The end of the Lento’s A’ section (b.16-19) presented an especially complex moment of ensemble interaction. We initially grappled with the Czech Quartet’s timing here by breaking it down into four independent strands, with each player establishing their counterpart’s precise rhythmic ‘modifications’, with help from Sonic Visualiser (and other reference points, such as a metronome). We were able to determine, for instance, that the violist plays the first three notes in b.17 extremely late, the final note early, and the next bar more simply. But this method quickly encountered hard limits…

Determining the fingering patterns used by the Czech players was sometimes very intuitive and straightforward, and sometimes almost impossible. More than the fingerings themselves, we were interested in the reason we often found them hard to discern: their remarkably sophisticated ability to ‘cover’ shifts between positions. Because sliding between notes is more prevalent in early recordings than in contemporary playing, it is tempting to pay disproportionate attention to how early recorded musicians ‘used’ portamento, and especially the extent to which they sustained the bow during these glissandi. But this ‘observer bias’ easily draws attention away from their ability to take out shifts and slides when covering distances that are melodically de-emphasised…

We were often struck by the viola player’s ability to govern the shape of the whole via his accompanying material, and to lead a listener through the music in the process. Sometimes he projects a 1+1+2 structure: first, and most obviously, by the separating or joining of notes*;but also, more interestingly, through local variations in tempo…

It has come up in previous posts that developing the ability to resist the impulse towards synchronisation was a key component of the ‘re-learning’ process. This was more complicated than simply embracing individuality and independence. Ensemble players frequently telegraph shape, grammar, intention, and so on to colleagues, and they do so in a number of different ways. We found that embracing asynchrony in principle did nothing to dampen this requirement: in fact, we needed to continue projecting intentions more than ever…

The ‘emotional-pictorial’ qualities of the Czech Quartet’s playing are vividly illustrated by the variation in their characterisation of similar-looking musical material. The apparently unswerving viola part of the Lento presents a superb example of this disposition, and our attempts to copy emphasised still further the impulse towards constant change in the personae embodied in each moment. The metaphor of the viola ‘as pivot’ seems to have been as central to their understanding of this score as it was to ours, but the curious specifics of the expressive style posed difficulties for understanding their leader-follower dynamics.

The opening of this movement was one of many examples demonstrating how the bow functioned as a crucial — and embodied — locus of imaginative intention. Adopting this attitude has an obvious impact on vibrato; but we did not feel this meant considering it ornamental (in the manner suggested by most HIP writing). That ‘additional’ model felt too abstracted from feeling, and insufficiently integrated within the continuous unfolding of the tone as a whole. This is not inconsistent with the idea that the Czech Quartet’s search for expressive specificity was initially conceived in the bow, such that everything else emerged from that nexus of imagination and physicality. This was just one of the ways in which we adopted attitudes that would build in some resistance to parametric division a priori.

The common grouping of the two inner parts in this movement meant that we sometimes treated them as a single instrument: as a team, rather in the manner of a rhythm section, although with the viola usually acting as the main pivot.
This clean, abstract designation of roles misses the fact that the pairs are never passively linked together, for they also retain a vital flexibility to push against one another…

In revisiting the accompanying material discussed in #29 and #30, we were able to identify some further nuances. The viola player adopted a stroke which we approximated as ‘fragile yet solid’: playing quite near the middle of the bow, we had to try hard to avoid giving the end of each note a ‘bananashaped’ envelope. Once again, this meant going unusually ‘close to the edge’ in terms of retaining a functional balance of contact point and bow speed. As we saw back in #1, these players’ basic mode seems to have been significantly ‘in the string’, but with the option to lift.

Another aspect of this particular recording which we had difficulty in capturing was their distinctive tonal-emotional fragility. This presents some practical challenges and some methodological ones. Such sounds lie at the point where feeling meets the physicality of tone production: these ‘breaks’ cannot be executed intentionally, and certainly not self-consciously. They are often the most vocal, most emotionally intense utterances of all, and their indeterminacy is an intrinsic feature both of the means of its production, and of the effect.

