Breathing Bows

For continuity, expression, agility

Although this is, like some others earlier, a violin/fiddle exercise/game, I’ve heard from some wind instrument players, accordionists and singers that when they translate bowing ideas to breath, they find these ideas thought-provoking. I hope this game proves of interest and use to you. (I like call my exercises “games” because exercises tend to be things you drill or get over with — for your own good of course — whereas games are also develop skills but draw in more mindfulness and curiosity as you become familiar with them and notice connections and tricks to try.)

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I call this game “Breathing Bows.” It opens up the bow hand, and the musician it belongs to, to the idea of changing the speed of the bow while playing, and of connecting one bow to the next without any stopping and starting. These ideas are essential to developing expression and continuity.

Start your bow at the tip and move it as slow as molasses at first, then accelerate. Make every inch of bow go faster than the previous one, until when you get to the end of the bow, at the frog, you are moving super fast. Imagine that you hit a rubber bumper at the frog, and bounce back the other way exactly as fast as you were going when you reached the frog end of the bow. Then decelerate, slowing down as each inch of bow passes the string, until you are moving as slow as molasses again by the time you get to the tip.

Think of this entire motion as one breath. When we breathe, one breath is a combination of an inhale and an exhale. We don’t think of that as one breath in and one breath out; in and out is a single breath. Think also of this accelerating/decelerating bow not as two bows but as one breath, one musical idea, one connected motion.

If your bow speed and pressure are the same on both sides of your change of direction, the bow change will be perfectly smooth. It’s always something to aim for, thought it’s tricky to accomplish. Listen to a great violinist playing a very long note using several bows, and you won’t even hear the bow changes, because the speed and pressure is constant as they change direction.

Literal minds might imagine that physically, you have to slow and stop the bow before starting it the other way. But you don’t — not any more than you stop a paintbrush as you paint strokes back and forth, or a sponge when you wipe down a countertop. In each case, you keep the pressure on as you change direction smoothly, and without any stopping. On the violin, this means you can smoothly connect the sound of one bow to the next. It’s as if you’re painting rosin on the string. Your wrist and forearm are the handle of the paintbrush, and your fingers are the bristles reluctantly being dragged back the other way but staying in contact and in motion.

You’ll want to make sure your hand stays in one plane as you change bows; otherwise, especially at the frog, if there’s a change in the angle of your hand, there will be a jump or hitch as you bounce back the other way, instead of a smooth connection. To think more about this motion, lay your hand flat on a big sponge and let your fingertips drape over the edge as you wipe back and forth on a countertop. If you keep the edge of the sponge exactly parallel to the edge of the counter, you’ll get a good feel for bowing!

When people first try these breathing bows, it often takes them a few times or even a few days to get the hang of accelerating smoothly to a super fast speed, and bouncing back at the same fast speed before slowing down, way down, to their starting point at the tip. Give it a bunch of tries.

Now try it the other way: Start very slowly at the frog and accelerate mightily as you approach the tip. You should really be zooming along by the time you get there; then bounce back as if you were a pinball hitting a rubber bumper. Slow down gradually until you’re moving very slowly again at the frog. Your little finger might need to kick in to counteract the weight of the bow at the frog to avoid a scratchy sound (see the Windshield Wiper).

Since we’re thinking of each of these pairs of bows as a breath, you might even trying breathing along with your breathing bow. Just as in this exercise, when you breathe, you start very slowly and accelerate a great deal as you inhale. Then you start exhaling very fast and slow down, a lot and for a long time, all the way until it’s time to take another breath. You never really stop, unless some emergency, whether physical or emotional, makes you gasp or hold your breath (see last week’s The Power of Sound).

The motion of your hand, when you bounce back after accelerating, might be familiar from some other things people do. When going from up to downbow, it’s kind of like shaking out an old mercury thermometer, or like shaking water off your hand. The hand motion of bouncing from down to upbow is like what a conductor does when the baton reaches the bottom of the beat, or like a rubber ball bouncing off the floor.

I’ve talked about using a smooth change of bow, with equal speed and pressure on both sides of the change of direction, at the super fast end of the bow, but it can also be done at the slow end. At either end, it will also create a very smooth, continuous sound. Once you start using “breathing bows,” you can connect each bow to the next, whether up to down or down to up, frog or tip, fast or slow.

When you can create this continuity of sound, you can connect one note to the next, and in a piece of music, you can use those connected notes to build a phrase that holds together, instead of allowing the notes to be chopped apart merely because of a change of bow. This connection between notes is the bread and butter of playing the violin. Everything you play should be able to have that smoothness. You can always add articulation any time you want just by pressing, tapping, poking, or braking the bow with your first finger as you play. Once you have a smooth foundation, you can stop a bow, play staccato or spiccato, add bite to the start of a beat note, or accelerate to a sudden stop as we talked about last week.

This smooth connection is always worth aiming for and improving. Without it, our sound is kind of doomed to be choppy from note to note.

And here’s the kicker: getting used to this “breathing bows” game means that when you play pickup notes leading into a beat, you can easily grow your bow sound right into the beat note. This is very expressive, and also very exciting. It creates a lot of lift in dance music.

It also focuses your attention on what you can do with the bow during a note. This is important for two reasons — one is that it makes bagpipers and pianists jealous, because once they play a note there’s nothing they can do to change its volume or expression! The other is that it takes us away from merely focusing on what notes we’re playing, and makes us aware of what music is all about — the connection, the phrasing, the voice and feel of what we are trying to say.

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Below is a brief video taking you through the “Breathing Bows.” It reminds you about what to try and what to think about as you do the exercise. Rather than view it once to get the idea, use it as a practic companion. Note: This video is reserved for paid subscribers because it is one of 12 videos in Technique Video Group 2 on my fiddle-online.com site, and I need to honor those who pay a nominal charge for access to those videos. (Besides, I can’t give ALL the secrets away for free, can I?)