Violin Video Lesson: Making smooth bow changes - Bill's Violin Insights

So, I remember when I first started thinking about bow changes.

I must have been around 20 and was by then studying at the Juilliard School. Yes, I was a late bloomer.

Of course, I really wanted to have a smooth bow change, but I wasn't the most physically gifted student. So it definitely wasn't happening naturally.

Because of this, I really needed to use my head to think through it to be able to find a solution that achieved this goal.

So what I was looking for in my bow changes was a kind of continuous motion, no stops.

A motion that was almost like a straight line that suddenly went in the other direction.

No stopping, just a change of direction.

So to begin, I first needed to look at and try to analyze what I was doing.

What I noticed was that I sped my bow up before making any change of direction.

I really don't know why I was doing this. I guess it was to try to mask the change.

But doing it this way altered the color of the sound and this went against what I was looking for, which was the same sound throughout my bow change.

So obviously, this was not the right solution.

Something that I'd heard about was using a circular kind of bow like a figure eight. But when I tried this, it only granulated the sound.

What I mean by that is it sounded sort of like using a noise filter on an image in Photoshop.

Doing it like this sort of hid the change, but hiding it was not what I was looking for.

So I thought a bit deeper and it occurred to me that perhaps I was simply too rigid, too tight.

But as I looked deeper at what I was doing, I realized that in fact I was using muscles to make or should I say force the change in direction to happen.

It occurred to me that perhaps this was at the origin of the tension I was trying to get rid of and was contributing to my bow changes not being smooth.

But after trying to loosen up and not force things, I still hadn't moved myself any closer to my goal.

So it was while exploring different positions of my hand to the bow when I noticed that if I didn't break my wrist, my index finger moved on the metal winding of the bow. So when I got to the frog on an up bow, for example, my hand was already going in the direction of a down bow.

This meant that there was no stop or accelerated motion when I changed directions because though my bow was moving in an up bow direction, my hand and arm were slowly going the other way, preparing for the bow change that would eventually occur.

Here, let me try to be clearer. My hand was moving downward with my index finger moving on the winding and my bow continued in the other direction until the downward motion caused the bow to move downward as well. Because of this, there was no noticeable change in sound as the bow simply went in the other direction, just like the line did that I mentioned before.

So no need to change the speed or use less pressure or change the point of contact. The bow just went the other way.

I did, however, notice that one had to be very careful when focusing on this gesture.

I had to be very careful to not allow the gesture to be artificially created.

So to avoid this, it meant that I had to throw my forearm and hand from the elbow.

This allowed the wrist and especially the fingers to remain relaxed.

To help my students understand what that felt like, I used an example of throwing a baseball or any ball over my shoulder.

I would have them roll up a sheet of paper into the shape of a ball and then have them throw it over their left shoulder.

This, I will tell them, is what an up bow should feel like.

As they were doing this, I would ask them to stop at various points to see the different hand shapes that had been developed.

When doing this, the focal point becomes the position of the index on the silver or metal whining.

Curiously, I remembered looking in Mr. Galamian's book, The Principles of Violin Playing and Teaching.

I noticed a similarity between the pictures of the right hand in the middle, frog, and tip of the bow.

They looked a bit like what happens when you throw from the elbow, as I am suggesting.

I guess there's a lot of truth to the saying, what has been will be again.

What has been done will be done again.

There is nothing new under the sun.

So I hope this video gives a clearer look into what I believe is behind the making of a smooth bow change.

But you know what? I would be very curious to know what you think about this solution.

I mean, everyone is different. So there are no right or wrong paths.

It just boils down to choosing the path that leads you to where you wish to go.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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