#30: Local shaping and ‘groove’ in accompaniment
Section 3: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, ii: Lento
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. The impression was that this gesture was sometimes significantly ‘clipped’ (b.1-10 in viola; b.11-18 in violin 2).
This effect is difficult for a modern player to grasp, probably because of the placement of the initial acceleration. Rushing a figure at an early stage in a bar or phrase generally feels much more alien than doing so at a later point in such a unit, because it feels like an ‘authentic’ increase in the basic tempo, which yields anxiety about getting ahead of the collective pulse. (I hardly need to spell out how this feeling might relate to the concern for the ‘proper’ maintenance of timing synchronisation). When synchronisation is one’s normative assumption, it is not that this kind of ‘clipping’ never happens, but that it is almost always associated with recovery. In our own style, in other words, such an inflection is almost always reactive, and so generally happens ‘late’. (Contemporary ensemble paradigms depend on the idea that capricious nuances will rarely, if ever, risk being read as subversive of the basic pulse of the group as a whole). The Czech Quartet’s viola player usually pays back this time – though not always. (As we will see in more detail later, these local nuances of unequal timing are directly related to larger-scale tempo changes). In any case, that did not make this relational ‘re-wiring’ any easier for us to capture, because the sensation of that timing imbalance is related to the whole context, and not to the (more abstract) ‘aggregate’ of the rhythm over the whole bar.
That such complex inflections were taking place in an ostensibly ‘accompanying’ part also made them more marked for us, than would have been the case for them. (We were more used to adopting a certain ‘flexible neutrality’ in such a role). It also took time to reconcile this destabilising flexibility with allowing the music to breathe and flow on a larger scale. That rhythmic detail, not yet fully internalised, tended to give the music a halting quality, and we sometimes had difficulty in committing to the progression of phrases as a whole, rather than as successive modules. In retrospect, we felt this problem was directly related to the unusual fluidity with which their leadership roles shifted from moment to moment: whatever was happening, it was never a simple case of the melody acting as leader, and the other parts as followers.
