#44: Leader-follower dynamics
Section 6: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, ii: Lento
The ‘emotional-pictorial’ qualities of the Czech Quartet’s playing are vividly illustrated by the variation in their characterisation of similar-looking musical material. The apparently unswerving viola part of the Lento presents a superb example of this disposition, and our attempts to copy emphasised still further the impulse towards constant change in the personae embodied in each moment. The metaphor of the viola ‘as pivot’ seems to have been as central to their understanding of this score as it was to ours, but the curious specifics of the expressive style posed difficulties for understanding their leader-follower dynamics. These relationships were often opaque and unpredictable to us, perhaps because they do not follow a basic paradigm of ‘adjustment’ to a primary voice; nor do they subscribe to the broader idea that roles are extrapolated from the score, or from a quasi-analytical reading of it.
It is not that the players do not account for one another, but that the combination of a) a relaxation of the synchronisation imperative, and b) a concern for emotional-pictorial expressivity, means that their concept of leadership is regularly located somewhere other than alignment of note-onset timing.* That ‘somewhere’ is clearly elusive to codification, again because it is a product of wholeness – not just of ‘the ensemble’, but of each musician’s imaginative and embodied contribution.
As is well illustrated by that active, keenly personified viola part, we had the sense that their leader-follower roles were not determined by material as notated – at least not as a blanket rule – but were governed more by intensity of characterisation. The latter is not only transient but relational, in that the specificity of such individual characterisations always has direct implications for the behaviour (and intentions) of others. In practice, this meant that we had to think of our individual imaginative characterisations as if ‘suspended’ above the group, such that they were more distributed in ownership, as well as their effect. This often resembled ‘real-life’ social interactions; indeed this seems natural, if we assume that each utterance has to unfold in a way that is underpinned by this idea of music as a person.
*This is not to imply that research into leadership dynamics has been exclusively concerned with timing – only that this parameter has often functioned as an effective stake in the ground for probing those relationships in performance. This has, however, generally been dependent on the convention to prioritise ‘maintenance of synchronisation’. What other domains might be opened up by treating ‘leadership’ differently?
