Brendan Taaffe: Bow Exercises




Bow Exercises

Since writing my last how-to column, I’ve taken a sabbatical from my life in Vermont and come to Ireland, where I’m spending a year as a graduate student at a master’s program in traditional Irish music performance at the University of Limerick. So, where I formerly thought I had some inkling about what was going on with Irish music, I have been disabused of that notion and now realize just how little I know. And how everyone has a different approach—different bow grips, bowing patterns, philosophies, etc. Which makes it difficult to say much in a how-to column. What is clear to everyone is that the bow is the heart of the matter, and so I am offering some exercises to increase basic control of the stick, gleaned from a variety of sources.

Exercise One, from Martin Hayes. A lot of time is spent on teaching bowing patterns, historically as well as currently, but Martin made the point recently that ingrained patterns lock the player into one interpretation. The antidote: practice some favorite tunes with no bow changes at all. One long slur until you run out of bow at the tip, and then back the other way until you run out of room at the frog. Deceptively simple, this will reveal all kinds of shortcomings in bow control. Speaking for myself, I have much less control of the stick at the frog than I do at the tip. The exercise will also point out sticky areas in the tune itself, places where you want to use a bow pattern to avoid something challenging, and will force you to concentrate on the timing of your left-hand fingers. Often for beginning and intermediate players, the timing can be slightly off between left-hand and bow movements, and the bow usually gets blamed. But our left-hands can be off kilter as well, and this exercise will force you to express the rhythm clearly with your noting hand, as you would have to if you were playing something on a piano.

Concomitant exercises: If one area of the bow is harder to control than others, as with the frog, then exercises to develop that control should be fairly intuitive. Play through a tune restricting yourself to the frog to develop control: play through again in the middle, and at the tip, etc.

Exercise two, from Siobhan Peoples. Give it wellie, and think rhythm. A lot of us, especially when we’re learning, are uncertain and hesitant when we start playing. That can throw the rhythm of our playing off. Instead, lean on the bow—pressure from the index finger on the bow grip—and view the whole endeavor as a way to express a rhythm. Irish music has been able to survive many things historically—scratchy tone, poor intonation, bad piano players—but as soon as the rhythm is lost there’s no music worth having. So lean in and practice the rhythms on an open string. A good rhythm (which I can’t convey on the printed page—listen, listen, listen) should never be lost, not amidst the fancy runs and ornaments, not even in the slow reels and hornpipes.

Martin Hayes also made a great point about practicing smart. If you practice by just playing the same way you do now, all you’re doing is driving that pattern in further: the more hours, the deeper it goes. Instead, choose something to change, and spend time addressing it. It will take time to pay off, but the rewards are more certain.

Happy practicing.