#49: Style as options
Section 6: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, ii: Lento
With greater familiarity with their shaping of the Lento, we felt that their ensemble concept was critically dependent on each player ‘actively’ communicating their emotional state in each moment. As we saw earlier (in #19 and #36), a line needed to commit to its own expressive logic, and to see through its implications; but alongside this, each player’s attention was also distributed among the group.
Our viola player noted that this sensation is a result of years of rehearsal: a player always has a sense of an available ‘field of options’ open to them as individuals, and a parallel sense of that ‘field’ for their colleagues. This implicit understanding effectively streamlines the ensemble’s responsiveness in particular situations.*
This was available to us when playing in our more familiar manner — indeed it is practically a definition of style, that it presents an array of plausible options for how the next moment might go. It was interesting, then, that a take in which we aimed to ‘just commit to the imagination, while listening and responding to each other as we normally would’ immediately gave our playing a noticeably more modern ‘feel’.
*Such options are generally intuitive and embodied, and not explicit or linguistic; indeed this may be related to the finding that professional musicians talk significantly less than students (Ginsborg and King 2012).
Ginsborg, Jane, and Elaine King. 2012. 'Rehearsal Talk: Familiarity and Expertise in Singer-Pianist Duos', Musicae Scientiae, 16.2: 148-67 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864911435733>
