Bowing and Batting

Know what made me think about bowing recently? Reading “Albert’s Second Act” by Tom Verducci in the baseball preview edition of Sports Illustrated.  Among other things, the article had this to say about hitting a baseball and Albert Pujols’s prodigious skill in this area.

Verducci: “Pujols's swing is a technical wonder, a kinetic event that causes the most mayhem with the least effort” (p. 1 of the online edition of the article).

A bow stroke, too, is a “kinetic event.” A good violinist should be able to foster musical mayhem (in a good way) efficiently, not wasting energy on bow strokes, but channeling that energy into the strings.

Pujols: "The high fastball, when I hit it, it's like, Wow, I didn't even feel it. Why? Because all I did was throw the hands. Sometimes in BP I try to hit the ball as far as I can, and most of the time it's impossible. I can't do it. But when I take a real nice easy swing toward the ball? Man, the ball just goes" (pp. 5-6 of the online edition of the article).

He’s talking about a high fastball that he hit more than 400 feet for a home run in the 2011 World Series (edit: video below, 0:02), and he “didn’t even feel it” because the finely calibrated flow of his swing merged perfectly with the energy of the 96 mph pitch. I wish I could get my bowing to do that. Sometimes I feel like I’m flailing away, expending all this energy, and it just isn’t translating into my sound—not in a good way, anyway.

I’m working on that, but it’s one of those things that’s getting worse before it gets better. I’ve talked about working on bow distribution in the Bach. However, another thing that Ms. L. has been having me work on all along is my bow hold.

It started with, “Curve your pinky.” OK, I get that, I knew I was slipping into straight-pinky mode sometimes, and I knew that was bad. Then, “Curve your thumb.” Did not realize I was playing with a straight thumb. More consistently curving the pinky and thumb must have created a domino effect—next thing I knew, my index finger was gradually slipping too far around the stick. Ms. L. advised me to mentally check it after every measure and stop if I needed to adjust. “It will drive you crazy, but it will work,” she said. Well, I found that the slippage was happening too gradually for me to notice it.

A few times she molded my hand the way it should be as I stood holding the bow on the string. When I played with that bow hold, it felt great. My hand felt odd—it felt like it was turned way sideways/inward, and my thumb felt like it was coming at the stick from the bottom—but bowing was just plain easier. Without my changing anything else, passages in the Bach suddenly flowed much more smoothly. The angles just worked. It felt as though energy was being transferred instead of being wasted. I felt like Pujols connecting with that high fastball.

But in practicing, I could not reproduce that bow hold on my own.

Ugh. I tried visually inspecting my hand in its Ms.-L.-approved configuration, I tried molding it myself with that sideways feel in mind…and finally, this week, I think I have started approaching that bow hold on my own. I have tried being mindful of it in my warm-ups, in a C major three-octave scale and arpeggios, and on the last 2/3 page of the first movement of the Bach. I’m not consistent with it (YET), but I’m slowly approaching it, to the best of my non-Pujolsian ability.

(Edit: This video shows the three home runs that Pujols hit in Game 3 of the 2011 World Series. Unbelievable.)