Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Forget Me Not by Larry Redican from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about bowgrips. A fun topic. So is it a bow grip? Or is it a bow hold, it's usually called a bow grip. There was kind of a movement in the violin pedagogy world, I would say over the last 30 or 40 years to call it a bow hold. And teachers felt like saying grip might be encouraging students to grip or squeeze their bow too much, we could call it a bow hold. I mean, I don't think it makes a difference. I'm gonna call it a bow grip.
Is there a correct way to hold the bow? Now, there are a lot of self taught fiddlers who hold the bow all different ways. So you see their thumb, all different places, different things they're doing with their pinky. I've seen people you know, holding the bow in different places on the stick, or even holding it on the frog and not really in the traditional place on the stick.
As long as you're relaxed, and you're getting a good sound, you're kind of relaxing into the string and you've got a good contact point, you're getting the tone that you want out of the fiddle. It doesn't matter how you hold the bow, you're not hurting yourself, and you're getting the sound you want. There's no reason if your bow grip is comfortable, and it's working, that you would want to change it.
So So what am I even going to talk about? Well, I'll talk about the classical bow grip, what it is, and why it is the way it is. And we'll talk a little bit about fiddling in many things with classical violin, the bow grip developed in order to be able to play very difficult and complicated music. So what violinists need to be able to do at high levels are these advanced bow strokes such as spiccato, or sautielle, or less common like ricochet.
These are all bow strokes where you balance and you're looking to lifting your bow on and off the string, and you need it to be able to bounce. And in order for that you really need counter balance on your bow grip. Again, just be holding the bow and letting it move back and forth on the string because you're going to have to be lifting it and bouncing it and balancing it.
So what you've got in the classical bow grip is the thumb is bent, it's inside the frog. And it's bent. This is a pretty big difference between a lot of beginning players and fiddlers and the advanced classical violinists, because no part of your hand should be straight and locked in that includes your thumb, so your thumb is bent into the bow, so that it's curved, and it's not locked out, you know, the way you would standing, you could like lock your knees out, is very different from having them a little bit bent or just soft.
The pinkie is on top of the bow. So for fiddlers again, this doesn't make a huge difference. But for violin your first, second and third finger are wrapped around the bow and you kind of need them for the weight that you put in the string. But your pinkie is on top of the boat, it's counterbalancing between your thumb and your pinky. You can you have the balance and the control of the boat.
Another thing about classical bow grips is just that the hand is highly malleable, you work really hard to get the tension out of the hands so that you can be very, very gooey on the string and get all the crunches out.
The way we talked about a little bit in the tone podcast for classical players. They really don't want any bone noise or any of the noise of changing directions of the boat. So their hand is very relaxed, very malleable on their bow to get the sound that they want, which is basically the most ringing out of the instruments they could get with the least amount of bow noise and crunch.
So for fiddle, we don't need to do a lot of bouncing. I mean, maybe if you're Jean Carignon, and you're doing some kind of ninja bouncing in French Canadian stuff, but for most of fiddling, we may lift sometimes the ball off the string. But we don't have a need for that counterbalance. And we don't even necessarily have a need to be fully malleable and gooey on the string and not have any bone noise. So you don't necessarily need parts of your fingers or your hand to be all curved and bend and supple, things can be more locked.
In general, the less tense you are, I think you'll have less pain, you'll have a more kind of resilient bow grip for the long run. So I teach people all different ages. And you know, a young person may be tense and a part of their body and it might not be hurting them. But because I teach older folks, I know that having tension and doing repetitive motions can lead to limiting amounts of pain, a lack of motion. And so I'll always try to guide people towards having less tension in their bow grip in their bow arm. Some people are tense first and then they release it over time as they get more comfortable, as with many things.
Our tune today is Forget Me Not by Larry Redican. So Larry Redican was a fiddler born in Dublin. Although his parents were both flute players from county Sligo. He didn't go into the flute. He chose the fiddle and studied studied in Dublin with Frank O'Higgins and emigrated to the US in 1928. So in the United States, he was a member of the New York Ceidli band, and a member of the all Ireland senior championship trio with Jack Cohen on flute and Patty O'Brien on the box.
He was known for having very good time. What I read about this was that in the 1950s, there were some new dance teachers that came from Belfast, Peter and Cyril McNiff, and that they had a new style of dancing, that slowed the tempo up to put in more fancy footwork. And to play for that kind of dancing. You had to be very, very solid with your tempo, which is always the case for dancing but especially if you're playing slow and then the dancer is trying to fit in a lot of footwork, a lot of fancy stuff.
So Larry Redican was a fiddler who was very sought after for the style because he could play at different tempos and play very very solidly and steadily I don't have I didn't come across an explanation for the name of this tune, Forget Me Not maybe it's the flower maybe it's just the sentiment. But here we go, you can decide for yourself?
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