#43: Bow ‘first’ – and implications for vibrato
Section 6: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, ii: Lento
The opening of this movement was one of many examples demonstrating how the bow functioned as a crucial — and, importantly, embodied — locus of imaginative intention. Adopting this attitude has an obvious impact on vibrato but we did not feel this meant considering it ornamental, in the manner suggested by most HIP writing. That ‘additional’ model felt too abstracted from feeling, and insufficiently integrated within the continuous unfolding of the tone as a whole. This is not inconsistent with the idea that the Czech Quartet’s search for expressive specificity was initially conceived in the bow, such that everything else emerged from that nexus of imagination and physicality. This was just one of the ways in which we adopted attitudes that would build in some resistance to parametric division a priori.
Like a string’s resonances, the oscillations of vibrato are intrinsically continuous and in flux. It is easy to forget that these oscillations in pitch are also intertwined with the character of the resonances set in motion by the bow. The bow lends itself better to discussion through metaphor, because as the ‘origin’ of the tone it is so obviously gestural and qualitative: clearly, the bow cannot be conceptualised as ‘additive’ or two dimensional. But neither does vibrato function like this, in practice. Discussions of vibrato in scholarship have frequently been limited by their polemical undertones, and reduced to the evidence for ‘with’ or ‘without’. But it does not take a great deal of listening to realise that such questions would surely have made no sense to the musicians of the Czech Quartet. These players’ priorities clearly lay in more integrated, embodied realms: of feeling, shape, and intensity. They must have been invested in conventions, but banal rules and simplistic binaries would likely have been anathema.
Retrospectively, then, one can assert that vibrato is an important ‘component’ of sound. But from the musician’s point of view such oscillations are never truly separable from tone production, the specificity of sound as a whole, and especially its capacity to ‘behave’ like other things – including feeling states. This is the heart of the difference between how vibrato appears, from outside, to be ‘used’ or ‘applied’ by a string player, compared with to how the musician relates to each moment of performance.
