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(bell ringing)
(dog barking)
(birds chirping)
(strings music)
(tool scraping)
- Really what I'm going after,
what I'm using is genus trees.
For that reason, the wood is like everything in my bows.
The fine player has a level of control over the bow
that's just like an Olympic gymnast of the hand.
- The violin gets all the press.
Although we all know that the bow is more important.
- The bow is kind of like a phone call.
It's the phone call between you and your instrument.
- If it hadn't been broken,
this bow would be worth about 130, $150,000.
- The bow is like your steering mechanism.
It's like if you have this great car and you could just,
it's got all this power and everything.
If the steering's sloppy, it's a sucky car.
- This bow makes a great short note.
- The bow as breath.
It's how we literally breathe.
- The instrument is like the stage
and here comes a ballerina
and it's performing all these jumps, and you know,
and these intricate steps.
- This is what I call a sideways bow.
- Spiccato,
or martele.
- There's also a stroke called ricochet
where you actually bounce the bow in a certain direction.
- You hold the on your right hand
because it's the sword hand
and it's supposed to be for fencing, really,
even with the sound.
And then from this, you turn into this,
and so you're kind of fencing with your viola.
- With great players, this is half their deal.
But it never takes main stage.
- It's really hard for people, even myself,
to grasp the fact that the bow is an instrument in itself.
- This is kind of like the silent servant
that's super key to the whole element.
What I think that the common person doesn't know is,
you know, they see this and they go, it's just a stick.
Well, it is a stick, but what people don't know is
this is hollow to about here.
This piece goes in here and it's threaded,
and this is an octagon that turns into circular shape.
And the frog is silver lined with this little brass islet
that's put just exactly in the right place
so that glides back and forth, tightens the hair,
and there's a nice, perfect bend in it.
There's no glue holding the hairs and it's all pressure fit.
There's 30 feet of silver wire right here.
And then this is lizard leather.
And the end of this up here is hollow.
So this is hollow as well and there's a knot in a wedge.
I think that the bowmakers are crazy because of the amount
of skill and focus and patience.
And I don't think that I'm quite cut out
for that type of, that type of focus and participation
in bringing this wonderful traditional form forward.
I think I'll just stick to my weird guitars.
(tool scraping)
- Now you could say that the bow is a functional item
and that as such, it doesn't matter
whether it's beautiful or ugly,
but in my opinion, that's not true at all.
Something is beautiful, you want to bring it into yourself.
And so the bow really has to be beautiful in order to draw
the player into using it the best they possibly can.
Bowmaking is dependent on musicians.
That's why we're here, we're serving musicians
in with the tool that they need.
The crux of it is we actually really need the conservative,
the traditional since of classical music
to keep this trade alive.
And at the same time, it's got to move with the times.
And so that's why a lot of interesting ensembles
are looking out beyond the normal field of classical music
and looking for other inspiration.
I like Brooklyn Rider.
They're really exploring potentials
in the classical music genre.
- I love the fact that this thing I'm holding in my hand
literally is from all parts of the world,
like the Pernambuco is from Brazil, of course,
and the frog is made of ebony,
which grows, Africa or India,
and the horse hairs from, you know,
Mongolian or Canadian horses.
- That shell could be like a Japanese.
- There's two types of mother of pearl.
There's, I think the eye is Japanese,
and the slide is otmo, which is in the English Channel.
- [Musician] That is amazing.
- But all of this comes together, you know,
in this one thing that I hold in my hand
and literally from all corners of the globe
and to make music.
- You haven't seen the case of bows.
- Let's see the case of bows.
I don't think I've ever seen the case of bows.
- I have a case of bows, yeah.
- Yeah.
- [Musician] There it is.
- Charles Espey was the first person
that I actually commissioned a bow from.
I feel like Charles has an incredible idea of how the bow
feels in the air or on the string.
I've got a Charles Espey Number Two.
This is Charles Espey Number Three,
which is a really flexible, beautiful bow.
My most recent Charles Espey, it's Number Four for me,
what I was playing last night is also a pretty recent bow.
This is by a Noel Burke, Irish bowmaker.
He worked, I think with Charles, for a time.
- And his brother is a well noted Celtic fiddler, right?
- Kevin Burke, yeah.
- That was probably the first time I really paid attention
to what a bowl can do.
'Cause the first time I played on an Espey bow,
I realized I had never played a bow like this before.
I was really surprised it was that evident
that this is really special.
It seemed to track on its own.
You didn't have to guide it.
It knew where to go.
He's probably the most influential by bowmaker
of his generation, yeah.
(tool scraping)
- What I really like to listen to a string quartet.
I think it's the ultimate and musicality
to play in a quartet.
Anybody who plays on a quartet,
I'll just bend over backwards to make them a bow.
- I think what did it for me was I was in New York
and the viola's Toby Appel, who teaches at Juilliard,
let me try and Espey bow, viola bow that he has,
and the sound that it got out of my instrument,
I had never heard my instrument sound like that before.
I was at Nick Chords' place from the Brooklyn Rider.
He has four Charles Espey viola bows.
He put me into a room in his house and I just stayed there
for an hour trying each bow.
