#36: Weave (I)
Section 5: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
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, but it was crucial that each player continued to hold the whole ensemble sound in attention. As we gained more familiarity with the Czech Quartet’s repertoire of expressive patterns, we did not need to ‘try’ so hard to come apart in timing, because adopting this specific mode of interaction meant that we were better able to commit to the flow of each player’s gestures. More familiarity with this unusual mixture of collective awareness and individual intensity meant that asynchronous timing could be left to emerge from ‘betweenness’, and never risk the sense of those isolated moments being superimposed. This was not inconsistent with attempting to copy the original quite precisely, but we thought it important that we retain the potentiality associated with allowing each player always to be able to characterise their material independently — and with conviction.
Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, and Helen M. Prior. 2014. 'Heuristics for Expressive Performance.' in Dorottya Fabian, Renee Timmers and Emery Schubert (eds.), Expressiveness in Music Performance: Empirical Approaches Across Styles and Cultures, 34–57. (Oxford University Press)
