Hi!
I don't play the violin, but on Saturday my conductor of my youth orchestra let me have a play on his violin. He said that I have to totally relax my arm, but when I do that I can't bow! Just wondered if you could explain to me how you effectively bow. Bearing in mind I'm not a string player!

Josh

Well, I'm not a great string player, but my technique for cello, and for when I used to play violin was to have a fairly loose wrist, and kind of let the wrist lead. If you hold your hand in front of you, and imagine the wrist is drawing your arm along, you'll get the idea. Of course, I might be totally off beam, but that's how I do it.

There are certain parallels between walking and bowing. Try walking without bending one of your leg joints--hips, knees, ankles, even toes. If you freeze any one of these walking becomes stilted and crippled.

When you bow, you must (at some specific time in the total operation) bend all four parts of your arm--shoulder, elbow, wrist and fingers.

The comparison with walking falls apart when you add the need to hold on to a bow. You have to get past the fear of dropping the bow before everything else can work. (Imagine how hard it would be to walk if you had to grasp and hold something with your toes!)

The actual bow hold: I won't go into here except to say that the ideal arrangement allows the player to maintain just enough hold of the bow and remain loose enough to allow the wrist and fingers to do the fine tweaking of the path of the hair over the string. The engine of the main motions will be the large muscles of the back, upper arm and elbow; and the fingers and wrist will steer.

It is not uncommon for a "new" player to tense absolutely every muscle in the entire arm all the time causing "rigor mortis." What you need to do is work as little as necessary.

Gabriel Villasurda