Bowing Drills: Highly Adaptable Exercises for All Ages

Abstract

In the orchestral string world, the left-hand is primarily responsible for pitch while the right-hand is accountable for much of the remaining elements of music including tone, dynamics, articulations, and phrasing. While many orchestral string methods focus primarily on pitch and reading music, tone production is often neglected. Few resources address the use of the right-hand isolated from the left-hand. Those resources that are available address only one instrument at a time, so classroom use is impractical. Furthermore, many students in the United States only receive instruction from their public school teachers, who often do not have extensive experience on a student’s particular instrument. The result is dominated materials and students lacking a beautiful, resonate, stylistically appropriate sound quality.

The method introduced in this document—Bowing Drills: Highly Adaptable Exercises for All Ages—develops bowing technique to the equivalent proficiency of string players’ left-hand skills. By isolating the bow with several exercises, teachers can quickly improve their students’ tone, timing, clarity, and ensemble playing. This method focuses on bowing through string crossings aimed at helping beginners who cannot read music to advanced students who are perfecting their tone. Five basic bowing patterns that isolate string crossings on adjacent strings, skipping strings, and double stops are used to improve bowing performance at increasing tempi. The patterns are highly adaptable and can be used for individual or group warm-ups and practice exercises, or to improve basic to complex orchestral bowing passages. Variations are limitless and easily adaptable. By using the concepts found in Bowing Drills, teachers can create their own exercises to address any bowing, articulation, dynamic, style, adding in the left-hand and more.

Additionally, the traditional orchestra educational system in the United States is filled with barriers, including the prohibitive costs of instruments, materials, and private lessons, as well as the background knowledge needed to understand technical concepts found in many methods. Bowing Drills is a free-use resource suitable for school orchestras, private lessons, collegiate applied lessons, and more. Because there is no cost, students only need to know their open strings to play. Financial and knowledge-based barriers are removed from the method.

In this document I cover the need for a new method and existing materials that can be supplemented with Bowing Drills. I will also teach the five basic bowing patterns of the method, how to adapt the patterns for your individual teaching needs, and how to isolate learned skills and scaffold in new concepts through easily memorizable exercises. Additionally, this document contains double bass-specific bowing patterns and I apply the concepts to standard double bass literature.