Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Seletsky
Robert E. Seletsky is an independent scholar and baroque violinist. His published work appears in
New Grove II (2000), Early music, Opera quarterly, The new Harvard dictionary of music, Recent
Researches in the Music of the Classical Era and elsewhere.
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11 Three screw-frog transitional bow designs, c.177585: (a) battle-axe head, pernambuco stick, rounded (earlier)
open-channel ivory frog and button; length 73.0 cm (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Hill Collection no.24); (b) late
battle-axe/hatchet head, pernambuco stick, rectangular (later) ivory open-channel frog and button, stamped DODD,
probably John Dodd, London; length 73.4 cm (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Hill Collection no.27); (c) modified
swan-bill head, fluted pernambuco stick, rectangular (later) open-channel ebony frog and ivory (or bone) button,
attributed to Tourte L; length 73.8 cm (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Hill Collection no.26). All bow lengths include
button.
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Tartinis bows
As we have seen, the Tartini bow is something of a
puzzle and a recurring theme throughout the 18th
and 19th centuries, its attributes different almost
every time it is mentioned. While many of its alleged
traitsgreater length and head height, reeding,
straight stick, or screw-frog3were simply characteristics of the evolving bow and have nothing
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14 The violin bows evolution shown in Woldemar, Grande Mthode drawings, c.1798: (a) short: Corelli; (b) long:
Tartini; (c) transitional: Cramer; (d) modern: Viotti. Compare these with the bows in part I, illus.8
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16 G. B. Viotti apparently with a long bow after 1800; penand-wash drawing ( Copyright The British Museum)
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Transitional terminus
The model of Franois Tourte (17471835), originating in the 1780s, is at 74.5 cm, 14 cm longer than
most transitional bows. (Note that, for consistency,
total lengths shown here include the movable
buttonabout 1.5 cmwhich luthiers sometimes
omit from cited bow lengths.) Tourtes bow was the
experiment that eventually became the standard, the
first time a bow-makers design served as a specific
model for continuing generations of subsequent
makers. Often with stronger graduations, sometimes
more pronounced cambre, and a closed, sharply
rectangular frog with a mother-of-pearl slide, and a
silver or gold ferrule and heel-plate (illus.12c), the
Tourte bow, at 5760 grams, is heavier than most of
its predecessors; the hatchet head is similar to contemporary models, but never with mirrored peak
and throat. Although this type of bow ultimately
eclipsed all previous designs, various transitional
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bows were made well into the 19th century throughout Europe, notably in England by members of the
Dodd and Tubbs families. Cost was often the motive
for this variation: frogs with mother-of-pearl slides
and ferrules of precious metals are more expensive to
produce than plain open-channel ones. A lithograph
of c.1820 by Karl Begas (17941854) clearly shows
Nicol Paganini (17821840) using a bow with an
early transitional battle-axe head (illus.18), extremely
similar to the head of Hill Collection no.24 in
illus.11a.27
We are thus presented with a very different
picture of the violin bows history from c.1625 to
1800. The previously accepted idea was that players
were continually dissatisfied with the bow, impatiently seeking changes. However, a thoughtful look
at extant objects and sources, both written and
iconographic, indicates instead the reluctance of
players to part with familiar, well-functioning bows.
The short bow, now generally relegated to the
17 Gaetano Pugnani in Turin court attire with screw-frog bow (1770 or later) (Royal College of Music, London)
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