• Percussive Bowing: Between the Note and the Noise

As many parents are well aware, young string students take years to develop a beautiful sound. It is a hard-won triumph of fine motor skills over the obstacles of physics, nurtured and refined under the watchful eyes of experienced teachers. 

So, it is to the open minds of those students and teachers that I appeal when I propose the possibility of exploring other sonic possibilities and developing a second language on their instruments, a language not of dulcet melodies, but of percussive noises. 

Why Percussion?

Why would we need a string player to make these percussive noises, some may wonder? If it’s rhythmic noises that are required, we have whole percussion sections full of noisemakers large and small.

Part of the answer is simply that most string players are neglecting half of their musical potential by thinking and functioning primarily as melody instruments. We have a huge range of percussive possibilities that have gone largely unexplored. So why not? 

Why Has Rhythmic Playing Been Ignored?

The fact that these sounds are largely unexplored has almost everything to do with the fact that towards the end of the 19th and into the 20th century, string playing took a turn away from the popular music world of which it was always a major part—the world of folk music and dance music. The emphasis, especially for violinists, turned more and more toward virtuosic and melodic playing, the repertoire dominated by solo material such as concertos and sonatas, with much less emphasis on serving as the rhythmic accompaniment for singers, dancers, or other instrumentalists. String playing and teaching became codified and reached a state of arrested development, being played and taught more or less the same way ever since.   

Meanwhile, the rest of the musical universe was carried along on the ever- changing current of popular music—into the jazz age, the swing era, bebop, rock, hip hop and beyond.

Rhythm Playing is the Key to Popular Music

By reclaiming our rhythmic potentialities as string players, we are not just activating our neglected rhythmic side or exploring new sonic territory. More significantly, we are finally rejoining the rest of the contemporary popular musical culture which surrounds us all. We are repairing one of the most devastating schisms in the history of music: the absence of strings as a significant instrument in popular music. 

Playing popular rhythms connects us to popular music because rhythm defines dance, and dance, as far back as the earliest secular music, has defined the style of the era. And to be rhythmic in a contemporary way, we need to be percussive, to use sounds which are more typical of our popular music than our classical music past.

Guitar players are all familiar with the dual roles their instrument can play: lead guitar and rhythm guitar. We string players have the same capabilities. We have long nurtured our melodic side. But our rhythm side is almost as unexplored as the dark side of the moon. So let’s take a closer look.

Horizontal Vs. Vertical

The main difference between guitars and strings is that string players use a bow. This incredible tool is capable of an astonishing array of sounds, ranging from the softest, purest breath of a vocal-like melody, to sharp, aggressive sonic attacks.

We think of bowing a string instrument, generally, as a back and forth motion—down bows and up bows. These strokes can be fully “on the string”, meaning smooth or legato. Or, it can also be somewhat “off the string”, meaning shorter notes in which the bow seems to bounce somewhat on the string, also known as spiccato.

String players tend to think of the bow stroke as primarily horizontal, with the possibility of adding vertical elements of varying amounts for shorter articulations. 

But what if we use the bow to create a completely vertical stroke that has no horizontal motion at all? How is that even possible?

It’s possible by playing all the way at the base of the bow, the “frog” as it’s called, and by using the bow in a sort of limited in and out motion instead of the more usual back and forth. What occurs, if your hand is relaxed and the bow is allowed to make a tiny skid on the string, is a sharp percussive noise which has no pitch. It is a purely percussive note. We call this stroke a “chop.”

The Chop can be used as a simple percussive hit, like a snare drum. Or, by developing this stroke, into what I call a “Compound Chop”, we can create a more complex series of percussive noises that can function like a shaker, playing the subdivision or fast notes of a groove. We can use a chop stroke to imitate a drum kit, playing rhythmic grooves employing different types of vertical percussive sounds to replicate different drums.

The Land In Between

And in between the traditional horizontal bow strokes and these vertical purely percussive “chops” is a vast musical landscape of rhythmic sound possibilities; a rich garden of crunchy, chunky, bluesy, gritty, crackly, gnarly, crispy, slappy, funky musical goodies and nutrients that will nourish and bring rhythm to any groove. 

There’s a reason bowed string instruments have survived centuries and have been used in almost every kind of music since the dawn of man. The ability to skillfully manipulate a bow on strings has seemingly limitless possibilities of expression. Few instruments can command the subtleties of expressiveness like strings, and much of that is due to the development of the modern bow, which is a marvel of engineering.

Not only can string players soar like a vocalist or a lead guitarist, they can also lay down a groove like the funkiest rhythm guitar player, but with the added ability to access this wide range of articulation in between the vertical and the horizontal. By comparison, there is only so much a guitar player can do with a pick. A bow is simply a much more complex and capable tool.

Is It Note or Is It Noise?

But, limited though they may be () we can learn a lot from rhythm guitar players. The lead guitar always plays the hero, but it’s the rhythm player who makes you dance. And if we break it down, we find that this rhythm dance magic is a combination of 1) perfect timing, 2) an instinct for catchy rhythmic patterns, and 3) the perfect tone, which comes down to that ineffable sonic cocktail of note and noise.

And when it comes to tone and articulation, this is where string players can offer so much richness. Often, it’s the understated, muted half-notes that do the best job of forming the all-important musical connective tissue between the pure rhythm of the drum and the pure melody of the vocalist or lead guitar. It’s the perfect synthesis of tone and rhythm that gets the job done. Is it a noise with a bit of pitch to it, or a pitch with a strong percussive edge? 

Explore!

Because there are so many possibilities of tone/noise that are new to the string sound-palette, there are not a lot of helpful and specific bowing terms for rhythm bowing as there are for more traditional bow strokes. But what’s important is not to know what to call these sounds or how to categorize or even notate them. There may be too many subtleties to notate effectively. What’s important is simply to explore and discover how these rough-hewn, less-beautiful, less-traditionally classical sounds and rhythms fit into contemporary popular music. 

Beautiful classical tone and vibrato may be perfect for Tschaikovsky, but they’ll sound a little absurd when playing a rock or jazz tune. It’s the noisy, rambunctious, iconoclastic tones that are exactly right for contemporary popular styles. 

So, maybe it’s time to start teaching our string students not only how to preserve the wonderful classical musical world they came from, but also how to fit in with the popular musical world all around them.

Bio:

Redefining the role of the violin in contemporary music, Tracy Silverman has contributed significantly to the repertoire and development of the 6-string electric violin and what he calls “post-classical violin playing.” 

Lauded by BBC Radio as “the greatest living exponent of the electric violin”, Silverman was formerly first violinist with the innovative Turtle Island String Quartet, and was named one of 100 distinguished alumni by The Juilliard School. A concert electric violinist, Silverman is the subject of several electric violin concertos composed for him by Pulitzer winner John Adams, “Father of Minimalism” Terry Riley, Nico Muhly and Kenji Bunch, as well as the composer of 3 electric violin concertos of his own. 

A long-standing advocate for music education, Silverman is the author of Strum Bowing: How to Groove on Strings, is an in-demand clinician and on the string faculty at Belmont University and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.  www.TracySilverman.com