"B" is for Bowings

I’ve been thinking that these blog entries could be more concise. In MS Word, they’re Bruce Banner; online, they’re the Incredible Hulk. As we know, online attention spans are shorter than those for print media. I can read a ten-page New Yorker article in one sitting, but online, anything beyond one screen seems like too much. So I’m determined to tighten up this blog. The other day, talking with friend and colleague Jim Cushing, I expressed confidence that this entry would be short, maybe even too short: “I just can’t think of what to say about bowings.” After some hysterical laughter, Jim replied, “Dear David, you have too much to say about bowings.”

He was right. Strap in, kids. This will be a long ride.

Bowings.
Have you ever wondered how string players know to move their bows in the same direction? Read on to find the answer to this and other burning questions about bowings. (String players may want to scroll down, as what follows might be like detailed instructions on how to tie your shoes.)

In this clip of the Berlin Philharmonic playing the last movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony (on the program for the November 8 Classics in the Cohan concert) notice how they don’t just move their bows in the same direction; they also play in the same part of the bow, with the same bow stoke, the same bow speed – it’s as if they were part of the Borg Bowing Collective.



Here’s a breakdown of how this uniformity is achieved. There are (thankfully) only two ways to move the bow, down or up.

Downbow: You pull the bow down toward your lap.

Upbow: The upbow goes up toward the ceiling.

String players mark these “bowings” in their music: a downbow is indicated with a mark like an upside-down U, an upbow with a V. Simple. There’s a little more to it. Generally, pickup notes and upbeats are played upbow. There’s more anticipatory energy with an upbow. Loud chords (like at the very end of a piece) are downbow. The bottom part of the bow (the frog) is heavier than the top part (the tip), so playing at the frog gets a louder sound. You also have to decide how many notes to play in one bow, what part of the bow to play in, what kind of bow stroke to use, and above all else, bowings have to feel natural and achieve specific musical effects. All these bowings have to be decided, marked in the parts, and practiced so that at the concert we’re all bowing together.

This is getting too technical already. Let’s back up further. There are two ways to make a sound on a string instrument – plucking the strings, or using the bow. Beginners start with plucking until they can read music and make a few notes with the left hand. Only then is the bow introduced. Each instrument has its way of holding the bow. For the violin and viola, the hand is perched on the bow; for the cello, it’s more draped; there are two kinds of bass bows; one kind is held overhand, the other underhand.

The bow hair is actually that – horsehair – and the little barbs in the hair catch the strings and pull out sound. We have to get our bows “rehaired” (isn’t that a great word?) -- because those barbs wear off with use. When your bow needs rehairing (did I just make up a word?) it slides around and won’t pull out a good sound. You can compensate by applying more rosin (a hardened sap-like substance that helps the bow grip the string) but that’s not a real solution. Here in SLO County, worn-out bow hair means a trip for you and your bow to Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, or San Francisco (or you can live dangerously and send your bow UPS) because there are no locals who rehair bows.

Learning to use the bow is vital because that’s how you get sound out of the instrument. You can have the best left hand technique in the world, but without good bow technique, the sound won’t be good. There are lots of different ways to bow, and each requires years to master. Legato, Detache, Martele, Marcato, Jete, Sautille, Spicatto… and others whose names I don’t recall. I was never good at memorizing musical terms. In music history, I failed the test on the Requiem Mass. I still can’t keep the movements of the Requiem straight. Pie Jesu Domine Sanctus Lux Aeterna Salon…umm… Agnus Moorhead Doris Dei Sic Transit Gloria I think they got your number, I think they got the alias that you been living under… in Excelsis Deo? (I know, I’m going to hell.)

Click below to learn more about bow techniques.

http://www.siegelproductions.ca/calvinsieb/bow.htm

I learned a new bow technique when I joined the SLO Symphony – “brushy.” “Brushy” is hard to explain, but it makes sense when Michael Nowak or Kathleen Lenski demonstrate it. We’re very lucky in the SLO Symphony to have a conductor who knows bowings. Conductors always have ideas about how they want the music to sound, but if they don’t understand the technical issues of the instruments, those ideas can get lost in translation. This is especially true for the string section, the heart of the orchestra. In the past, I’ve played under conductors who might say, “this needs to sound like a foggy, gloomy sunrise after a long night of storms, leaving everyone in the sleepy hamlet uncertain about the new day.” OK. Poetic descriptions can be helpful, but it’s even more helpful when a conductor like Michael can tell us -- and show us -- how to make that sound happen: “play at the tip of the bow, over the fingerboard, with two bow hairs, and no vibrato.”

