Still newer light on the old bow

Apologies to Robert Seletsky for the long delay in publication of this letter. Ed. In my article ‘New light on the old bow’ (Early Music, xxxii/2 (2004) (Part 1), pp.286–301; Early Music, xxxii/3 (2004) (Part 2), pp.415–26), I made a few statements which I would like to emend. In Part 1, on p.294, in my zeal to defend the short bow, I presumed that archets communs, appearing in the catalogues of mid-18th-century French luthiers, meant ‘short bows’. In fact, these are contrasted with archets à vis or ‘screw bows’; thus, communs is intended to indicate clip-in frogs without reference to bow length. While it does not negate the fact that short bows were still popular at the time, it is not a direct reference to them. In Part 2, on p.417, I noted that the two bows thought to be owned by Giuseppe Tartini and housed in the Conservatorio di Musica ‘G. Tartini’ at Trieste were constructed of legno santo (‘holy wood’), as described by the curator of the collection in 1969. Italian bow-maker Antonino Airenti has kindly provided me with some brilliant recent photographs proving that the woods are nothing so exotic. The long bow is simple snakewood—overly thinned, octagonal and too light, as I wrote—while the later bow—also too light—is apparently made of satiné, cacique or some other wood in the brosimum family of woods. Information about the material of the later bow is courtesy of Toronto bow-maker Stephen A. Marvin; we both dissent from Mr Airenti's description of the wood as ‘pernambuco’. The single extant clip-in frog, which evidently fits the long bow very poorly and the later bow not at all, is not boxwood as I had been informed earlier, but is probably pernambuco (again, I disagree with Mr Airenti's designation of ‘palm wood’). I should also note that the later bow is of very rough, almost folk-bow, quality; it is currently badly broken as well. It seems unlikely that a noted master like Tartini would have used a bow of this grade professionally. One may muse that musicians typically accumulate all sorts of instruments throughout their lives, and at their deaths, the precise origins or purposes of such objects are often unclear and misconstrued. At all events, the new information makes note 6 in Part 2 of ‘New light on the old bow’ unnecessary, however intriguing I found some of the information contained therein.

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