaginary, 'original', but towards entirely different ways of thinking about music. Our project aimed to undermine the disembodied, abstract disposition towards musical objects that has been conventional since the 1800s. In the process, we hope to show how nonsensical it is to pose (and enforce) limits to creativity on that basis. Making these detailed insights available is a way of raising awareness of just how wide the possibilities are. Armed with that realisation, it is much easier to recognise the ideological limits that are both a brake on, and a misunderstanding of, the contribution that performers make to the meaning of music.
Original Czech Quartet recordings
Florian Experiments
#8: Transcending instincts vs. retaining ownership of intention
Copying early recordings implies a certain antagonism towards one’s contemporary instincts: that these are ideally barriers to be overcome, or (often bad) habits to be resisted. There is an element of paradox here, however. For excessive repudiation of such instincts – perhaps in favour of a more detached model, inhering in the application of ‘stylistic features’ – may divorce one’s music-making from the kinds of creative utterances that are genuinely felt and experienced.
In undertaking this work, we hoped to learn how to feel, think and relate to one another in terms of a different paradigm, and especially to reorient our judgement on the basis of that alternative imaginative universe.
#7: Ensemble tensions encompass ‘whole’ dispositions
We often felt that Hoffmann’s instincts were towards a greater steadiness than his more impetuous colleagues. Such general inclinations – akin to an individual’s ‘groove’ – contribute a great deal to the uniqueness of ensemble interaction, but they are never independent or deterministic ‘features’ or ‘attributes’.
#6: ‘In the background but never passive’
An example of #5 is the way in which Czech Quartet first violinist Karel Hoffmann seemed to be resistant to a truly ‘bravura’ disposition. Shapes, intentions and expressive gestures are projected with unusual strength, and are manifestly ‘outward’ in character; but we never had the sense that he was playing ‘at’ either his colleagues or his audience. Even more significant, in terms of ensemble, was the ability to continue contributing imaginatively, even while stepping away from the musical foreground. This can be contrasted with a passivity that gives others nothing to play ‘against’.
#5: Listening for ‘personality’
We were keen that some of the more colloquial content of our process should not be overly diluted in the retrospective account, especially in cases where such thinking was key to our understanding. For instance, listening for the people ‘behind’ the notes offered a useful heuristic through which to get a more intimate sense of the Czech Quartet’s internal dynamics.
#4: Mapping ‘felt logic’ onto historical expressivity
When combined with listening, the process described in #3 helped us to re-orient our expressive gestures around a more physical impression of particular intervals and harmonies. Could our experience of that ‘felt logic’ be brought somewhere close to the Czech Quartet’s manner? The role of judgement was crucial here, for we were keen to go beyond simply ‘thinking in the right categories’, and actually develop the capacity to evaluate our playing according to plausibly similar priorities.
#3: Rehearsing without concrete decisions
It was relatively straightforward for us to undermine the de facto association of synchronisation with ‘togetherness’, especially after extensive listening to the Czech Quartet. But it was a very different proposition to achieve this effectively as a group, and in a way that approximated the distinctive manner of the early recorded style. We needed to develop some techniques that would help us to develop this very unusual sensitivity.
#2: Reading notation
We felt that the Czech Quartet habitually treated expression markings as invitations: as though they were investing such moments with ‘more’ of whatever shape or gesture might already have been imagined in response to the notes, and especially their intervallic relationships. This is a disposition that sees surrounding context as fundamental, not additional; and as fluid, not static.
#1: Introduction to tone
We began our experiment with Josef Suk’s Meditation Op.35. This piece presented a rich blend of songful and gestural material through which to explore a our hypothesis of a link between the character of the Czech Quartet’s ensemble and the way they used the bow. Throughout our experiment, the bow functioned as a crux: it was the central ‘point’ at which even the blandest of technical descriptions would shade into the qualitative and the metaphorical. Bowing presents a subtle, always-changing continuum, and so we suspected we would need to dig into this idea — and, moreover, to get beyond static descriptive categories — in order to understand what was going on in this very different kind of chamber music playing.