Like John McCain and Sarah Palin on energy independence, I’ve observed that Mike has an “all-of-the above” approach to bowings. The first time I played for him I murdered a Bach minuet, but he gave me a second chance, and I played some of the Handel Concerto with a “grande detache” bow stroke. He asked me to play it again with the “brushy” stroke and demonstrated it. I mimicked him, and that’s how I got in the SLO Symphony. Blame it on “brushy.”

A few years later, when I was “guest principal” and playing Hindemith’s “The Four Temperaments,” Mike had very specific suggestions about bowings for my solos. But what really made the style of the piece click-in for me was when rehearsing the solo movement – reminiscent of bohemian café culture – he mimed having a drink and a smoke in a café (I spent most of my 20s drinking and smoking in cafes – or Seattle beer bars, rather). After that demonstration, I knew exactly how to play. There’s technique and there’s poetry, and I guess the challenge is to figure out how to marry the two.

Conductors who don’t know string technique can be either frustrated or amused by bowings. A few years ago during a recording session for PCPA, violinists Carol Kersten, Tanya Streder and I would sometimes need to have little “bowing summits” before the session could continue. The conductor took it in stride, saying he was always amused when “strings players go into their own little world” – bowing world.

On the other hand, some conductors are sticklers about bowings. Our conductor at the University of Oklahoma, a fine violinist and Diet-Coke fueled dynamo named Akira Endo, would bow every part himself. In rehearsals, he’d tell us exactly how to play his bowings. I remember his yelling at me during one rehearsal, “David, get to the frog! You’re the only one not at the frog!”

My teacher, Wayne Crouse, had great respect for Maestro Endo because Mr. Crouse had played for years under another string-player-turned conductor: Sir John Barbirolli. Sir John was a cellist, and obsessively detail-oriented about bowings. He imported the carefully marked parts from his Halle Orchestra (of Manchester, England) to the Houston Symphony. When a bowing change was made, it was a moment of high seriousness. There was a meeting of all the principal players. Prayers were said, incense burned, animals sacrificed, and then the Maestro insisted that the change be marked in every single part. From Sir John, Mr. Crouse also learned the importance of playing pianissimo passages at the tip – the very tip – of the bow. Sir John said, “only those with advanced cases of arthritis will be excused from this practice.”

Mr. Crouse had had a quite different experience earlier in his career, performing under Leopold Stokowski. After WWII, flush with oil money and hope, the Houston Symphony wanted to raise its profile, so they hired a slew of East-coast-conservatory-trained musicians, but still needed a big name to draw crowds. Who better than Mickey Mouse’s costar in Fantasia: Stokie, as they came to call him. He ruled the orchestra with an iron fist, and he insisted that they adopt “free bowing” -- he didn’t want the strings to bow together. He thought “free bowing” produced a sound that was more open, unstructured -- “free,” I guess. This technique posed a problem for the Houston Symphony strings, who’d been trained, as everyone is, to bow together. Stokowski would lose patience and cry out at rehearsals, “don’t bow together! You Americans, with your canned soup and your Social Security!” (These stories come from personal communication and from an article Wayne Crouse wrote called “When the Maestros Came to Houston.”)

The SLO Symphony is a bit more relaxed about bowings. We don’t have anyone to copy in bowings beforehand, so we get them at rehearsals. I put in bowings before first rehearsals, but often one has to wait to see what other sections will do, or what Michael might have in mind. He can be as detail-oriented as anyone. Before the opening concert last season, he called me up at home.

Mike: “Oh hey, Dave, it’s Mike Nowak.”
(Me: “Crap, what have I done now?”)
Mike: “I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and trying it out, and you guys' opening line in the Brahms – (singing) duh-duh-duh-duh-duh – I think it’s better down/up than up/down.”

Whew! Then we talked about other viola issues on the concert. It’s so great to play under another violist who can talk in detail about the viola part. Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.

I told Ina Davenport (a pianist friend of mine and Mike’s) about this down/up, up/down conversation, and she replied with her trademark wry humor: “Oh well, I hope poor Mikey didn’t lose too much sleep over that.” As the pianist in our group, the Lumiere Quartet, Ina’s left out of “bowing summits,” and I think she gets bored. She’s figured out, though, that when we go into bowing world, that’s a good time to stretch her legs, use the restroom, hop down to the Inn at Morro Bay for a martini, or at least call someone on her cell phone. “Hi honey, what are you doing? Oh me, nothing, those guys are just talking about the bowings again.”

