Bow (music)

A bow consists of a specially shaped stick with other material forming a ribbon stretched between its ends, which is used to stroke the string and create sound.

Materials such as mother of pearl or abalone shell are often used on the slide that covers the mortise, as well as in round decorative "eyes" inlaid on the side surfaces.

Rosin, or colophony, a hard, sticky substance made from resin (sometimes mixed with wax), is regularly applied to the bow hair to increase friction.

Slightly different bows, varying in weight and length, are used for the violin, viola, cello, and double bass.

The characteristic long, sustained, and singing sound produced by the violin, viola, violoncello, and double bass is due to the drawing of the bow against their strings.

When the player pulls the bow across the strings (such that the frog moves away from the instrument), it is called a down-bow; pushing the bow so the frog moves toward the instrument is an up-bow (the directions "down" and "up" are literally descriptive for violins and violas and are employed in analogous fashion[further explanation needed] for the cello and double bass).

The orientation appropriate to each instrument family permits the stronger wrist muscles (flexors) to reinforce the strong beat.

String players control their tone quality by touching the bow to the strings at varying distances from the bridge, emphasizing the higher harmonics by playing sul ponticello ("on the bridge"), or reducing them, and so emphasizing the fundamental frequency, by playing sul tasto ("on the fingerboard").

Pictorial and sculptural evidence from early Egyptian, Indian, Hellenic, and Anatolian civilizations indicate that plucked stringed instruments existed long before the technique of bowing developed.

[7] Eric Halfpenny, writing in the 1988 Encyclopædia Britannica, says, "bowing can be traced as far back as the Islamic civilization of the 10th century ... it seems likely that the principle of bowing originated among the nomadic horse riding cultures of Central Asia, whence it spread quickly through Islam and the East, so that by 1000 it had almost simultaneously reached China, Java, North Africa, the Near East and Balkans, and Europe.

"[8] Halfpenny notes that in many Eurasian languages the word for "bridge" etymologically means "horse," and that the Chinese regarded their own bowed instruments (huqin) as having originated with the "barbarians" of Central Asia.

The Central Asian theory is endorsed by Werner Bachmann, writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Bachmann notes evidence from a 10th-century Central Asian wall painting for bowed instruments in what is now the city of Kurbanshaid in Tajikistan.

Pernambuco wood, which was imported into France to make textile dye, was found by the early French bow masters to have just the right combination of strength, resiliency, weight, and beauty.

A lighter, clearer sound is produced, and quick notes are cleanly articulated without the hair leaving the string.

A truly great example of such a bow, described by David Boyden,[14] is part of the Ansley Salz Collection at the University of California at Berkeley.

[15] Fine makers of these Transitional models were Duchaîne, La Fleur, Meauchand, Tourte père, and Edward Dodd.

The underlying reasons for the change from the old Corelli-Tartini model to the Cramer and, finally, to the Tourte were naturally related to musical demands on the part of composers and violinists.

Undoubtedly the emphasis on cantabile, especially the long drawn out and evenly sustained phrase, required a generally longer bow and also a somewhat wider ribbon of hair.

[16] These new bows were ideal to fill the new, very large concert halls with sound and worked great with the late classical and the new romantic repertoire.

[17] The Chinese yazheng, yaqin, Korean ajaeng and Ryukyu teisō (nihongo: 提箏, hiragana: ていそう) zither are generally played by "bowing" with a rosined stick, which creates friction against the strings without any horsehair.

In the 20th century, violinists and cellists used a so-called Curved Bow[19] to enable polyphonic sounds on string instruments.

Renowned string instrumentalists such as Emil Telmányi, Rudolf Gaehler, Tossy Spivakovsky, Lorin Maazel, Michael Bach, Gustav Rivinius, Janos Starker and Mstislav Rostropovich, as well as composers such as John Cage, Dieter Schnebel, Walter Zimmermann, Hans Zender and Michael Bach Bachtischa have dealt with this innovation in string instrument playing.

James McKean recommends that the owner "loosen the hair completely, then bring it back just a single turn of the button."