Bow Wow: The Interactive Violin Bow and Improvised Music, A Personal Perspective Jon Rose a b s t r a c t Bowed string music has always existed as an aural culture with improvisation considered as a prime focus of expression. It is the author’s strong belief that experimenta- tion is the natural state of Grunt Grunt hair have in common is their stick- all string music. This paper slip action. While the bow hair is concentrates on recent history: Sometime after the last ice age, a hunter-gatherer returned bows that have incorporated to his cave and, instead of sharpening his arrows for the next sticking to the string, motion in one interactive sensor technology. day’s sortie, picked up his bow and started to improvise on it— direction is followed by a quick snap The central narrative deals with using his fingers, a stick or a bone. Sometime later, in a stroke back in the opposite direction upon the author’s own experiments and experience at STEIM since of genius, he started to use that weapon to excite the strings release. This gives rise to the charac- teristic sawtooth waveform and con- 1987. How reliable and practi- of a chordophone, a precursor to the rebab, lira, ravanastron, cal is this technology? Are the er-hu, kalumbu, crwth, berimbau, bumbass, chikara, viol and sequent sound of the bowed string. results worth the trouble? Are violin, to name but a few from the long list. With the invention of the “mod- there new modes of improvising Bows come in a plethora of shapes and sizes, from the colos- ern” François Tourte violin bow in only possible with an interactive bow? sal arched Vega bow invented through misguided Bach schol- the 18th century, an aesthetic as arship [1] to the abrupt, serrated and hairless stick used with well as technical watershed for the the Korean ajaeng (zither). One thing, however, that bows with violin bow was reached. Up until that time, violin bowing technique Jon Rose (violinist, improviser, composer, instrument-maker). E-mail: <jonrose19@aol. maintained the essence of its dance-music origins in the messa com>. Web site: <www.jonroseweb.com>. di voce bow stroke—a short, sharp sonic hairpin articulating a See <mitpressjournals.org/lmj/-/20> for audio related to this article. rhythmic gesture. The accumulated knowledge of the dancing Fig. 1. Jon rose playing Palimpolin with the K-bow at Galapagos club, New York, 2010. (© Jon rose. Photo © Jill steinberg.) ©2010 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 20, pp. 57–66, 2010 57 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00013 by guest on 29 September 2021 bow reached its zenith in works such as corporates a loop of lateral (normal saw- uncool to do all the lightweight rapid L’arte del Arco (The Art of Bowing) by Gi- tooth action) and longitudinal (à la Ellen up/down stuff. That said, it’s a very ef- useppe Tartini (1692–1770). Post-messa, Fullman) vibrating options. Between the fective bow stroke that all non-string play- composers (with the exception of the vir- straight and unstraight bow stroke lies ers want to do when they pick up a violin tuoso class, e.g. Paganini) moved string a broad area of under-utilized bow op- for the first time, because it looks good music ever further away from the rhyth- tions—and that’s using just the straight and punters think you are really working mic impulse into a symphonic swirl of vanilla detaché bow stroke. hard.) massed strings—leading to Mahler and If we push and pull on through the The reverse bow requires the string eventually to Mantovani. Nothing wrong bow’s repertoire of tricks, we find the player to remove bow hair from bow by with either, but the rise of the symphony martelé, meaning “hammered,” referring undoing its frog, then replacing hair in orchestra to unchallenged power sped to a percussive on-string stroke produced said frog, but with the instrument now the death of many improvising traditions by an explosive release following heavy caught between bow hair and bow stick. in European music. The ones that sur- pressure—a kind of initial pinching of This enables the violinist to play all four vived, such as church organ music, did the string. Staccato is basically a series of or more strings at once. Like most string not use the violin bow. martelé strokes taken in one bow stroke. techniques, it has probably been around Then we get to the flying staccato (prob- since the beginning of bowing itself and ably more hovering than flying), which was standard fare in the fiddling tradi- ups anD Downs leads us to the ricochet or thrown bow tions before improvisers took it as their The majority of detaché violin bow strokes stroke said to have