There are about as many different varieties of sick sound as there are childhood diseases; let’s consult the doctor about just two of the most common maladies. She’s diagnosed them as “stressed-out sound” and “anti-sostenuto-itis”.

STRESSED TO KILL

Symptoms of stressed-out sound include crunches; over-accenting with slow, diffuse release of accents; and a lack of resonance—you don’t get the entire series of overtones ringing through the pitch when you play an open string, for instance.

One of the main causes of stressed-out sound and of anti-sostenutoitis, which we’ll treat in a moment, is what Talbott calls a “breakdown in the springs of the bow arm.” 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.

“There’s something locked in the shoulder,” Talbott explains, “or the shoulder blade is immobile, or the elbow is too high or too low which locks the arm, or the bow-hand fingers are too stiff or too loose. The springs have been tightened, and there’s not a free, elastic bow arm. This is the number-one cause of all these sound ailments.”

In stressed-out sound, this tightness causes you to press the bow down rather than let it rest on the string. Talbott suggests the first thing you do is to check your bow arm all the way down. “Is the shoulder high or locked?” she asks. “Is the elbow high in relation to the wrist? Is the wrist locked? Are the fingers coming down straight onto the bow instead of being curved? Are the fingers not equally spaced? If the first finger is separated from the rest, it’s doing most of the pressing, which isn’t good.”

Check your posture. “If the violin or viola is not parallel to the floor, or close to it, you have to work against gravity, which ties into pushing the bow into the string.”

Work on this problem by doing some body-movement exercises to benefit your posture. “When we talk about the breakdown of the springs,” Talbott says, “often the students are really tight and there’s no freedom of motion in their trunk or legs. So swing the violin back and forth, twist from the hips, bend your knees a little bit to get physically loosened up. This will get that bow-arm spring system working again.”

That’s just the beginning of the treatment for this ailment. “Collé and martelé bow strokes are excellent medication for stressed-out sound and for anti-sostenuto-itis,” says Talbott. “Start with martelé, which is a stop, set, and release stroke. Start the stroke, stop, set the bow into the string, then release it so that you get an accent but with a resonant release. Focus on the quality of the release to make sure you get the resonance and ring. Release it quickly. Oftentimes, when you crunch your sound it’s because you can’t release quickly enough.

“Collé is a stroke where you use only your fingers and a slight bit of wrist motion. It’s a consonant stroke. Start the bow, set it on the string, and then release it by alternately straightening (down bow) and curling (up bow) your fingers. This helps get the fingers more flexible, but you also need a stable bow hold. So this balances the hand and frees the springs of the fingers and works on the weight transfer that has to happen.

“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.”

WHISTLING WHILE YOU WORK

Our 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.”