Discoveries
Inside the Czech Quartet, 1928
In this project the Florian Ensemble attempted to understand an unfamiliar attitude to musical togetherness from the distant past. This blog is your in-depth guide to what we discovered!
In a process that would challenge the very foundations of our musical upbringing, we aimed to assimilate these musicians’ remarkable style of making music together. That sense of connection is our own passion, so trying to develop a ‘radically historical’ model of that sensation was an incredibly rewarding experience. The project required us to rethink all sorts of things, from our attitudes to notation, to instrumental technique, and ultimately to our ears and musical judgement(s).
If you listen to the example below, It immediately stands out that the Czech Quartet musicians did not experience ensemble in the same way that modern players (or listeners) do. But their playing is so beautifully crafted, so passionate, and so subtle, that it makes no sense to argue that modern styles of chamber music performance are ‘better’. They were simply working with radically different assumptions. So, our aim was to try and find out what made these players ‘tick’ when playing together, but not always ‘together’. What sorts of conventions, relationships, and priorities could give rise to music-making like this?
We worked in detail on just four movements: three by Antonin Dvořák and one by Joseph Suk (who was also the ensemble’s second violinist).
If you are interested to read more about the context for our work, you can access the full text of Chris’s PhD thesis here. As well as explaining these practical findings about one historical group, it looks at the philosophical and cultural implications of adopting such a different attitude to ensemble.
The blog itself will walk you through our discoveries, one by one. It’s recommended that you start from #1, as they build on each other in a way that shadows our gradually increasing understanding. The subtitle of each post will tell you which piece each is referring to, and the original recording and full score is always given at the top for help with orientation. Some posts will also include more detailed audio and score examples.
We hope you enjoy exploring this fascinating material with us!
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Various musicians have experimented with the strikingly unfamiliar performance styles heard on early recordings. Sometimes this has been with the intention of making (almost) exact copies: Sigurd Slåttebrekk and Tony Harrison’s fascinating work from 2008 is a great example, which involved painstaking amounts of detailed listening, experimentation and technological wizardry. Our intention here was subtly different to theirs, partly for practical reasons, and partly for philosophical ones. We wanted to probe the dynamics of ensemble, and for this we felt that exact replication—typically involving lots of editing in post-production—would not be so interesting. We preferred a slightly looser process that acknowledged the vast distance between our musical upbringing on the one hand, and that of our historical subjects on the other.
Our method was relatively simple, and was mainly grounded in a lot of listening. We tried hard not to get bogged down in labelling, or an approach that replaced the subtle dynamics of experience with a bunch of static ‘objects’ or ‘devices’ that were ‘applied’ to the scores. We discussed all sorts of things verbally, of course; but we were primarily interested in what it felt like to make music ‘together’ in this startlingly pre-modern way. This approach made it easier to grasp the subtleties of the Czech Quartet’s style—and to understand why capturing them was so difficult. Incidentally, it yielded ways of describing musical performance that are richly metaphorical, thus providing yet mroe evidence of music’s ‘lifelike’ qualities, and ability to model the dynamics of human experience.
The insights set out below only scratch the surface of what we discovered in (only!) 12 hours of sessions. We had been familiar with these recordings for quite a few years, but made a conscious choice to confine this detailed archaeological process to a short, intense burst. Our efforts to embody this alien manner of playing meant we had to verbalise many things that normally go beneath the radar: aspects of performance that never usually need saying out loud because they are assimilated into the very foundations of a musician’s creative imagination. Sometimes the recorded results are quite rough, as you’ll hear. But it seemed much more interesting, in terms of finding things out, not to present a sanitized version, but actually to communicate the content of the process in all of its vulnerability.
For all these reasons, the posts will often grapple with aspects of the performer’s experience that are not easily captured by the normal 'perspective' of discussions about classical music. Our disposition very rarely intersected with claims about the (alleged) characteristics of musical works. And we found that generalisations, abstractions, lists of ‘valid’ practices, or other black-and-white distinctions, were actively unhelpful. By grounding our approach in embodied experience, we were able to bypass some of those familiar contentions, and start to explore very different kinds of insight.
The idea of going 'beyond abstraction' ultimately proved to be the crux of the whole project. It leads in some radical and rewarding directions, and many of these implications have yet to be explored. One of the most central is about the ideology of historicism in performance (usually referred to as 'HIP'). It is surely worth asking how far evidence of early recorded style, like that of the the Czech Quartet, has been treated in classical music’s court of opinion? Does that familiar historical-ethical grounding for critical response even have a coherent basis, given that this kind of evidence has been so roundly ignored?
In the face of all sorts of competing claims for the territory of ‘how nineteenth century music ought to go’, then, we have taken a very different route. We do not propose that this research should lead anybody to police performance on the basis of the evidence. What we discovered here suggests something broader and more interesting: that almost every layer of classical music culture incentivises an attitude that, when one looks more closely, is essentially upside-down. The verbal trappings of classical culture persuade us to start ‘looking at’ music from the wrong end of the telescope, because it believes that the abstract ‘work’ is more real, more solid, more reliable, than musical experience. This makes sense up to a point. But if you look at it in enough detail it starts to fall apart.
Historical evidence does not need to be a stick with which to beat performers. It can act as a stimulus not just to recovery of some sanctified, imaginary, 'original', but towards entirely different ways of thinking about music. Our project aimed to undermine the disembodied, abstract disposition towards musical objects that has been conventional since the 1800s. In the process, we hope to show how nonsensical it is to pose (and enforce) limits to creativity on that basis. Making these detailed insights available is a way of raising awareness of just how wide the possibilities are. Armed with that realisation, it is much easier to recognise the ideological limits that are both a brake on, and a misunderstanding of, the contribution that performers make to the meaning of music.
Original Czech Quartet recordings
Florian Experiments
#18: Judgement and recording
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.
#17: Flow, inaccuracy, and hypermeter
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.
#16: Specificity and aural illusion
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.
#15: Hairpins and tempo-dynamic coupling
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…
#14: Dynamic functions indirectly
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…
#13: Gesture, joins, and ‘grammar’
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.
#12: Imaginative gestures are rarely ‘in parentheses’
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…
#11: Bowing, ‘betweenness’, and storytelling
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
#10: Tone, trajectory, and ensemble
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.
#9: Finding reasons
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.