#38: Playing more ‘structurally’ generated closer copies

Section 6: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, ii: Lento

One of the most interesting of our experimental approaches in the Lento involved adopting a more deliberately ‘structural’ mindset, even while retaining the freedom in timing and expressivity we had developed in the previous session. Rather than thinking of ourselves as playing ‘moment to moment’, then, we adapted our attention to be more conventionally anticipatory: we tried to ‘see’ the shape of larger structures, and perhaps even the whole piece, unfold before we created them. Strangely, while the expressive qualities of our previous takes wore their debt to the Czech Quartet’s individual gestures on their sleeve, in listening back we felt that this more ‘structural’ take sounded closer to their playing in some important respects. This judgement applied both on a small and large scale.

This may be further evidence that familiar terms like ‘structural’, ‘rhetorical’, or ‘moment-to-moment’ are useful as retrospective categorisations, but their ‘resolution’ is not sufficiently fine-grained to capture salient distinctions when directed ‘back onto’ performance itself. In Chapter 5 of the thesis (p.102-128) we saw how the accelerandi in the C and C’ sections of the Lento suggest that these players were indeed sensitive to the progress of larger-scale shapes, even if this was not theorised in a ‘structural’ way. The really significant difference, as we experienced it, was that these shapes never unfold in a schematic, ‘top down’ manner. This may be connected to a more intrinsically continuous conception of musical time: we increasingly felt that they could not have been thinking of their expressivity in terms of ‘manipulations’ of a pre-existing, regular baseline, but that everything they did was built from a timing paradigm that was already intrinsically fluid.