Capturing their attitude towards the Lento required us to be much more disciplined than we had anticipated from listening. The familiar linguistic tropes for describing these players’ expressivity — ‘use’ of portamento, tempo modification etc. — were sometimes misleading in practice…

From this point the idea of ‘weaving’ became especially useful for appreciating how gestures could be passed and interrelated, but in a way that operated independently of any enforced ‘interpretive’ similarity. (We were also increasingly aware of the integrated quality of recurring metaphors: we barely spoke of ‘just’ timing, but more often of holding, announcing, spinning, weeping, or rolling (see Leech-Wilkinson and Prior 2014)). Like most of our verbal explanations, this concept eschewed decision-making...

In briefly revisiting the Meditation, we had considerably more success in approximating the quality of the Czech Quartet’s ‘asynchrony’, but this improvement, importantly, was not remotely a product of more detailed verbal discussion. Returning to this piece after the Vivace of Op.96 had heightened our sensitivity to their different modes of interaction, and this example felt radically different from the ‘playful’ untogetherness of the inner parts in #31, #32 and #33…

Adopting a fuller, more highly ‘spun’ sound helped us to increase the density of ‘content’ we were able to find within melodic intervals: a greater range of overtones opened up a richer range of consonants and vowels in the grammar of the music. This is related to the idea of balancing up, insofar as we tried to retain some of this feeling even when becoming less present, individually, within the texture…

A further implication of #32 is that a string player’s timing variation is always integrated with precisely how the bow is ‘allowed’ to behave. For instance, the unevenness generated by using an intrinsically unstable region of the bow, which then has to be controlled, has very little in common with ‘uneven’ playing that involves different kinds of stroke. In this case, the expressive energy of the unevenness seemed to have very little to do with cerebral ‘intention’: it was almost literally ‘playing out’ on the turf of physicality.

The inner parts are not consistently synchronised in the opening paragraph of this movement, despite what looks like an obvious ‘binding’ in the notation. One should see this in the context of their embracing physical instability in the bow (#31), which may have been a strategy for creating extra energy: it gives the impression of acceleration, but without actually getting faster. In terms of ensemble, it is also significant that the two players perform this stroke in exactly the same way, but not always at the same time. In this kind of ‘togetherness’, then, the players’ creative impulses are operating intensely collectively – to the extent that the two are almost ‘fused’ in their manner – and yet this could always be quite independent, in principle, from strict ‘between-player synchronisation’.

At the opening of the Op.96 Finale (b.1-32) the middle parts play the energetic, locomotive-like figure in what is by modern standards a subtly unusual way. They did not seem remotely concerned with what we called ‘orchestral’ priorities, in that they did not aim for any ‘sheen’ in the sound, and seemed actively resistant to generating ‘solidity’ in their timing. (By contrast, our impression of the usual process of setting out on such a ‘finale texture’ was that it could resemble ‘starting up the orchestral resonating machine’). Instead, the physicality of their bowing here felt to us to be consciously designed to work against discipline, rather than to enable more control. Could they have set themselves a challenge by making the bowstroke more difficult to accomplish than was strictly necessary?

We were quickly able to isolate some details in the Czech Quartet’s treatment of the Lento’s repertoire of ‘accompanying’ figures. The viola player in particular seemed inclined to increase in speed in the first half of a bar, and to ‘recover’ that time in the second half; indeed this was one of the things which we had found destabilising in #28. We also found that this give-and-take motion was is never only a matter of speed, but is entwined with change in the physicality of the tone: from an initial sense of containment (i.e. tension), into a more ‘released’ sound later in the bar or phrase….

This movement demanded close attention to the basic idea of ‘accompanying’, and to nuances within its amalgamation of social and musical functions. One might take the view that a subsidiary role – designated on the basis of the material ‘itself’ – equates to a responsibility to lay down a disciplined, organised, even ‘structural’ canvas on which melodic fantasy can unfold with freedom. But this is not necessarily inconsistent with the idea that these voices can take a great deal of control of the music in a less overt manner, by shaping the underlying landscape on which the ‘foreground action’ unfolds…