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W ould you agree that the difference is a near-horizontal rear forearm, subsequently maintaining the connection with the shoulders? I think a more vertical forearm is a result of keeping tension in the rear-most scapula. I believe that these players are actually loading their scap’ in such a way that their elbow moves into a more ‘slotting’ position. The reason they maintain connection is because they maintain the ‘scap load’ and let the rotation take their hands/bat to the ball. In some of these drills, the vertical forearm is a checkpoint or even a ‘cue’ to get the young player to maintain some scap’ tension, which prevents disconnection and excessive external rotation of the shoulder/upper arm.”Viola da gamba bowing biomechanics is quite a bit different from bowing members of the violin family. For one thing, the under-handed way of holding the bow means that the wrist and forearm have fewer (remaining) degrees of freedom and less range of motion, compared to over-handed violin bowing. And the dorsal flexion of the arm—and supination/rotation of the forearm—to hold the viola da gamba bow put more emphasis on the strength and agility of the supraspinatus. With that in mind, CMT readers who’ve asked about viola da gamba bowing and strengthening exercises may find some of the sports medicine and rehab links below useful. Especially ones that are involved in épée fencing.
— Anonymous sports medicine physician, discussing biomechanics of baseball arm motions.
I f you begin with a backbow (‘roverso’), then you must be prepared also to keep the same consistent alternation of back and forward bows. Practice both ways, so that you are not caught unawares and are unable to straighten out the bowing in a fast passage. A fast run that begins off the beat must start with ‘roverso’ while a similar passage beginning on the beat would start with ‘dritto’. If you have a sequence of ‘groppetti’ [English seventeenth century theorists would call them ‘relishes’ or ‘double relishes’ –Ian Gammie] then begin the first on a forward bow, take the next on a back bow etc.”
— Sylvestro Ganassi, Regola Rubertina, 1542, Book I, Chapter 6 (quoted in Gammie I, Chelys 1978; 8:23-30).
T he bow is to be held with thumb, middle and fore-finger. The thumb and middle finger hold the bow so that it does not fall, the index finger applies greater or lesser pressure on the strings as is required. [This would preclude having a finger on the hair of the bow, as was common practice in the seventeenth century, and the articulation and volume is to be controlled through the stick instead. There has been some confusion in modern times over what Ganassi meant precisely with his description of the fingers. I consider it unlikely that he meant a player to have the index finger on the hair while the thumb and middle finger hold the stick—an unusual physical contortion at the very least. Ganassi intends that the index finger should apply pressure to the strings of the viol, not to the strings or hairs of the bow. –Ian Gammie] The bow should be placed about four finger widths from the bridge—depending of course on the size of the instrument, the arm relaxed, the hand firm but not tense, so as to draw a clear and pure sound from the viol. Playing closer to the bridge will give a rougher tone, playing nearer to the finger-board will give a softer, sweeter tone.”
— Sylvestro Ganassi, Regola Rubertina, 1542, Book I, Chapter 6 (quoted in Gammie I, Chelys 1978; 8:23-30).
P etites Règles qu’il faut observer dans les commencements.
- Ne lever jamais aucun doigt sans nécessité.
- Les Pieds sur le Plat.
- Le Pouce suis ainsi le doigt du milieu.
- Montrer le Poignet.
- Ne creuser point la main.
- Ne point faire le dos d'âne.
- Fermer le poignet en poussant, et ne présenter le dedans.
- Ouvrir le poignet en tirant.
- Commencer le Poussé par le bout de l’Archet.
- Commencer le Tiré tout proche le poignet.
- Soutenir la Pointe de l’Archet
- Tirer et pousser à Angles droits.
- Ne point tendre le coude.
- Ne point faire de Grimace.
- Ne point souffler.
[Little Rules for Beginners
- Never move any finger unnecessarily.
- Keep the feet on the floor.
- The thumb is the key.
- Show the wrist.
- Don’t ‘dig’ the hand.
- Don’t do the ‘donkey-back’ (sway-back posture; lordotic spine curvature).
- Close the wrist while pushing, and don’t present the inside.
- Open the wrist drawing from it.
- Begin the stroke by the tip of the bow.
- When you begin the pull, close the wrist.
- Support the point of the bow and pull and push at right angles.
- Don’t extend or stretch the elbow.
- Don’t grimace.
- Don’t blow.]”
