Discoveries
Inside the Czech Quartet, 1928
In this project the Florian Ensemble attempted to understand a way of playing from the distant past.
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.
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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.