#1: Introduction to tone
Section 1: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
We began our experiment with Josef Suk’s Meditation Op.35. This piece presented a rich blend of songful and gestural material through which to explore a our central hypothesis of a link between the specific character of the Czech Quartet’s ensemble and the way they used the bow. Throughout our experiment, the bow functioned as a crux: it was the central ‘point’ at which even the blandest of technical descriptions would shade into the qualitative and the metaphorical. Bowing presents a subtle, always-changing continuum, and so we suspected we would need to dig into this idea — and, moreover, to get beyond static descriptive categories — in order to understand what was going on in this very different kind of chamber music playing.
Very early on, we felt that the Czech Quartet adopted a tone in the opening material that had significantly more ‘core’ than our contemporary instincts would have suggested. (This idea of ‘core’ will come up quite a lot here: it is our useful metaphor for the sense of tactile resistance in the contact between the bow and the string, and a related concern for generating width in the overtone spectrum). These musicians rarely allowed the bow to ‘float’ across the strings, even when the mood was calm and the dynamic understated. Playing relatively close to the bridge, with a rather slow bow speed, ensures that the string’s resonances never lose their ‘spin’: the tone is always engaged, even if it is quiet. The feeling one gets is of greater goal-directedness.
While this quality was broadly familiar to us, these earlier performers managed to retain a feathery quality alongside this spun intensity. Nor did their playing have any of the thinness of sound — associated with high overtones — to which this bowing technique can sometimes give rise. The advantage of this kind of contact is that it makes the tone more immediately responsive and manipulable, but it requires a rather contained disposition. Flexibility in the point at which the bow meets the string, in tandem with subtly responsive variation in bow speed, is crucial in preventing the sound from ‘tightening’ when the intensity increases. This stroke is very finely balanced, and can initially feel like performing a high wire act.
From b.1-19 their manner of connecting notes seemed inseparable from this commitment to living ‘in the string’. The option to release was always present, but our expressive baseline in this material needed to be associated with that resistant, connected core. More importantly, it was already clear that their relative timing would only be intelligible if we treated it as intrinsically connected to their means of generating and relaxing tonal intensity, and the specific resonances they were able to find in the bow’s contact with the string.
