THE ANCIENT GREEKS KNEW OF FOUR ELEMENTS: earth, air, fire, water. The periodic table of elements is a lot more crowded these days, but many dancers still reduce everything to four elements of their own: weight, space, time, flow. That’s what 20th-century dance theorist Rudolf Laban emphasized in his study of movement.

These elements could apply to string playing, too. What is bowing but a dance on a wire by wood and horsehair partnered by your arm? Janine Riveire, an associate professor of music at Cal Poly Pomona, has adapted Laban’s theories to help you bow like a dancer.

As you know from chemistry, elements combine in many different ways to form various substances. Similarly, Laban’s elements—he called them factors—combine to produce many different kinds of motion. There are more than you might guess, because each of the motion factors comes in two varieties.

Weight can be either heavy or light (also called strong or weak). Space may accommodate a movement that is either direct (with a single focus) or indirect (multi-focused, like crossing from one string to another). Time, in terms of movement, means that something is either fast or slow (or sudden versus sustained). Flow can either be bound or free (a bound movement can be stopped suddenly).

As Riveire points out, “The combination of the first three factors can result in the eight basic efforts: dab, punch, flick, slash, glide, float, wring, and press. Flow then moderates these efforts, giving an overall character to a movement.

Getting confused? It’s not that complicated. “Dab,” for example, is a movement that is direct, light, and fast. “Punch” is a movement that’s direct, heavy, and fast. Change just one of the factors in the combination, and you get a different effort.

GO WITH THE FLOW

Let’s start with something simpler, the factor that gives each movement its final character: flow. “Probably the most important thing anybody at the beginning or intermediate level can be concerned with is recognizing the difference between bound and free flow,” Riveire says. “I’d say that 80 to 90 percent of the time, we want free flow in the bow arm. You have to recognize when you have tension in the shoulder, neck, or arm muscles, that will inhibit the free movement of your bow. Tension is blockage that interferes with the sound. Most beginners are very familiar with the choked sound that tells you your arm is way too tight or you’re using way too much pressure.”

The Suzuki method, Riveire notes, acknowledges that small children naturally start out with short, jerky movements—bound flow—so Book 1 gives them lots of 16th- and 8th-note rhythms, saving free- flowing legato bowings for later.

According to Riveire, “Laban believed that any skill is developed through a type of consciousness-raising, ‘a gradual refinement of the feel’ of a movement.” That ties in neatly with her own training under the method of Paul Rolland, which has you practice movement using your instrument in only a primitive way, or not using your instrument at all.

“You just practice the movement to develop the muscles and angle and flow, whether you do it with the instrument or not,” she says. Learning vibrato, for instance, can begin by pretending to shake salt on your salad with your left hand, or fanning your face, or waving goodbye to yourself.

When it comes to bowing, Riveire suggests imagining that you’re pushing open a saloon door to get your elbow to open up.

OPEN THE DOOR

And that brings us back to Laban’s eight “effort” words—dab, punch, flick, and so on. Like a direction to open a saloon door, they take descriptions of movements we’ve all done in normal life and apply them to bowing.

Here’s how to start. “Place your bow on your favorite open string,” Riveire says, “and try to move your bow in a nice straight line, real heavy, real slow. That would be a ‘press.’ That doesn’t get you a lot of lovely sound unless you’re close to the bridge. So now take that same direct, heavy movement and make it fast, and it turns into a ‘punch’—and that can be your martelé stroke. Take that direct bow and make it light and fast, and that’s the ‘dab,’ a small staccato note.

“Direct, light, and slow is a ‘glide,’ your beautiful whole bow. Take that and turn it into a string crossing, so it’s now indirect, light, and slow—it’s a ‘float,’ and you need that any time you change strings, especially for slurred string crossings.

“The ‘wring’ motion is indirect, heavy, and slow, but any movement that involves a twist has an element of wringing to it. In a full bow, especially on violin and viola, and on cello on the A string, as you do pronation toward the tip of the bow there’s a natural wring to that. Practice that movement off the instrument with the bow, and you’ll get the feeling of it.

Son Filé Exercise On any open string:

“Indirect, heavy, and fast gives you the ‘slash,’ which I think of as the beginning of the slow bow. When you’ve got those Baroque concertos, the figures with the first downbow and the three-note slur up, that’s your slash. We get to slash the other direction, too.

“Finally there’s the ‘flick,’ indirect, light, and fast. It’s more a pizzicato movement than anything. By the way, we don’t spend enough time working on pizzicato and what we can do with it in terms of tone production. You can probably apply all those Laban ‘efforts’ to pizzicato for a whole new tone vocabulary.”

PLAY IN A COMBO

Now, to make it a little more complicated, your average bow stroke is usually a combination of those “efforts.” Break a stroke down into its individual efforts, and you’ll have a better idea of how the movement is supposed to work, and maybe why you’re having trouble with it.

“Let’s go through a basic full bow,” Riveire says. “It starts at the frog with a glide, which is direct, light, and slow. It may turn into a press as it gains some weight as you’re moving toward the tip, and then it changes to a wring. Your transition to the upstroke might have a passing use of arm weight or that indirect pivot we use, and the upstroke is almost entirely a glide, suddenly decreasing in weight.

“With experience, that becomes a rather more unified motion; we don’t think about it a lot after we’ve been playing 10 or 15 years.

“From that, when you need to have those accented attacks or a more martelé stroke, you add a little speed or weight at the beginning, make it more of a punch or a little splash as you begin the stroke, and it smoothes out into a wring.

“All these things we’ve been talking about are mostly free-flowing movements. Sometimes, though, it needs to have that bound quality. A grand martelé that’s very staccato is a bound movement, one you can stop suddenly, and it involves a lot of tension in the muscles.

“I think the movement we do that would be the most bound is tremolo. You’ve got that nice little quiver going on in the hand, and for an extended tremolo we have to be sure we don’t seize up any muscles in the shoulder or upper arm

“Rapid 16th notes may appear bound to the eye, but using movements analogous to bouncing a ball or rapping on a door can keep them more relaxed. These are called ballistic movements, because they naturally propel themselves.

“There are other things that can look as if they’re bound, but we can control how bound they are so we don’t get too many blockages. In all the work I’ve done with intermediate players, we’re always looking for the most efficient, least direct force that you have to use, so you don’t wear yourself out.

“One thing people can do to work on that free flow is the son filé exercise (see above), where you start with whatever metronome mark feels good, maybe 60, and you play four full bows, a quarter note to each bow. Then you play a pair of two beats per bow, then a pair of three beats per bow, always using a full bow, each pair adding one beat.

“Beginning to intermediate students can work their way to getting 10 beats in a bow, then work their way back to one. More advanced students should work their way to 30 or 60 beats in a bow. To get to 30 beats will take about 10 minutes if the metronome is set to 60. After 30 beats, a full tone is not easy, but the goal is a smooth, free-flowing sound, without any hiccups in the movement. Playing so slowly drives teenagers crazy, but it’s analogous to the martial arts, where so many exercises are done in slow motion before they’re done quickly. And in yoga they say if you can’t do it slowly, you really can’t do it.”