UC Santa Barbara

This research Document traces the evolving relationship between the violin family bow and the concept of vocality from its earliest iterations in pre-Baroque instruments to contemporary string writing. Though its implementation has varied according to compositional trends, performer capabilities, and technological advancements in bow design, the vocal tradition is the most consistent and powerful force throughout the history of bowed instruments. Early bowed instruments such as the vielle and rebab naturally encouraged vocal expression due to their melismatic purposes and technical constraints. Bow developments in the early violin family introduced more articulated playing, at times departing from vocal ideals. Nevertheless, Baroque composers like Corelli and Telemann pursued vocal expressiveness as a central aesthetic, the latter composing in the galant style, and both writing within what would later retroactively be termed the bel canto tradition. Later, the collaboration between Viotti and bowmaker Nicolas Tourte in the 1780s proved transformative, enabling expressive capabilities that shaped both Classical and Romantic repertoire, including Beethoven’s quartets and innumerable solo pieces. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the emergence of extended techniques reflects both a fragmentation and reinvention of the vocal ideal. While composers like John Cage challenge conventional expressivity, others such as Anna Thorvaldsdóttir expand the notion of vocality through ecological and timbral dimensions. The resulting landscape of bowed nstruments is one in which composers are free to pick and choose which elements of vocality they wish to exploit; meanwhile, the performers and the bows they use are more than capable of exploring every voice that a composer can imagine.