In stark contrast to the relative ease with which we assimilated a radically different ensemble concept in the Op.51 Dumka, the Lento of Op.96 proved fascinatingly problematic. In one striking response to a full take, our group’s first violinist was left feeling “really horrible” about the experience. This was not because asynchrony was permitted, but because uncertain boundaries in our collective negotiation of timing meant that she experienced a loss of mutual trust. In trying too consciously to surmount our own inclinations to synchronise, we had gone too far in the direction of interpersonal avoidance…

Although we had intentionally limited the range of the pieces chosen for the experiment to a narrow historical and geographical band, the variations in their character were still sufficient to reveal some fascinating differences in how we responded to the Czech Quartet’s performances. For example, their playing in the Dumka seemed closer to our own imaginative instincts than it did in other cases: we felt as though many of these gestural ‘types’ were not so far from those upon which we might have alighted ourselves…

Learning to play ‘together’ in this way meant severing the link between awareness of another’s figure, and the intention to synchronise those figures in time. Consider the energising viola gesture at the beginning of the Vivace section (b.88-95): following a semiquaver after the other instruments, the Czech Quartet’s violist plays this pair of notes as a vocal swoop, and certainly not as a ‘tight’ rhythmic reactionto the first beat of his colleagues. There is no sense that it is intended to fit smoothly into the rest of the ensemble…

Loosening the synchronisation imperative demonstrated how far many of our own technical capabilities had been grounded in that convention, and were in many ways dependent on it. The (related) sensitivities to intonation and tonal shaping, for instance, were affected by the removing the ‘safety net’ of blend and coherence that had been provided by aiming for predictable, synchronous timing. In part, this was probably because we had to pay attention to many new concerns at once, and so our priorities did not initially lie in accuracy or consistency. But attention was not the only reason…

In refining our work on b.14-25 we felt a need to ‘roll’ more through gestures, even whole phrases. Creating momentum or ‘spin’ from the first moment became increasingly important, for it was this which would generate and then carry their keen sense of continuity, ‘following through’ its logic…

We often found it difficult to establish the fingering choices of the Czech players from listening alone. A good example was the viola player’s opening answer, and in particular the finger used on the note following the harmonic G. The ‘lift’ of the harmonic means that next finger can be jumped to, rather than connected…

The passage b.14-25 exemplified a curiously disciplined type of swing, which we felt was oriented towards the organisation and projection of ‘content’ rather than flippant playfulness. This feeling of rigour, associated with ‘showing’ the angles and directions of harmonic progressions, was relatively familiar to us, and meant that in this case we were repurposing existing conventions more than entirely relearning. (Sometimes we also experienced a ‘domino effect’ of reactions to each other’s subtle nuances of tone and timing during the span of a phrase). On the other hand, embracing the potential for ‘asynchrony’ opened up new horizons for achieving this…

The Dumka’s frequent handovers of melodic material presented an opportunity to explore the way in which the Czech players elided one instrument’s phrase ends into the beginnings of another. (Indeed they sometimes seek these joins even when it is rhythmically incorrect, technically speaking, to do so). This attitude, and the role of anticipation in achieving it, is easy to hear in the opening melodic exchanges between first violin and viola, but that willingness characterised many other moments…

In the first phase, we had radically changed our attitude to synchronisation but had not yet embarked on a more explicit process of archaeology, and so we soon began to struggle with committing to expressive intention. It was not such a problem to adopt different responses to the notation as individuals, for greater lengthening of emphasised notes, more extravagant projection of shapes, and so on, was comparatively intuitive. Much more problematic was our latent inclination to adjust to others. The desire to be influenced – specifically towards the ‘safety’ of synchronisation – was especially interesting for the way it compromised our ability to follow gestures through to their conclusion.

This report is necessarily entangled with the multi-layered and intangible matter of judgement. The recording process plays a significant role in this, for there are inevitably differences between a musician’s perception of their own playing, and their response upon hearing the same take played back. This tension, which has often been reported in modern musicians’ experiences of recording sessions, is made still more complex by introducing historical recordings – not least because those sources are not neutral in this respect either (Blier-Carruthers 2020). The boundaries of judgement, then, are intrinsically blurry.

