Alexander Hawkins talks about The Convergence Quartet's time at Space

As I sit here drafting this blog, I notice that my opening gambit had originally been along the lines of ‘well, we’ve literally just finished our tour…’

…which I then had to scrub, on noticing that it was in fact Sunday 20th November, when the last date of our tour (which had begun with a wonderful 3-day residency at Dartington) was in fact precisely a week ago, on Sunday 13th November at the London Jazz Festival. This set me thinking: since my intention had been to blog the day after the tour – to strike while the reminiscing iron was hot, so to speak – where had my week gone? The answer, of course, is relatively straightforward: as any working musician will tell you, there are always periods, such as the last couple of months have represented for me, where there is so much going on, that it is next-to-impossible to carve out a waking moment for oneself, or indeed anything other than getting to and playing the next concert.

And of course this really touches on what made the Dartington experience so special for The Convergence Quartet. This was our third tour, following successful outings in 2006 and 2009. Two of us are British, living in the UK (Dominic Lash and myself); one of us Canadian, living in New York (Harris Eisenstadt); and one of us American, living in New Haven (Taylor Ho Bynum). I don’t care to count how many concerts in how many different countries we play each year in our own separate orbits, or the number of musical territories we investigate in these respective musical endeavours; and yet we still endeavour to carve out these tour periods for ourselves, to come together and explore our collective music, and take it around the country. But the logistics of life as a musician make this much easier said than done. Timetables are always tight, and the sad truth of touring is that the reality is often arrive at the airport, and disappear up the motorway straight to the first gig. Especially with international collaborative projects, it can be almost impossible to realise even those simple things which can make a group dynamic really special – spending time together without the pressure of an immediate performance, and (yes it’s mundane, but all the same) simply rehearsing together. In this context, it’s easy to see, and difficult to overstate, what makes Dartington so special.

We spent a fantastic three days in Studio 3 (eventually, that is: once we had dragged ourselves inside from walking and talking on what was a spectacular Autumn day in the stunning gardens). After finishing-off bits and pieces of the compositions we were each contributing to the group, we had some initial play-throughs, before each taking some time for private practice on any particularly tricky compositional corners. And then we were all set to go about the real business of rehearsing: investigating those areas of the performance which don’t reveal themselves on first sight; trying out any avenues which may occur, not with a view to making firm decisions about what is to happen in performance (at heart we’re improvisers, after all), but rather, with a view to multiplying the possible musical directions which we can take at any given time during a performance. And all the while, of course, developing the musical empathy which is so important in any group, but especially one such as this where real-time decision-making plays such an important part in shaping the overall performance.

The added luxury for us was a performance on the second evening: furnishing not only the opportunity to road-test and galvanise the pieces with the pressure of playing for an audience (and what a wonderful, focussed audience too!), but also to take the third day of our residency as a time to reconsider our compositions in the light of what had happened to them under performance conditions. Here are two short videos from our concert. First is a composition of mine called equals/understand – basically a slightly irreverent march (I promise: keep counting in four, and we will meet you at the end of the melody). Second is a ballad from Dominic Lash called Piano Part Two.

From all of us, an enormous thank you to the wonderful staff at Dartington for making our stay so fun and productive…please enjoy!