Saturday, March 8, 2014

The recurve bow



My son was explaining that the standard modern bow, the recurve bow, was in fact only invented in about 1750. Before that, the bow allowed triple and quadruple stops to be played solid, instead of broken as in modern performance practice. This video shows a selection from a Bach cello suite being performed with a historical bow. Recurve bows allow the normal types of staccato we're used to hearing these days, however.