Overall, the trajectory of our process had a similar shape to that of ‘normal’ rehearsing. Early stages are characterised by unfocused but imaginative openness; more ‘closed’, detailed work refines the details more sharply; and the process eventually culminates in a synthesis which allows one to work within a field of imaginative ‘options’ that are both unique and usefully delimited. Transitions between these phases are always experienced vividly, but working with an unfamiliar style heightened that awareness, even in a short experimental period.

An example of #15 is the markings in the violins b.33-35, which the Czech Quartet execute in a fashion that might have been predicted by our theoretical ‘Brahmsian hairpin’. The phrase does indeed seem subtly to ‘lead’ towards the middle in both volume and tempo. But reducing such a moment to its ability to ‘enact a general formula’ is surely the opposite of explanation, and the attempt to copy revealed dimensions of specificity that extended well beyond this basic category.

While our own training had largely implored us to resist letting the tempo get faster when it gets louder, the Czech Quartet seem to have been comfortable with this coupling. This idea is familiar in historical performance circles, and as in the famous case of the ‘Brahmsian hairpin’, a general feeling of ‘more’ seems to have been a broadly conventionalised aspect of nineteenth-century notation (Kim 2012).
In our encounter with these recordings, however, that general principle proved exceedingly low-resolution…

As with any music-making, the copying process involved an attitude towards dynamic that was frequently tangential to explicit description (i.e. anything from measured loudness (in dB) to the familiar incremental markings of p, mf, ff, and so on). We felt that the Czech Quartet regarded notated markings in an especially indirect manner, as if they were reading them as the feel of a shape or space – or even its ‘personality’ or ‘state’ – as much as its size (i.e. volume). On occasion it even seemed as though they were playing with reversing the procedural implications of the notation…

A few bars earlier, we saw how this desire to knit gestures together often took priority over the lengths of rests as notated. In b.31, they clearly imagined the rest as a join, rather than as a break: the length of the silence seemed to us to be directly connected to the quality (and the trajectory) of the preceding gesture. The silence, then, could not be ‘counted’ independently. We felt that the cello entered fractionally earlier than written, and that the first violin slightly anticipated the entry in b.39 in a similar way. Whether or not this was true in terms of measurement was beside the point: in both cases, we had to be considerably quicker on our feet than our normative feel for trajectory would have required.

In this passage the Czech Quartet’s imaginative gestures often felt ‘big’ in comparison to our own instincts. But these players also had a curious way of ‘catching’ such inflections immediately, as if less tempted to put them in parentheses by taking further time on either side. (We were more familiar with ‘saying something, having a space to think about it, and then moving on’). Allowing extra time for expressive intent to ‘tell’ is especially useful if an ensemble’s aim is to synchronise their gestures within regular phrase-shapes – indeed these two conventions may be mutually self-reinforcing. When copying, we found that although the Czech players’ imaginative contributions were frequently more ‘active’ than ours, their inclination to ‘move on’ very quickly provided significant compensation…

We were struck by the peculiar ‘thickness’ of the sound required at b.34 (beat 2), as the distinctive tone of the violin unison ‘peeled’ into separation. Similarly, we found that the intensity of the bowing in the cello and viola parts in b.36-38, far from being reduced by the hairpin, actually needed to increase, for it was the second harmony of each bar that took on the responsibility of ‘telling the story’ of those three parallel utterances

A well-known nuance of ensemble playing concerns how a musician ‘shows’ to others how the trajectory of a note is likely to unfold. A good example of this was the unison A played by both violins in b.32 of Suk’s Meditation, where a practically imperceptible change in the depth of contact from both players ‘telegraphed’ not just where the next note might happen, but where it inevitably had to fall. The player’s job, in many ways, is simply to match that projected, anticipated shape with what they actually go on to do.

In these early stages we used the technique described in #3 to ‘scout’ harmonically dense passages slowly, freely, but intensely. This was partly an aid to accuracy and familiarity, but it also allowed us to experience ‘betweenness’ in the relationships of individual players, as well as tones.