JAVS Spring 2022

Often, we’ll have asymmetrical bow ings, that is, bow ings where more or less time is spent playing down-bow versus spent play ing up-bow. In order not to drift toward the tip and run out of bow, we need to use the same amount of bow for each note, which means the

As you can see, the Three Laws of Sound Production— and the accompanying sound charts— have a great deal of explanatory power, which can help any violist trying to gain a deeper understanding of how to control their instrument’s sound. Of course, these Laws don’t explain everything there is to know about sound production; for example, they don’t address the fact that the bow will normally need to be farther from the bridge on lower pitched strings and closer on higher ones, or that the bow will be closer to the bridge when playing in higher posi tions, or the difference in sound generated with a flat bow versus using smaller amounts of hair. A genuinely exhaus tive explanation of everything that can be known about sound production might easily be a thousand pages, and the Journal of the American Viola Society is fairly clear that they don’t allow articles to be quite that long. Hopefully, though, the readers will be satisfied with what amounts to a somewhat comprehensive first-level understanding of how it all works. Figure 23: twice as much time is spent playing down-bow as playing up-bow, requiring the eighth notes to be played with double the bow speed to prevent drifting toward the tip of the bow.

Figure 22: sul ponticello played near the bridge but with a medium or low-density sound. The sul ponticello sound lies in Wispyville .

bow needs to move twice as fast on the eighth notes as on the quarter notes. The problem is that then, because of the First Law, the eighth notes would be louder due to this increase in speed, producing a hiccup effect, which we usually want to avoid in this situation. To solve this, we can simply do what we did back in Exercise 3: lighten the bow when moving it faster, preventing the eighth notes from being louder than the quarter notes.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring 2022