THE FIRST TIME A TEACHER HANDS US a stringed instrument, we figure the tricky part will be putting our left-hand fingers in the correct spots to get the right notes. How hard can moving the bow with the right hand be?

Well, as we discover the moment we first draw the bow across an open string, it’s not that simple. Then, as we try to get a decent sound, a lot of us tighten up that right hand, use the wrong pressure in the wrong direction, and start making noises that remind us that strings used to be made of catgut.

Before we can produce the smooth sound that attracted us to strings in the first place, we have to overcome that tension in the bow hand. Florida freelance violinist and teacher Eden Vaning-Rosen has written an entire tome on the subject; it’s called The Violin Book 6a: Elements of a Tension-Free Bow Hand, with Etudes.

She says that tension sets in when a muscle’s natural motion gets halted in some way. And we aren’t necessarily talking about anything as active as moving a bow or climbing stairs. As an experiment, Vaning-Rosen suggests that you sit with your feet flat on a hardwood or tile floor. Press your toes down against the floor, and hold them like this for a short while. “You’ll not only feel your feet become tight,” she points out, “but soon your calves, and then your thighs.

“What has happened? You created energy by your muscle motion against the floor. The energy could not travel freely into the hard floor, so the energy came back through the muscles following the same pathway along which it first traveled.”

If you can do that to yourself just sitting there, you know you’re in trouble if your bow hand is tense.

RIGHT AND WRONG
So how, exactly, does tension affect a violin bow hand? Here’s Vaning- Rosen’s explanation: “Think back to your first lessons, when you were learning to hold the bow correctly. At this point your hand was placed at the frog with the thumb under and the four fingers across the top. Right away you became aware, consciously or unconsciously, of a large strain on your pinky. The natural decision a student makes at this point is: ‘In order to hold this violin bow I’m going to have to hold it tightly with my pinky, because this bow is heavy!’”

That’s obvious if you’re holding the bow in the air in front of you. The bow stick works like a long lever arm, and because of the pull of gravity, the longer a lever arm is, the heavier it feels. Your thumb under the frog acts as the lever’s fulcrum, or support; your pinky literally gets the short end of the stick, supporting the actual weight of the bow, as well as the increased weight because of the length of the bow stick. Because of this, the pinky develops tension, which moves through the wrist and into the forearm.

But what happens when you place the bow down on the A string? Now the long bow is supported by the string, not your thumb, and your pinky can relax. You can even lift it up and down. Your whole hand is relaxed now, and you can focus on the front side of the hand, transferring any needed weight into the bow stick to achieve the sound you want.

“When a student doesn’t realize that the feeling in the bow hand on the string is different from the feeling in the bow hand off the string, and thus continues to keep the tension in the hand after the bow is placed on the string,” says Vaning-Rosen, “this continued tension in the pinky will equalize the weight being transferred into the other side. The bow therefore surfaces over the string, with little or no energy being transferred into the string. With little or no feeling of friction on the string, a strong, rich tone cannot be produced. A student should, therefore, be aware of how he starts each bow stroke, paying careful attention to any pinky tension.”

She advocates consciously trying a technique the wrong way as well as the right way, so you can see and feel the difference. She suggests playing a line from an etude by Franz Wohlfahrt (see Example 1).

The first time through, let your pinky remain tight after you place your bow on the string. Listen to the sound you produce, and feel any tension in your hand.