# Bonnie and her Beaux



## Ingélou

When I got my Chinese starter violin, it had a cheap wooden bow in with it, which I named Beau. It did the job, though it had a nasty habit of juddering on slow notes - funny thing, all my bows have done that! Unfortunately, when I'm nervous, I start to shake from inside, and it transmits itself to my bow arm, and because it's from inside, I can't actually stop it. It's better than it was, but bow shake can still give me a Nasty Surprise, even when I'm playing for friends and apparently feeling relaxed.

In April that year I started lessons with Fiddle Guru, and he didn't like my pusillanimous way of bowing Playford tunes in particular. He'd insist that I tighten the bow as much as possible, even though I told him that Stella, my other teacher, liked me to play with a loose bow. I think Fiddle Guru was trying to turn Beau into a baroque bow, which has a much bigger distance between the bow hair and the stick. Fiddle Guru also made me press hard on the string - one of the practice assignments he set me was to see if I could play so loudly that he'd ask me to tone it down!

Some hope!
However, I did learn how to play forte, which with Stella I'd never quite managed to do.

A few weeks after I'd started lessons with the Guru came our planned holiday in Atholl. Two days before we were to set off, I was practising when suddenly - bang - Beau snapped. That sort of moment comes as a huge shock and you can't believe what's happened. I felt a surge of grief too to see a piece of Beau lying on the bedroom carpet. And I'd planned to practise every day on holiday.

We screamed up to Allen's, the music shop in Yarmouth, and bought a new cheap bow for £12, which I named Muzhik - at that price, he was indeed a peasant. Stephen Lyle, the luthier at the shop, was severe with me: 'A bow is a living thing, which oughtn't to be treated like that - I hate to see a bow in two pieces.'

I told him that my teacher liked me to tighten the bow and press hard. 'Don't do it,' Stephen said. 'Well, he's a young man, and very insistent with his views,' I said. 'Exactly. He's a young man, and you are an older woman. So just ignore him!'

Curiously enough, while I was away on holiday, my shoulder rest snapped, with the same sensation of shock! When I got back home, we went screaming up to Allen's to get a replacement.

But these mini-disasters made me nervous. I decided that I'd like to always have a spare bow, and asked Stephen to order me one. He chose a Brazilwood bow that cost me £150 - not much in bow terms, but more than I'd paid before. When it came, I liked the sound, and because I thought it had a 'Paris' frog, (not sure now), I called it Monsieur. I took it to my next lesson with Fiddle Guru, and he didn't notice that I had a new bow, but he did say that I had improved! 
Result...

However, in some ways I preferred my cheap bow, Muzhik, not only because it was lighter and easier to handle, but also because it had a softer sound, probably because the bow hair was loose and soft whatever you did to the frog. I was practising Suzuki pieces at the time, and I took to playing a piece first with Muzhik & then with Monsieur, or vice versa, to see which sounded best. It was actually quite a good way of keeping interest and focus.

Monsieur seemed particularly stiff when I was playing folk music. One day, after I'd been suffering from bow shake, the Guru asked me to try his baroque bow, and it did help. The baroque bow is a couple of inches shorter than the tourte bow, so I wondered if a three-quarter tourte bow might be better for me. I found a fibre glass one on the net from a London firm, P & H, that cost only £30, so it seemed worth trying. As soon as it came, I tried it out and loved it. I sent off for a duplicate so that I could have a three quarter bow for each of my violins, in each violin case, and that is what I play with all the time now. My bows are called Niel and Nathaniel, after the famous fiddling Gows.

After my grade 3 exam I let slip to Wilbert, my exam teacher, that I had a three quarter bow, and it really bothered him. He reckoned that the extra two inches would make a big difference to some pieces. I tried using Monsieur for a while, but he still felt heavy, so in the end I ordered a full-size fibre glass bow in the same series as Niel & Nathaniel.

Unfortunately it took weeks to come & Wilbert got the chance to nag about it for too many lessons. But eventually it did, and it was much the best out of my full size bows. I called it Gandeleyn after a medieval outlaw who'd obviously use a *long bow*.

I don't use it now because I'm not playing classical music, but I have it as a spare. I have now all four bow spaces filled up, so Muzhik and Monsieur live together in a cardboard cylinder lined with tissue paper at the top of John's wardrobe.

Fiddle Guru was always urging the advantages of baroque replica bows; their archery-bow shape means that they can play three strings at once (for harmonies) and that they taper the note in the correct baroque manner. But I had seen baroque bows for sale on the Norwich Baroque site, and they cost hundreds of pounds. Besides, I was such a scrappy player I didn't think it would make much difference.

But in Spring of 2014, the Guru said that he could get me a Chinese baroque replica bow for £50, the price of two lessons. Again I said no, but I did a bit of thinking over the week, and went back the next week & said I'd like to give it a go. The Guru put in a bid for a bow on e-bay, but it wasn't in time, so he decided to send for six bows & use them for other pupils, which would bring the cost down to £40 - an absolute snip!

When I came for that lesson, he had the six bows laid out - two black-haired & 4 whites. He kept rosining them up & letting me try them out. I had expected there to be no difference between the white & back hairs, but there was - the black was more sounding, & the white softer. In the end, the 2 blacks were in the final with one white, & I narrowed it down to the black-haired one I now play with. The Guru said that was the one he'd liked best too, and it has a tip like the 17th century bows that had been used by Lully, my favourite composer. So I felt delighted & I call this bow 'Monsieur le Noir', or Beau Noir for short.

It is a lot easier for me to produce the delicate tapering Baroque sound. And I also use it when playing tunes in front of friends, as the design makes it more stable & less liable to shake, though with my nerves, that's not foolproof. But I find the sound a little harsher than my cheap 3/4 tourte bow, and I also can't lift Beau Noir as well as I can Beau Niel - which is ironic, since I don't need to 'lift' for folk fiddle, but only for baroque!

After a week's practice with Beau Noir, I told the Guru at my next lesson that he'd been right to urge me to get a baroque bow, and I'd been wrong. He said, 'What did you say?' So I repeated it ... and this went on for a couple more times, after which he said, 'I think I'll have that in writing!'


----------

