Books › Modern violin-playing, 1920 › scan 66
Scan 66
Modern violin-playing, 1920
16 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 32. See the scan on archive.org.
1The bow is an elastic wand strung with horsehair, which itself has a certain elasticity. It can be manipulated in two ways. Either the stick or the hair can be made to bounce. And when one of the two bounces, the other will remain inelastic.
3The fingers hold the bow by the stick, which, we must remember, is nearly an inch above the playing-medium (the hair). The hand therefore travels in a plane that is parallel to the plane of the horsehair, but above it.
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7Fig. 12
9The importance of this fact lies in its application. When once the bow is handled as though the holding-plane coincided with the hair-plane, a diagonal line of pressure is established from the hand to the string. This is shown in Fig. 12, where A is the thumb and B the forefinger. The downward pressure is, of course, exerted by the rotation of the forearm round the thumb. And the direction of this rotation is represented by the curved arrow
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13Fig. 13
15In this way, then, a diagonal line of pressure is set up between the forefinger and the string. It may be represented, for instance, by the imaginary line connecting the two points B and C in Fig. 13. If it remained constant in its direction and force, it would have no evil results on the bow-stroke. But that, of course, is exactly what it does not remain. It is continually changing, both in its length and in its incidence to the string and to the stick—and consequently to the axis of the hand.
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