-
New light on the old bow--2
- Early Music
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 32, Number 3, August 2004
- pp. 415-426
- Article
- Additional Information
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Early Music 32.3 (2004) 415-426
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New light on the old bow—2
Robert E. Seletsky
The first part of this article appeared in the May 2004 issue.
Transitional bows and long bows
The long bow persisted until the end of the 18th century, overlapping with the transitional/classical bows that appear in increasing numbers by c.1770. Transitional bows have no set measurements; they are as various as the bows that preceded them. However, they are all designed to function in musically similar ways; they continue the logic of the long bow in further raising the head, creating so-called 'hatchet' or 'battle-axe' profiles, and, not infrequently, foreshortened and extremely high swan-bill heads; a considerable number of bows with this latter head shape are fluted as well (illus.11 c). Interestingly, one occasionally encounters in curved high-headed transitional bows built with the old convex 'hump' near the head for added flexibility in that area. In transitional bows, the sticks were heated and systematically bent inward to add spring and resistance, and to counterbalance the extended hair-to-stick distance inherent in the new head designs. In 1791 Galeazzi mentions the use of cambre in the type of bow he recommends (clearly a transitional model; he acknowledges the wide variety of bows in use):
I would want the bow either to be straight, or to be low at the frog and high at the point. This can be achieved by introducing a small amount of curve toward the point. A bow thus constructed has the same strength at the point as at the heel, which seems to me a very considerable advantage.1
Interestingly, high-headed cambred bows seem to have the opposite characteristic to Galeazzi's ideal: often his combination leads to glassiness in the upper part of the bow, while original lower-headed, largely un-cambred long bows are much more consistent from frog to point. It is almost certain that the original cambre applied to most transitional and early modern bows was far less pronounced than that which came into use later. Although, as indicated earlier, cambre can relax over time or can be deliberately augmented—most bows being subjected to the latter—it is impossible not to observe that in all 18th-century pictures of violinists with transitional bows, the sticks are straight, not incurved, at playing tension. Some are even slightly convex under tension, indicating that there was not even cambre deep enough for appropriate playing tension with the stick tightened only to appear straight (see illus.15 and 18). Typically, even today's period specialists consider bows with their modest cambre too flexible.
Pernambuco—a superior species of what makers now call 'brazilwood'—and, less often, ironwood—were generally used for these thicker concave sticks rather than snakewood: pernambuco because it is lighter, ironwood because it is less stiff. Many shortcomings of the materials could be circumvented by the inward cambre; pernambuco, previously used primarily to dye leather and as ships' ballast, was also far less expensive than snakewood. Many transitional models are shorter than the long bows, and are usually less weighty despite thicker graduations, owing to pernambuco's diminished density compared with snakewood; they frequently have narrower hair-widths, although as the century progressed, these bows were [End Page 415] designed to be longer and heavier, with wider hair channels (illus.11, 12). The bounced bow-strokes in the music of Haydn, Mozart, the Mannheim school composers and others, seem to have been responsible for the introduction of the transitional bows, which performed these effects more naturally than the long bows. It was formerly suggested that cantabile playing was the catalyst, but it is the long bows that sink smoothly into the string, hence Le Blanc's 1740 remark about 'seamless bow-changes'.
Click for larger view | Figure 11 Three screw-frog transitional bow designs, c.1775-85 : (a) battle-axe head, pernambuco stick, rounded (earlier) open-channel ivory frog and button; length 73.0 cm (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Hill Collection no.24); (b) late battle-axe/hatchet head... |