I’ve learned a few things about bowings since becoming principal violist. It’s not always possible to bow with every other section all the time. Just last week, there was a minor mutiny over an awkward bowing I’d put in to keep us with the violins. I should have taken to heart Mark Hatchard’s exhortation: “they can be be the violin section, and we’ll be the viola section.” To quote Mary James’s wardrobe: Viola Power!

Also, it’s important to get the bowings set as soon as possible so the section will be able to practice them and feel comfortable. This is not something that comes naturally to me, for two reasons. First, I was trained to mark up rented parts as little as possible. Second, I’m more of an intuitive than an intellectual musician. Too many markings in the part actually mess me up, so I prefer not to write in a ton of bowings, and I’m pretty flexible about them. When I first started as principal, this flexibility posed a problem in that I would sometimes change the bowings right before a concert. These eleventh-hour changes ceased when I learned that the other violists had constructed a David Hennessee voodoo doll, complete with miniature Steve Madden shoes, tiny sideburns, and a melancholy countenance. 

One way to think about bowings is vis-à-vis the Myers-Briggs Jung Typology. You can take the test here: www.humanmetrics.com (I’ve learned from my students that no blog is complete without a personality test.)

Sometimes a bowing just feels right for the music and you do it. I think this is iNtuition being expressed. Other times you really need to think bowings through and mark everything. This sounds like Judging. I feel a lot of tension between these two approaches since I’m an INFJ. It’s kind of challenging to take in information about the world through non-linear, non-rational imagination and still want that world to be ordered and decided. I guess it’s the same with bowings – remain open to inspiration, or attend to every little detail?

I guess the best solution to questions about bowings – as for so many of life’s other burning questions – is an “all-of-the-above” approach. (This is not an endorsement of McCain/Palin.) If it feels right, do it. If it doesn’t, figure something else out. If a metaphor or an image helps get it done, go with that. If nothing comes to mind, fall back on details and technique, and hope for inspiration.

At last, the ride through bowing world is over, and I didn’t even cover ponticello, sul tasto, col legno, Baroque bows vs. modern ones, carbon fiber vs. pernambuco, or why really good bows can cost more than some instruments, or why Lisa Davidson’s bow broke from the heat at last year’s Pops-by-the-Sea-in-Hell Concert.

Here are some parting gifts. Unfortunately, the soloist for the November 8 concert, Alyssa Park, isn’t on YouTube yet, but here’s Anne Akiko Meyers (who’s returning for the May 2, 2009 Season Finale) playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (on the program for November 8.)



Click here for an encore.

(sorry, youtube "embedding" was not available. You'll have to click-thru.)

And here she is back when Reagan was in office:



Finally, here’s an on-topic viola joke: how can you tell when a violist is playing out of tune?

Their bow is moving.

DH

P.S. up next, C is for Conductors, or, It’s Payback Time!

A is for "Auditions"

Hello again ―David Hennessee here. I heard that the opening night concert was wonderful. I was heartbroken that I couldn’t play because of illness. Here’s a “shout out” to Karen Loewi-Jones, who heroically filled in for me.

To read Jim Cushing’s review of the concert, click here.

You may have heard that Jim has been named Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo. (Click here to read about Jim and about Poetry Month.) We’re so lucky to have Jim writing such informed, insightful, and poetic reviews of our concerts. There’s no more appreciative fan of the SLO Symphony.

Bernstein and West Side Story
I was going to post this link before the first concert. Here’s Bernstein conducting West Side Story:


And here he is conducting Beethoven’s Overture to “Egmont,” which is on the November 8th concert at the Cohan Center:


During my recent bout with death-flu, I had an idea to do a series for the blog: “playing in the orchestra from A to Z.” (I have no idea what the Z entry will be – Zoroastrians in classical music?) What follows is the first entry. Be warned: it gets moralizing toward the end. Recently I’ve been teaching Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Romantic poets, and when you’re steeped in those guys, moralizing happens. So, A is for:

Auditions.
A necessary evil for anyone in the performing arts. You practice your music, your monologue, your dance routine, but it comes down to whether or not you perform your best, on the spot, in front of folks there to judge you.

