"IT'S THE BOW, STUPID"
(with apologies to Pres. Clinton)
The above mentioned motto is probably the main mantra of my teaching and in my opinion should be the mantra for all teachers. I tell my students that the music comes from the bow. While this may sound like an abstraction more appropriate for a college level master class, students must learn that clear tone production requires that the bow be closer to the bridge than to the fingerboard, that the bow have traction rather than a gliding quality, that the weight of the bow is insufficient to produce a real tone, and that control of bow speed is essential. Above all, the physics of a string instrument require that the bow be drawn parallel to the bridge, otherwise the sound is fuzzy and prone to squeaks and whistles.
 | A performance of the Bach Double concerto with Fabio Santana at the Iglesia Cristo Rey in Bogota, Colombia in August of 2005.
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As any of my students will attest, I am a fanatic about the development of the bow arm. I will go as far as to say that if the bow does not produce a clean and full sound, the left hand does not matter very much.
Since a controlled slow bow speed causes some difficulty for most students, I recommend that students practice long bow exercises with a metronome, gradually increasing the number of beats per bow stroke. With the metronome set at 60, it is possible to work up to a point where the student can hold a sustained bow stroke for 20 counts. In the early part of such training, one should not expect more than 5 or 6 counts per bow.
Too many students believe that the bow will simply take care of itself and will automatically improve with time. This is a notion guaranteed to produce frustration and barriers to musical development.
While the fundamentals of tone production and the correct mechanics of bowing are prerequisites to making music rather than simply playing the notes, I find that the proper development of the bow arm to be the single most neglected aspect of string instruction. There is no excuse for a student who has been playing for four or five years not to be familiar with the basic concepts of BOW DIRECTION, and the variables of SOUNDING POINT, PRESSURE, and BOW SPEED.
Bow Grip or Bow Hold?
While the term "bow grip" is commonly used, I prefer to use the term "bow hold" because the word "grip" implies a degree of tension or force. The sad truth is that most students actually do "grip" the bow in a way that renders the right hand useless for tone production or articulation and phrasing. The focus of a typical student bow grip is simply not to drop the bow and has nothing to do with making music. While I would not present it to the student so harshly, that is the essence of the issue.
More often than not, the pinky is collapsed and rigid, and the same is true for the thumb. With such a "grip" it would be difficult for the wrist to fulfill its' proper function as the main source of the "steering mechanism" that controls bow direction. The inevitable result is an innapropriate use of the shoulder in the bow stroke, and the resulting path of the bow is an arc that slides across the string between the bridge and the fingerboard. This results in noise rather than a true tone. One can practice with this approach to bowing for five hours a day for the next twenty years, and the result will still be squeeks and whistles. The violin is subject to certain laws of physics. Determination, time, and effort, that fails to recognize how tone is actually produced, will produce only frustration and muscle tension.
When I work with a student I can demonstrate to the studen's satisfaction that certain principles of the mechanics of bow technique actually do work. The student can hear a dramatic difference; it is never a matter of doing something simply "because the teacher said so". If I am not able to demonstrate the logic and effectiveness of my instruction, then it is not very useful to the student. That does not mean that the student does not have to practice, but they are practicing with an understanding and point of focus that leads to positive results.
So When Does The Music Start?
While my thoughts on this are a work in progress and I may be adding and deleting in the coming weeks and months, the issues that strike me as overlooked are concepts of bow speed, bow division, and sounding point, in various combinations that produce satisfactory, if not beautiful phrasing. In other words, after we start teaching students how to play the violin, when do we start teaching them how to make music? Is that not the whole point of learing the violin?
Most students will have a certain default bow speed and sounding point that is rarely adjusted to the musical requirements. They either grind away with an excessively heavy right hand, or float over the string with large sweeping gestures. The results are inadvertant false accents, sound without true tone , and phrasing that is arbitrary and mostly unmusical. It often boils down to: too much bow, not enough bow, or wrong part of the bow.
This is a very complex matter that does not lend itself to simple formulas and lies at the heart of the artistry and "magic" that is associated with the highest levels of string playing. However, the complexity does not mean that the student should not be intruduced to the issue or that phrases cannot be worked on in detail with attention given to bow speed, the "attack" of the bow, and the part of the bow that lends itself to a particular sound or articulation. While a student's talent and predisposition are very important, and beyond the control of the teacher, I have seen gifted students flounder in this area because they have not been given sufficient guidance.
So to answer my rhetorical question as to when to introduce this aspect of violin studies .... I would say, as soon as possible. One cannot expect a student to become musical on some particular future birthday, when for years they have been allowed, even encouraged, to play like robots following encoded instructions. Music comes from the heart, even with all of the mechanical and technical difficulties of a string instrument. All the technical emphasis on scales and etudes must never allow the student to put violin playing in the same category as electronics or HTML programing. Even the driest Kayser etude must have tone and phrasing. Unless a student is encouraged to make an etude sound like Bach, the Bach is doomed to sound like an etude.
No teacher can make an musically insensitive student feel a phrase; but there are many frustrated string students who can hear that something is amiss but they do not understand the source of the problem or how to correct it. If pointed in the right direction, they can begin to align the sounds that they hear coming out of their instrument with their musical instincts and take their first steps in the artistic realm of string playing.