E ven in the first five quartets Bartók remains elusive. One might assume that he possessed something of Yeats’s power to develop continuously, and that this is revealed in his tireless revision of his means of self-expression—but what was he trying to express? One feels in late Beethoven, as in late Mozart, that certain changes in technique reflect a change of temperament, a deepening, a serenity which, in Mozart’s case, gives the music a kind of weight without changing its basic quality of gaiety. But it is not this quality that distinguishes [Bartók]... Bartók struck most of the people who met him as a curiously inexpressive person—remote and aloof. As a small boy he had a skin disease that covered him with sores for six years. During this time he was so ashamed of his appearance that he felt at ease only with his mother. The disease ultimately disappeared. But instead of becoming less introverted, Bartók spent his nights worrying that it might come back... [Bartók was diagnosed with leukemia in 1941, and died of complications of this 4 years later.] The story strikes a Proustian note: it is clear from the beginning that Bartok is one of those with a basic mistrust of life and a desire to retreat into some inner world... ”
— Colin Wilson, p. 87.
W e human beings are governed by the urge to conform and blend in with our surroundings. We follow fashion. We become part of cultures of conformity—religious communities, military groups, sports teams. We take on corporate identities. Likewise, we seem to have the capacity to grow into our built environment, to familiarize ourselves with it, and eventually to find ourselves at home there. We have a chameleon-like urge to adapt, and, given the increasing mobility of contemporary life, we are constantly having to do so. The desire for camouflage is a desire to feel connected—to find our place in the world and to feel at home.”The defining quality in Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin and Piano (1928; revised 1945) is its elusiveness. Hiding the simplicity and forthrightness of Hungarian rural culture within the refined modalities of urban art-music—this is inherent in Bartók’s compositional methods in many of his pieces. And in fact disguising and embedding like this are done by Kodàly and Grieg and Brahms and many other ethnomusicologist-composers, too. But this Rhapsody embodies camouflage of a deeper, psychological sort.
— Neil Leach.
A reception aesthetics calls into question one of the central tenets of analysis—the stability of the work’s identity, its capacity to make its own statement independent of any recognitional condition. Ultimately it calls into question the very possibility of an ontological essence for the musical work.”
— Jim Samson, in Cook & Everist, p. 44.
I ’d like people to consider what it means to let the government control our daily lives [with intrusive surveillance, erosion of privacy, and coercive technology]. When we are controlled we hand over our individual responsibilities to the state. I wanted to make a suit for the non-criminal citizen whose house is being watched 24 hours by street surveillance cameras. I’m also responding [to a progressively more prevalent wish that ordinary people have] to disappear [and regain their privacy and dignity].”
— Desireé Palmen, 2008.
W hen Florestan is imprisoned for speaking an unacceptable truth, we are to suppose ... that he was once able to speak the truth, and then he was buried in a silent dungeon for having done so. What are we to make of other notions of silence: the case of someone already invisible and unable to speak at all for political reasons, someone who has been silenced because what he or she might represent is a scandal that undermines existing institutions?”
— Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 2000, p. 521.
W arfare has changed in the same ways as the composition of pictures... War has become anonymous and now renounces the desire for show.”James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong will perform Béla Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin & Piano and other works this coming Saturday, 01-MAR-2008, in Kansas City. We look forward to trying to unwrap Bartók’s beautiful enigma. At the very least, we look forward to vicariously concealing ourselves in plain sight, in the pungent folk-music extroversions of introverted Hungarian diaspora.
— Pablo Picasso, 1944, on improving camouflage, letter to Apollinaire, quoted in Belting, p. 336.
G ilroy’s notion of ‘changing same,’ in which reiteration ‘is not some invariant essence that gets enclosed subsequently in a shape-shifting exterior [nor is it …] the sign of an unbroken, integral inside protected by a camouflaged husk.’ [It] is conducive to the dynamic, complex movement that Gilroy deems essential for formation of diaspora.”
— Cameron Bushnell, Univ Maryland PhD Dissertation, 2007, p. 118.
W hat these suppositions together come to is a denial that composers need or want accurate information about music, at least some of the time. Indeed, a more extreme account of the vocational difference wout have it that an occasional outright falsehood may be of use to the composer, even though believing it would be beneath the theorist. This view might leave room for a special discourse that might be called ‘compositional theory’ in a gesture of indulgence to those whose activities depend on occasional self-deception. These ideas seem dubious to me; it is not easy to understand how they can enjoy the credence that the undeniably do in some quarters of our musical culture. Beyond this, I feel obliged to say such ideas are offensive to me: taken to their logical end, they make me out to be too intellectually concerned to be a real composer, yet too uncritical to be a real scholar... Imagine walking in on Beethoven at work. He tapes middle D# a few times on his piano, with evident interest and perhaps a trace of amusement. You can’t hear anything amusing in his D#s, though. In fact, you can’t hear much of anything at all in them. Obviously Beethoven has something in mind that you don’t, that lets him hear something in his D#s that you can’t. What does he have in mind?”
— Joseph Dubiel, in Cook & Everist, p. 264.
