Having become familiar with the idea of ‘tactile beats’, the next stage was to see it is as a capacity, and not as a blanket disposition. We eventually considered this to be one of two possible poles, for in other situations we found we needed the reliability and consistency afforded by a more ‘given’ beat concept. We imagined the latter state as ‘being the wheel’: in this mode, one lets the beat ‘tick along’, not necessarily always completely metronomically, but with the groove reminiscent of a rhythm section. It is a much cleaner sensation than the ‘plasticine’ concept discussed in previous posts: more straightforward, and perhaps more brittle. We found that ensemble roles could then be grounded in this newly-available spectrum of dispositions towards time.

By the end of the process we had much greater insight into the relationship between tonal intensity in the bow, and the feeling that the next beat ‘could’ always fall somewhere that was indistinct, distributed, and not pre-determined. It had been easy to revert to a very different, more ‘given’ concept of beat, even when one was ostensibly performing the same kinds of slides and rhythmic variations as the Czech Quartet. This shift in beat concept proved to be one of the most practical ways of overcoming modern ensemble conventions — conventions which could be surprisingly resilient, even when multifarious historical ‘devices’ were more consciously in play.

An important question that has been lurking throughout these posts is whether it is possible for modern players to embody these early recorded sounds fully enough that genuinely felt emotion can start to take the place of self-conscious experimentation (with performance style ‘features’). How far could we keep hold of this unfamiliar manner while also trying to recast it as emergent from ‘real’ feelings of our own? Was it possible to channel C.P.E. Bach’s notion of the performer ‘letting themselves be moved’ by the music, even in an idiom that was so unusual to us?