Bowing Isn't Everything (or is it?)
Sometimes when I’m playing fiddle it seems like my left hand hasn’t the foggiest notion what my right hand is doing, and it doesn’t really matter, because rhythm, tone, and feeling depend mostly on what’s happening with your bow. I don’t know if that’s how classical violinists think about bow technique, but it certainly seems true for fiddling.
It’s a little counterintuitive to say that bowing is so important when a good deal of learning to play fiddle has to do with memorizing complicated patterns of motion in your left hand. I still spend a lot of my time in practice just trying to get the notes down, making them clear and consistent. Often I will tell myself that I’m going to practice scales more, but then get lost in trying to play new tunes. Of course, if I practiced scales more regularly, I suppose I’d have an easier time learning tunes.
At one point last weekend - when I was at the Indiana Fiddlers’ Gathering - a fellow fiddler and I traded instruments during a conversation about our respective searches for new ones. I recently acquired mine, and they were in a trial period with one after a fairly lengthy search. When they picked up my fiddle they went into an Irish tune, and had a confidence in their tone that was really striking to me. I’m still too hung up on inaccuracies in my fingering to just play out like that.
The difference in sound was not in the left hand technique though, it was in the bowing. My fiddling friend put that bow right in there, grabbed those strings and pulled. And it sounded good.
Speaking of pull reminds me of something I heard Earl White say in a workshop I attended Saturday morning. He would walk us through some particular phrase, and then count off in this funny, arrhythmic way “five, six, seven, and pull…” Idiosyncrasies aside, he was a really good teacher, I thought. Very personable - seems the kind of guy who can hang out with just about anyone and have a good time. Got through a couple of tunes, too - “Old Cumberland,” and “Lambs Wool Rag,” in just under an hour.
His bowing definitely had that old-timey feel to it - pretty much all in the arm (as opposed to the wrist), with separate bow strokes on each note and an almost biting attack. Not necessarily pretty, but its got a huge amount of rhythm. I try to put the “Tennessee Shuffle,” - where, in a series of four eighth or sixteenth notes, you slur the first two and then bow the second two separately - into my playing as much as I can. Which sometimes leads me to carefully mark every single bowing in my copy of a tune, so I can play the tune consistently. I find that sometimes, if I don’t hit a downbeat the right way it can derail me completely.
Practicing as I do - often working my way carefully through a written copy of a tune phrase by phrase - can sometimes put me at a disadvantage in a jam, as I end up welded to one particular version of a tune, and don’t recognize variations. This happened to me at a jam with the tune “Five Miles from Town” - we got through playing it, and I asked “what’s the name of that one?” I surprised to learn it’s a tune I’ve been working on with some frequency in the last month, with complete notation of the bowing and all.
On the other hand, I was able to lead a good number of tunes in jams over the weekend, so I must be something right. I discovered I even have a bit of a reputation as a decent fiddle player, which surprised me at least as much as anything last weekend. There were some top notch players in the jams at Battleground.
What really got me thinking about bowing was something that happened in a jam late Friday night. I was leading some tune - I don’t recall which - and I noticed my bow moving in a way it hadn’t before, with a degree of rhythmic articulation I haven’t gotten up till now. I spent a good deal of time in the jam circles playing simple shuffle rhythms and I think it did me some good - maybe its something to add to my practice routine? I mean, if there were space in my schedule to practice more than I do (alas, there is not).
Nevertheless, it felt like I made incremental progress out there in Battleground. So much of bow technique comes down to tiny details pertaining to speed, pressure, and attack. In another session with Bella Issakova (whose accent would not necessarily lead you to suspect she’s a master of Irish fiddle), she demonstrated how you can achieve a kind of rhythmic effect with the bow by jamming it hard into the string for just moment, creating a dissonant scratch (and thinking of it as a scratch reminds me of the classic turntable technique of record scratching, which is maybe closer to this bow technique than one might expect at the first) which, at speed, sounds like a little rhythmic accent within a melodic line. At one point Bella said something to effect that much of the sound of Irish fiddle comes down to bowing, which I’ve also heard said of Appalachian fiddling. The Midwestern fiddle style, as I’ve written before, has a stronger sense of melody, and leans a little more into left hand technique than other old-time styles. Even so, I’d say the bow hand is still responsible for the lion’s share of the sound.
I spent a lot of my time in Battleground jamming over by my friends Brenda and Drew’s camp. Brenda’s bow has always stood out to me - she’s got this funny looping motion to her bow hand that I can’t quite figure out, but it produces a marvelous shuffling rhythm. The shuffle rhythm isn’t everything in old-time, but its a lot. Getting it just right is the work of a lifetime.