WHY IS THE BOWMAKING FRENCH ?

Why are the bows French, the violins Italian and philosophy Greek ? Because there were Tourte, Stradivari and Socrates . This logic can't be faulted !

 Francois Xavier Tourte

To start this new series of articles, I thought to talk more deeply with that part dealing with the evolutionary history of the bow. But before describing in some monographs the most famous masters, I think it is more useful to focus on the period of time when these schools were established and why.

The development of instruments and bows, as for most of the things, thinking included, is characterized by key people, intellect, intuition and sensitivity above average. They really create with their work a fracture between before and after, radically and permanently changing the world to which they devoted.

The Italian violin making, even the modern one , must absolutely thank at least two genes of this discipline: Stradivari and Guarnieri. After they got their hands on the violin, changing volumes, dimensions, and camber, the tool has virtually completed its structural evolution, It is always the same.

In the bowmaking names and places may change, but the way in which the process develops is absolutely identical, if not even more evident.

The names of the two Fathers of the modern bow are Francois Xavier Tourte known as "Le Jeune" and Jean Pierre Marie Persoit. These two gentlemen have given in a different way the largest contribution to the development of the modern bow and of the classical French school of bow making.

Tourte, as said before, is an absolute alien and represents the Big Bang of the modern bow. If you compare his work, I don't say to those of its predecessors, but with those of his contemporaries, and then do the same with a bow of our time, the disproportion of time will appear obvious.

A Tourte built in 1800, is exactly the same, if not for a change in the distribution curve introduced by Sartory around 1890, to a bow built today 2011; two hundred and more years later. The closed frog, with covered horsehair, the ring, the slide, the mortise and use of pernambuco. If you had the chance to see Tourte's production, you would realize that, although for some things to the embryonic level, he already did everything, also from stylistic point of view. But if you look at the bows of his near contemporary, Nicolas Duchaine I, built in 1780, i.e. twenty years before, they will not even seem of the same family of today's bows.

Another key pawn for the French school is most definitely what I call the greatest businessman in the history of classical instruments: Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.

At that time school and work were very closely intertwined. Those who wanted to learn a trade had to work in an already well-going shop, the most coveted of all was that one of Vuillaume, because by him worked the best craftsmen of that time. Here's an example: Dominique Peccatte, to whom I give a third place together with Etienne Pajeot in the ranking of the most important craftsmen in this discipline, at the age of sixteen years moved from Mirecourt to Paris and went to work in Vuillaume's workshop. This gave him the opportunity to study with an absolute master, the number two in fact, Persoit. Very particular figure , about whom I will talk in the coming weeks.

Of course century after century the know-how has spread to at least a good part of Europe. In Germany there was Pfretzschner, who had studied and worked with Vuillaume, and contributed to the development of a German way of the bow, much more focused on concreteness and solidity than the French one.

In Italy, a cross street was followed, focused on the scientific selection of building materials and the application of this method to traditional building techniques.

Nowadays the difference between the quality of a bow made in France and another one made in Italy or Germany doesn't exist anymore but it took a couple of centuries, and considering the in-born reluctance of the craftsmen to teach their secrets, are not even many, but finally, in some cases there were also some sensational overtakings.

After all, the Greeks gave us philosophy but unfortunately we never learned how to use it, even if I think we gave ear to Aristotle a bit too much.

So long

Paolo.