been invented by Pa- own. take place at right angles to the string— ganini in a very bad mood. The same goes for super-slow martelé the legitimate angle of action. Once an Improvisers such as myself have de- bow strokes that slow the sawtooth wave- improvising musician circumnavigates veloped variations and combinations of form and pitch down to something more this straightjacket convention, a number these two killer actions—one of mine is like a chainsaw idling. Most improvisers of bent bow strokes—from the diagonal the equivalent of running on the spot for can control this bowing feature quite to the almost parallel—can be applied to extended durations (it comes with an RSI well, but Mari Kimura is in a sub-har- the string. The lateral bow stroke (with health warning). Utilizing and extending monic class of her own, capable of play- bow hair moving at 180º up and down the bow’s basic binary action presents ing a complete scale down from the open the whole fingerboard) is perhaps the most available sensors with quite an ar- G (the lowest string on her violin). These most useful, revealing (with variable ray of readings. (Oh, I forgot to mention kinds of sub-harmonics are not achiev- pressure) a smorgasbord of vibrations the tremolo. On no account use this bow able through any signal processing that and transient noise. The circular bow in- stroke! These days it is considered very I have heard. In the classical pedagogy of the last 150 years, the bow has been pacified and straightened out, and the violinist conned into the notion or nonsense of Fig. 2. bowing the “endless singing line.” The violin was experiments with the 10 string invented not for singing, but for danc- Double Violin, ing! And for dancing, you have to have sydney, circa 1982. rhythm in the bow. Any research direct- (© Jon rose. Photo: ing the bow toward a more radical life Kristine rose.) armed with sensors needs, I believe, to take this into consideration. Despite Gravity Once the bow leaves the strings, theatri- cal space can be accessed, the audience easily following the gesture; away from the violin, the sonic simulacrum of a fly can meet its doom with a swish of the bow stick [2]. Apart from the natural swish of the bow (one of the great acoustic gestures), other sonic phenomena lend association, such as the sounds of bird wings flapping, wind blowing, machines whirring or preindustrial slashing and hacking. The bow can unleash psycho- drama—the bow is a bit dangerous, you see; you can poke someone’s eye out with it. In the hands of Wilbur Hall (Paul Whiteman’s trombonist and the most out-there violinist ever recorded on film), the bow becomes truly a magician’s wand. The famous armless violinist Carl Unthan was also captured by camera but, 58 Rose, Bow Wow Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00013 by guest on 29 September 2021 Fig. 3. Jon rose, Violin Vivisection, Kunstler- haus bethanien, berlin, 1986. (© Jon rose. Photo: Konstanze binder.) alas, there is no movie of him plying his sound of the bow hair is embedded in ev- bow is used merely for the addition of bowing skills with his right foot. ery bow stroke that the “perfect” Heifetz- signal processing (let’s call it effects!) to The bow is forever weaving a pattern, type classical violinist has ever emitted. the regular violin, is that a worthwhile en- like a giant knitting needle noodling It’s the noise, the grain, the grit behind deavor? My first effects gadget, purchased with imaginary wool, drawing transitory any bowed utterance. By itself a belt of in 1969, was a wah-wah pedal—not the shapes, creating an abstract gestalt, not droning broadband noise, but amplified kind of thing I wanted an interactive sys- quite a synesthetic condition, but posing and augmented by pitch shift, the horse tem to bother with 20 years later. Satu- intangible relationships. The sign is writ- can get very frisky, with a sound pallet rated feedback-distortion, however, is a ten in the bow stick as well as by it. The reminiscent of a double bass, Albert Ay- sonic state that I have never grown out bow drips with its own totemic language. ler in the top octave or a barbed wire of, even 40 years on. Looking at classical violinists on YouTube fence [4]. The use of samples became a polemi- with the sound turned down, it is possible The bow can also play the big switch cal quest: Why use a violin sample when to pick the composition being rendered character. Keith McMillen’s K-Bow (Fig. you already play the violin? I relished (or murdered) as much by looking at the 1) has included gesture recognition the study of the simulacra; the industrial bow as by watching the left hand.