#41: Viola bowstroke

Section 6: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.96, ii: Lento

In revisiting the accompanying material discussed in #29 and #30, we were able to identify some further nuances. The viola player adopted a stroke which we approximated as ‘fragile yet solid’: playing quite near the middle of the bow, we had to try hard to avoid giving the end of each note a ‘bananashaped’ envelope. Once again, this meant going unusually ‘close to the edge’ in terms of retaining a functional balance of contact point and bow speed. As we saw back in #1, these players’ basic mode seems to have been significantly ‘in the string’, but with the option to lift. This disposition is much more intense, then, than ‘brushing’ the string from side to side, with faster bow speed and a less weighty contact. The contrast in these sensations was most apparent, physically, when crossing strings between the two notes of a slurred pair.

We also found that this tonal quality is inseparable from the rhythmic swing of the pairs, and that more ‘release’ in the timing often meant a similar release in the contact. But this is not an exact science – indeed the entire point is that it enables variation. Importantly, the sensation of the contact — as heavy or light, connected or lifted — is always related to the subjective ‘feel’ of the rhythm’s swing as a whole, even if that relationship is not one-to-one. It could not have been clearer that, specifically as a matter of the performer’s experience, ‘rhythmic inflection’ was never capable of ‘behaving’ independently of that quality of contact.