The Medici String Quartet were very much of my generation, being active from roughly 1975 to 2005 and making both début and farewell appearances at this very Hall. It seems likely that we would have heard them perform at some point, although I am unable to say when. It also seemed likely that we own some of their vinyl, but search has failed to reveal anything at all. Even more odd, their internet footprint is very modest, as if someone has been managing it down. But there is the site at reference 2, a site that plays music uninvited, with the place there described perhaps being Robertson’s response to the help he got from Dartington Hall as a child, a place which we occasionally visit ourselves. See reference 3.
The event was billed as an event from which we would learn something of what it was like to be a member of a busy string quartet, what it was like from the inside. An event to which I was attracted, having often wondered, on the one hand about what the music sounds like from the inside and, on the other, about the group dynamics of it all.
What we actually got was a not very well Robertson up on stage being prompted to give us a string of anecdotes about his life and times, which he was very good at, by a lady from the Guild. Most of the other musicians who had been in or through the quartet over the years were present – and up on stage for the second half. Some of them had come a very long way to be there. Plus various other people who had had to do with Robertson in one way or another over the years. But I think that most of the audience was drawn from the Guild, with event properly being this year’s Vera von der Heydt lecture and with Vera von der Heydt having been an exile from Nazi Germany and one of the last people to have been analysed by Jung himself. For many years, a luminary of the Jungian world in this country. Illustrated above.There were also two or three small children, presumably reflecting the difficulty of getting good baby sitters in north London.
I was surprised to find the occasion very emotional, despite knowing next to nothing about either Robertson or his quartet beforehand. While the bit of quartet life which I got to take away was the amount of squabbling, the amount of aggression and anger which are all part of the life of a successful quartet, involving as it does four able people bound up together for a very long time, both for the long hours at rehearsal and for the long years the quartet stayed together, albeit with some changes of personnel along the way. I associated to the anger and aggression which went into many of the meetings which I went to while in the world of work, anger and aggression which sometimes morphed into a good outcome.
There was an aside about viols, to the effect that while one could tune a consort of viols to match the four major voices of singers: soprano, alto, tenor and bass, a regular quartet was not like that, having two violins – and a suggestion that there was something odd about the viola. Also a suggestion that this departure from the major four was what gave us the power of the quartet as we know it. Plus some talk from the Jungians about the magic power of the number – in which connection you can ask google about mandalas.
It was striking that most of the changes of personnel of the Medici Quartet were to do with the second violin position.
I sometimes had the impression that Robertson and his Jungian interlocutor were running on parallel tracks. He was reminiscing and she was trying to put a Jungian spin on the whole business – from where I associated to Aldous Huxley’s various references to parallel tracks and ships in the night.
One of his anecdotes concerned the distortion of time at times of arousal or stress, a strong sense of time slowing down, of an awful lot of stuff being compressed into what, according to the clock, was just a few seconds. Another, that at similar moments, there were physiological correlates like the hair on the back of the neck standing up, said by some to be an evolutionary relic of the days when we were furry and puffing our fur out might have made us look bigger and so deterred a predator. There was also talk of golden moments, moments of wonder, quite rare, but which made the whole difficult business of being in a quartet worthwhile.
Two oddities. First, Robertson said that he knew that he was going to be a professional violinist from the moment when, as a young child, he first drew a bow across the strings. The Jungian take on this being that this was an archtype was emerging from the void. Second, he said that as a kinaesthetic he could not read music in the ordinary way and, partly in consequence, it used to take him a long time to learn a piece of music, rather tiresome for his colleagues. My take on this was confusion, the wikipedia story on the complaint in question not lining up very well with the anecdote. Perhaps I have remembered the wrong word. But I do think it was something like that.
All in all, a fascinating event which I was well pleased to have gone to. Needed the odd drink to wind down on the way home, even catching some débris from the Derby on the way.
Reference 1: http://www.analyticalpsychology.org/.
Reference 2: http://www.musicmindspirit.org/.
Reference 3: https://www.dartington.org/.
No comments:
Post a Comment