#33: Character of ‘asynchrony’
Section 4: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, iv. Vivace, ma non troppo
A further implication of the previous post #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. (Imposing a functionally unnecessary technical obstacle is a pleasing exhibition of this playfulness!) Further evidence for this may lie in the fact that we found this patch of music extraordinarily difficult to replicate. It is a banal truism that a musician has to inhabit a style fully before one is able to be truly playful in that context, and for the result also to ‘make sense’. Our early versions were caught in a middle ground: attempting to copy too closely inevitably meant we missed the playful quality, but deliberately aiming to be ‘free’ always missed their stylistic specificity, because our gestures were not sufficiently habituated.
This challenge came into especially sharp relief in the most asynchronous moments. The two inner parts come gloriously out of phase in b.25, only to find each other again in the following seconds. When listening, this seems like a large phase difference; but at speed, the timing differential between the players is delicately balanced. Consciously attempting to play out of time with one another was wildly unsuccessful, musically; and, paradoxically, on occasion our attempts resulted in very close synchronisation between the voices. It is probably significant that for us, active gestures of manipulation were required to come apart – it would not generally happen by itself. A softer notion of play therefore eluded us. Moreover, because such ‘applied’ variations in timing are generally grounded in a player’s native expressivity, when we attempted more actively to decouple, our patterns sometimes resembled one another extremely closely. Paradoically, then, in resorting to similarly habituated manipulations of timing, that sometimes meant that synchronisation was maintained, even as we were consciously attempting to undermine it.