For musicians, auditions start early. In school bands and orchestras, they occur at the beginning of the year, for chairs: a ranking of all the kids playing the same instrument. These auditions place students in the right ensemble or section for their ability. School auditions don’t stop there. Oftentimes, you can “challenge” -- you and the person sitting ahead of you play the same piece for the conductor, or even the whole group. If you win, you move up. If not, you don’t. Challenges can tap into kids’ competitiveness as way to help them excel. For example, my sister JoLynn was a very fine clarinetist in her younger days, in part because she and her rival Denise constantly challenged each other for first chair in their high school band.

I never had to worry about challenges. Growing up in Oklahoma, I was the only violist in the school orchestra whose playing didn’t peel paint off walls. In high school we lost our cellist, so I had to learn the cello. You can’t challenge in a section of one. Since this time I’ve had enormous respect for cellists. For me, playing the cello was like wrestling an alligator.

In Oklahoma, statewide, it was a different story with auditions, and I quickly got drawn in to their competitiveness. There was, as in many states, an “All-State Orchestra.” High school students from around the state auditioned in November, and those who made the cut got to travel to Oklahoma City in January, stay in a hotel, and spend the week rehearsing for a concert. The first year I auditioned for “All-State,” I practiced my fingers to the bone. Everyone was surprised when I got second chair (in a section of fourteen violists), “beating out” a bunch of older kids. I’ll admit I was proud of myself. I hadn’t expected to do so well. Most of the proficient string players were from Tulsa or the Oklahoma City area – not out-of-the way places like Lawton – and they all knew each other. People kept calling me a “dark horse” (I thought they were referring to my tan).

I was in for a major let-down. In January we had to re-audition, and I was demoted from second to fourth chair. Two whole chairs! This demotion happened for a couple of reasons. First, we were playing two movements of Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis.” I hadn’t heard, so I worked on all four movements, wasting a lot of time woodshedding weird chromatic scales. Second, right after I played the second audition, the older violists descended upon me, turning a dank hallway in a three-star Oklahoma City hotel into a viola-feeding frenzy. Those hot-shot 17-and-18-year olds could smell blood. They demanded that I relate what the judges thought of my playing. Shy, naïve, just-wanting-to-be-liked, 15-year-old-me confessed, “well, they said the Copland should be more staccato, and the Rossini a little faster, and…” Armed with this advice, they knew what the judges were looking for, and I lost my chair. Oh the agony!

I got my adolescent revenge, and at the time, it was sweet. The next two years, I was first-chair violist in the All-State Orchestra. I reveled in my status as the best teenage violist in the great state of Oklahoma (in retrospect, I realize this is an honor on par with being the best pig farmer on the Upper East Side.)

My adolescent narcissism was further stoked when I won a statewide string competition. The best part: I beat out my dreaded rival, a lean-and-hungry violist named Matt. He knew he was better than me. I knew I was better than him. We were always seated on the first stand of the Oklahoma Youth Orchestra and the All-State Orchestra, and our rivalry turned every rehearsal into a combat zone.

I suppose I had a right to be proud of winning this contest -- I did practice a lot, and there was a cash prize that helped pay for college – but largely I was thrilled to have finally defeated the dreaded Matt. I felt like Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star. Poetic justice was served on me for my hubris, though. I had won by playing the first movement of the Stamitz Concerto, a flashy little 7-minute bonbon. For the recital featuring the winners, my teacher felt that I should push myself and perform Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata. The whole thing, from memory. All 30 minutes of it. It came at the end of a recital featuring the other winners, all six of them. Now, Schubert’s great, but his idea of development is to play the same exact thing in a different key, and then repeat it in a few more keys. I pulled it off, but afterwards the weary audience’s compliments included: “that sure was a lot of notes!” “how did you memorize such a long piece?” “you look so handsome in your tux!” and “is it a long drive back to Lawton?”

In college, I learned that auditions are about more than expressing adolescent narcissism. When you’re auditioning for a paying gig, the pressure is ramped up, and it’s all about details. In auditions for professional orchestras, there may be hundreds of people competing for one spot. How can the judges make the tough calls? These are musicians who’ve been trained at the best music schools, and they’re all highly qualified, brilliant players. It’s a real shame that they can’t all find work and instead some have to find part-time day jobs or even change careers. I had a friend in Seattle, a very fine violinist, who trained at the North Carolina School of Performing Arts and the Brooklyn Conservatory. She tried to “make it” in New York for several years, but eventually gave up, moved to Seattle, and became a landscaper and later an ultrasound technician. One silver lining to this situation: the competition for limited jobs is making regional orchestras better than ever. (Click here to read an article from the New Yorker that describes this trend.)

