|
“Also, do sensitivity exercises [see below], where within one bow stroke you have to make a series of crescendos and decrescendos. I like to couple this with trying different sound factors, like creating a variety of colors on a paint palette. All these exercises pertain mainly to the bow, and how we can manipulate the speed of the bow, the weight of the bow, the sounding point, and the amount of bow hair we use. All these things can craft the sound in different ways. So pick one of the dynamic shapes in a sensitivity exercise, like a single crescendo through a bow, and then add a sound factor by manipulating the bow in some way. Do it with a metronome, so you can work on bow distribution at the same time. You can do all this on an open string, if you want.”
BOW SENSITIVITY EXERCISES

WHISTLING WHILE YOU WORKOur next patient suffers from what Talbott calls anti-sostenuto-itis. “That’s when the sound lacks focus or tonal core,” Talbott says. “It’s opposite from stressed-out sound. Here, there are large gaps between bow changes and a whistling sound in the sound production. This also involves what I call ‘hyper-portato,’ where the student puts slight pulses between slurred notes, even when they’re not called for musically. This does great damage to lyrical passages when you end up with pulsations under the sound.” One of the causes, according to Talbott: Again, your springs aren’t working. “If you’re tight in your bow hand, or super-loose in your bow hand, that locks your wrist; it’s almost like cutting your arm off at the wrist. You lose the value of having that heavy arm with two bones in it to provide the weight to help you make the sound. Imagine that every joint, from your shoulder and shoulder blade down to your fingers, is a spring, and if your springs get stiff, you’ve got trouble.
“Often the bow hand is ‘tippy’—you’re holding the bow with the tips of your fingers—and this causes the bow to skid out on the strings. Then, bad bow direction can cause problems with sustaining. The main thing I look to in terms of a cause is the lack of equal and opposite forces, the player forgetting the idea that we pull on the downbow and push on the upbow. Often, students don’t have this sense of equal and opposite forces; they just skid the bow.” The cure begins, again, with collé and martelé work. “But this time the emphasis is on the consonance of the accent,” Talbott says. “Make a sharp accent using martelé, then use several sets-and-releases per bow to get the idea of making contact with the string through all parts of the bow. Do more and more sets-and-releases per bow. This gets you engaged in the sound. “On the sounding point, there’s a straight track, like a train track, that the bow fits into for the best sound; doing several martelés emphasizes this. It’s difficult to have a crooked bow with 10 martelé sets per bow! Do a super-slow downbow and still maintain an even sound. Start with 10 seconds for a downbow, then work up to 30 or 45 seconds. You have to lock into your arm weight in order to make the sound; otherwise the bow will skid and there will be no sound. Do it with a metronome or while watching a second hand to work on bow distribution. This helps the hyper-portato problem.” Finally, Talbott says, it’s important to treat both ailments with position studies as tone exercises. She points out, “As we go up the string and play in higher positions, our sounding point changes; how much weight we need on our bow changes with the sounding point, and how much bow speed we need changes when we change the sounding point. So when you work on positions, use that as a tone exercise, too. For example, when you’re in third position or above on the G string, get the bow closer to the bridge and use more weight. When you shift back to first position, bring the bow back away from the bridge, toward the fingerboard, and use comparatively less weight.” These exercises might not cure all your ills. Talbott has identified such other maladies as “dysfunctional vibrato” and “up-bowitis and discombobulated détaché,” for instance. But in many cases, treatment comes down to paying close attention to the bow’s weight, speed, sounding point, and the amount of bow hair on the string, as well as what your nice left-hand vibrato might be hiding. You shouldn’t be stuck making just one kind of sound, good or bad. “My job,” says Talbott, “is to help students craft the sound, and discover more colors for their palette.” |