“The Bach Bow”: An Ingenious Discovery or a Beautiful Legend?

This article is written in Russian. You can read it here.

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DOI 10.34690/253

Author Alesya S. Tekucheva

Affiliation Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory, Moscow, Russia

Email as.tekucheva@yandex.ru

ORCID

0000-0002-3438-8280

Abstract

This article clarifies the phenomenon of the Bach bow. The question of how to play Bach’s polyphonic works for solo violin goes back to the era of Romanticism. The design of the standard violin bow makes it incapable of playing simultaneous chords indicated in Bach’s scores. Musicologist Arnold Schering first suggested at the beginning of the 20^th century that there had been a special bow with a widely-curved wood piece to play all four strings of the violin simultaneously. Albert Schweitzer supported this new theory and described Bach bow construction in his monograph. According to these musicologists, Bach’s famous violin solo sonatas and partitas were composed specifically for this type of bow. Violinists accepted these ideas and made the transition from the theoretical model of the curved bow to performing practice possible. After analysing several treatises of the 17^th–18^th centuries, the history and development of the Bach bow, sound quality as well as the inconveniences faced by the violinists and also after comparing the audible result with Bach’s manuscripts, the author of this article proves the Bach bow theory to be unfounded and the Bach bow itself inappropriate for performing baroque music—in contrast to modern art: it would be appropriate to restrict the use of this device to the range of modern compositions whose authors consciously focus on the possibilities of the curved bow developed in 1989 by M. Bach.

Keywords J. S. Bach, A. Schweitzer, A. Schering, “the Bach bow”, sonatas and partitas for solo violin, Ciaccona from Partita BWV 1004, violin technique, historically informed performance

For citation

Tekucheva, A. S. “‘The Bach bow’: an ingenious discovery or a beautiful legend?” Muzykal’naya akademiya [Music Academy], no. 3, 2022, pp. 54–75, doi:10.34690/253. (In Russ.)

Published 16.05.2022

Approved 29.07.2022

Submitted 26.09.2022

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