Violin Video Lesson: Discovering Figure Eights on the Violin

Hi, and welcome to Virtualsheetmusic.com's Meet the Expert. My name is William Fitzpatrick, and I am the Henri Temianka professor of violin at the Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music at Chapman University. I am as well director of MusiShare in Irvine, California.

Well, today, I thought we could talk a bit about how the bow arm moves, about discovering figure eights. But before we get into figure eights, we need to understand that in the bow arm, as in the left arm, everything hinges on the elbow, not on the shoulder or the wrist.

Okay. Let's have a look at what goes on with this side and this side of my body when we're playing. Well, here's one. When I shift, my left hand looks like this. Right? My right elbow, when I'm moving my bow, it looks like this. Well, those movements are identical. Because I move my left elbow, my wrist and fingers are free. The identical observation occurs in the use of the bow arm, as the movement from my elbow unlocks my wrists and fingers in the same way.

So by using this, by understanding this, the rest and fingers in both hands are free, and the shoulder is nonactive. Kinesthetically speaking, both sides are in motion simultaneously, working together in the same way. So this brings us to the theme of this video, which is about figure eights in the bow arm.

When we study the movement of the bow arm, the first thing that we notice is that its movement is not in a straight line. This is where the figure eights become apparent, not in a straight line. It's not this way. It's this way. So what is a figure eight? Well, a figure eight is the path that the bow is taking when it's playing. [music].

I think of that as a figure eight, something that looks like this. You can see that figure eight. Let's have a look at a few possibilities. Here, the movement is going halfway around the top of the first ball. This shows the path of the bow going from a lower string to a higher string. Did you see that path? I'll even go from the bottom. You can really see the path at that point.

Here's a movement going halfway around the top of the first ball and the bottom of the second ball. So we're going to go like this. Here we go. This shows the motion for a string change and crescendo. Here is the movement going halfway around the bottom of the first ball and the top of the second ball. There are so many possibilities. I-O. But of course, this size of a ball we're not . . . we couldn't possibly use.

So we're going to take it, and we're going to bring it into a smaller, smaller gesture. It will look like this. It's not going to be very noticeable. It's almost going to be invisible, unless you know what you're looking for.

So let's take this a step further. Now, can you imagine that figure eight as two balls, two 3D balls that are stuck together? This increases the number of paths available. It could allow for what we call compensation bowings. Now, a compensation bowing is when we're going from this point of contact to this point of contact. How do I get there?

I'm going to start deliberately, push out, bring the bow over, and there we are. I went from here to there. I'll do it again. Now, what if I wanted to do the opposite? Here we go. I went from here to here. These are called compensation bowings.

Well, that's it for this video. If you have any questions, comments, or special requests, please feel free to post them. See you next time.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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