As I mentioned, I got a taste of the competitiveness of professional auditions in college. In the late 1980s, the Oklahoma Symphony disbanded, and the Oklahoma City Philharmonic was reformed in its wake. To replace the string players who’d moved way, they hired college students from the area. A freshman at the University of Oklahoma, I auditioned for a spot on the sixth stand of the OKC Phil. I lost it to an older OU student, Kelli, because the conductor felt that my high e-flat was a little too flat (I still got to play as an “extra/substitute.” When you’re 18, you take what you can get.) A few years later, I lost another audition to Kelli, for a spot on the OKC Phil’s fifth stand, because the judges felt her ricochet bowing was a little bouncier than mine. Kelli and I were always good friends. She could do some things better than I, and vice versa – but at the auditions, we were competitors, and it came down to what we did at that moment and the finest of points.

I’ve done a few more auditions since then. Unlike when I was younger, for these auditions I didn’t think about “winning” or “beating out” anyone. I just wanted to play my best. I knew I was competing against my own limitations. Consequently, these experiences felt a lot… cleaner, somehow. Practicing for them felt like trying to get as close as possible to my viola. I did wonder, though, where was that devil-may-care, egotistical, competitive, hot-shot violist I was at 15?
Maybe he’s still alive and well in some parallel universe where it’s still 1986, and I hope he’s happy. Maybe living on the West Coast for 14 years has mellowed me, because these days, for me, music isn’t about winning, “challenging ,” or “beating out” others, or showing off (unless you’re a professional soloist – a lot of them have Hummer-sized egos, and they need to).

One great thing about the SLO Symphony is its lack of competiveness, politicking, rivalry, or hierarchy. The strings rotate seating; principal players don’t boss around section players; anyone can ask Michael a question, and he leads with encouragement and humor, not with the intimidation and condescension that too many conductors employ.

In a way, I’m glad that I was more competitive and egotistical when I was younger, as I’m sure that motivated me to practice harder. But these days, I feel differently about playing music. For example, recently I performed Schubert’s Trout Quintet with Margaret Berrio, Jan Carpenter, Clif Swanson, and Ina Davenport. We’ve done the Trout many times now, and it’s started to “gel.” When performing with these guys, I felt as if I wasn’t playing music, but being played by the music. Time stood still. The only reality was Schubert’s music and the people I was playing it with. I observed our playing, feeling a sort of purposeful, fulfilling, peaceful-but-exciting joy. It’s a hard feeling to describe. I think Wordsworth describes it in “Tintern Abbey,” where he writes about...

...that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Maybe I’ve read too much Romantic poetry lately, but I often feel something like this when playing the viola, alone or with others. I imagine I’m not the only one. As Wordsworth would say, these feelings, are, for me, “abundant recompense” for my younger, egotistical, competitive ideas about performance.

But then, in the real world – a place quite different from David Hennessee’s thousand-points-of-light imagination – there are competitive auditions, and you have to perform well, or else. When you’re a kid, if you blow an audition, you still have friends, school, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Clearasil, and dating. Auditions are just a part of the game, and if you lose one, you can always challenge.

Growing up, we learn that life is not a game, and the audition itself is the challenge. We all face on-the-spot pressures – auditions -- musicians and non-musicians alike. Job interviews and performance reviews, presentations to the board, sales pitches to prospective clients, paying taxes, or just a family waiting to be fed dinner. The best advice I’ve heard on facing pressures like these comes from Frances McDormand’s character in Almost Famous: “be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” Recently, I heard this advice echoed when visiting with principal French hornist Jane Swanson. She related Jennifer Dodson’s teacher’s advice on stage fright: “Just shut up and blow.”

Auditions – in whatever form – can be intimidating, but we can take away their power if we just “shut up and blow” – if we just do something. Something is better than nothing. It negates nothingness, despair and fear. It plugs us into the vast network of something-ness all around us, what Wordsworth calls the “mighty sum of things forever speaking.” And maybe our efforts add to that sum.

Perhaps that competitive, narcissistic 15-year-old boy trying to win auditions, get first prize in competitions and beat out others -- perhaps he added to that sum. If we’d had Facebook and MySpace back then, he probably would have been online, “friending” people. Instead he was befriending the forever-wooden Pinocchio who would someday help him become a real boy.

Well, that’s enough knock-off Wordsworthian moralizing. Here’s a viola joke: what’s the difference between a viola and a vacuum cleaner? You can tune a vacuum cleaner.

DH
P.S. up next, B for Bowings!