Books › Modern Violin-playing, 1920 › scan 69
Scan 69
Modern Violin-playing, 1920
18 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1shoulder. If the power is transmitted from the shoulder to the bow, the certain result is inflexibility of elbow, wrist, and fingers.
3Pressure from the shoulder, then, is undesirable and dangerous. The shoulder-muscles, however, have an office to fulfil. But it is an office that is quite normal, and incapable of causing cramp, inflexibility, or fatigue. This function is what may be called the "backward-push" the function of seeing that, when pressure is exerted on or with the bow, it takes effect in the desired direction.
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7Fig. 15
9Here some explanation is necessary. But, with the help of Fig. 15, the explanation can be made very short.
11In Fig. 15 we have a jack and two blocks of unequal weight. Work the jack and, whichever block you may hope to move, it will be the 90 lb. block that you will move, because pressure always takes the easiest outlet. If A and B were equal in weight, they would be moved equally. Note this important point: The exercise of pressure in the most direct and most efficient manner demands that the body, from which the means of pressure operates, should have a power of resistance greater than the force applied. (This last long sentence is worth re-reading twice or thrice.)
13So far for the wrong ways of using the bow. Let us now say, in one sentence, that the art of tone-production lies solely in adjusting the contact between the hair and the string, as the bow is drawn, and not in exerting pressure with it.
15The correct method is to hold the bow as though it were part of the hand, and to exercise leverage from the wrist with the whole bow. This leverage must not be upon the bow as an instrument separate from the hand. But it must be applied so that the hair forms the desired degree of contact with the string, and so that the plane of pressure is kept parallel to the plane of movement.
17This ideal method of tone-production is illustrated in Fig. 16, an illustration which is so simple that it may be left to the student's con-
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