#35: Not talking was effective problem-solving

Section 5: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a

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. In this material we found we needed to embody a more intense, intentional stance, which may itself be a corollary of the greater sense of physical (and interpersonal) resistance discussed in #34. Another dimension of this greater expressive purpose, however, was that the unequal rhythmic inflection could still never behave as an explicit alteration, for it felt as if it was ‘built in’ to their sense of musical motion at a more fundamental level. Awareness of that de-emphasised quality was a direct result of the copying process, for in many cases we were had not consciously registered those nuances in the original performance; they had been experienced as much more emergent, even understated.