My favorite bow of Nick's, the luminous one, I told Charles.
- When I looked up the bow,
I discovered that the stick was number 625,
and I thought, geez,
I think I still have one of those sticks.
I was looking through, looking for 625, went through,
and finally I found it.
- Turns out it was the only piece of wood
left of that batch.
That's the same bow that I loved from Nick's.
- I looked at the stick and I'd written her name
on the stick.
So I thought that was serendipitous to say the least.
- So my favorite bow of Nicks happened to be the same
exact batch of wood as the one he was setting aside for me
before I even told him for sure that I
wanted to commission a bow.
- [Man] Was that my bad?
- Maybe not.
Hold on.
- [Woman] C-sharp doesn't sound right.
- Does someone have a C-sharp there?
- You wanna try it?
All right.
(piano music)
(strings music)
Maybe hit a high C, someone, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's nice guys.
(tool scraping)
- Yeah, this is the bow.
This is Milena's bow.
To make a stick using the French method,
you basically take a bow like this and,
plane it down until it's in this kind of tapered shape,
except it's straight.
And then what you do is you just heat small amounts
at a time in the hot plate,
and then bend them over the bench.
When you play a bow on the string,
it's going through this incredible evolution of forces.
Like when you're starting up at the frog,
which is the little fitting up at this end,
you have the whole weight of the bow.
And you also have the fact that the bow
is much larger in diameter.
And then as you go down,
the bow gets more and more slender,
and the overall weight of the bow is lower and lower.
Well, it's really difficult to have even contact
from one end of the bow to the other.
It's the curve that allows you to have that even contact
so that when you're playing up at the head,
the hair is grasping the strings just as well as it did
down here and that's why the curve is so important.
Picture yourself in 14th century Europe.
The aristocracy wanted beautiful clothing.
But the dyes necessary to dye fabric, bright colors,
were very rare and hard to come by.
Basically the aristocracy,
the only people who could wear colored clothing.
- [Narrator] The story of the modern bow
began in the medieval fashion courts of Europe
where the nobility hungered for lavish scarlet
and crimson robes.
To satisfy the nobles insatiable taste,
Italian dye makers used a rare tree from Asia
to create a blood-red color called brasalina,
meaning ember or live coal.
In 1500, Pedro Cabral, sailing from Portugal on his way
to India, stumbled onto the coast of an unknown land.
He spotted trees that reminded him of the treasured die.
The native Tupis use these trees to make strong
and flexible hunting bows.
Cabral got a swift deal, exchanging clothes, beads,
and machetes for muscle.
(knife chopping)
And soon a ship loaded with parrots, monkeys, and lugs
from the mysterious tree headed home.
It caused an uproar.
Dyes from the wood proved extraordinary.
Soon ships from many countries headed to the new land
for the now named Pau-Brasil or furnace redwood.
Centuries of exploitation had begun.
A fir tree and a country named after the tree, Brazil.
But it would take a couple hundred more years
and an illiterate fishermen in France to
use Pau-Brasil to turn the music world on its ear.
(tool scraping)
- This is for Milena.
I'm making little aesthetic adjustments
to play the body and the stick, constantly with her in mind.
So when she gets the bow,
when it's finished and she'll try it for a week
and put it through its paces and see how it goes from there.
- I was his first student, yeah.
I was good, but he was very tough.
If you got it wrong, he would,
he just made sure you got it right, yeah.
Getting it wrong wasn't an option.
He, more than anything, instilled a respect for the trade.
(bow grinding)
- This is what we call it foret.
These were made for bowmakers in your core
back in the 19th century.
It was very simple drill
and that's what we use for all the drilling.
Basically nothing's changed since 1850 or so.
Like, one of those makers could sit down
and just go to work and not even think twice.
The tools are the same, techniques are about the same.
(tool scratching)
This is gonna be a bow that is really early
in conception when it comes to the stylistic elements,
the frog isn't going to have eyes on it.
And there isn't going to be a silver liner between the eyes,
between the frog and the stick.
And that's pretty much the way
the bows of Francois Tourte were.
Those are bows he was making, say in around 1800 and 1810.
(strings music)
(audience applauding)
- [Narrator] Early in the 18th century,
a fellow named Stradivari perfected a violin.
And by 1770 Italian violins were all the vogue in Paris.
One of the superstars of the time was Giovanni Viotti
who was filling concert halls as never before.
The reviews were rave.
Viotti was dissatisfied.
He knew his Stradivarius had more voice and power within it,
but he couldn't draw it out.
If only he could find a bowmaker.
Francois Tourte was a lifelong illiterate,
an avid fishermen and a clockmaker.
He had just begun working in his father's bowl shop.
One day, nearly 300 years after Pedro Cabral's voyage,
Tourte wandered into an area in central Paris
where 169 acres of Pau-Brasil to be made into dye
were piled high.
Hmm, he thought, I wonder what else this wood is good for?
(speaking in foreign language)
- You know, when I was a lot younger,
I had this feeling like I was destined to be an artist.
I really
wanted that for some reason.
For me, it was lacking something,
and then when I discovered bowmaking, it fit the key hole,
that I could be making something that was beautiful,
that could actually be used by people.
A bow is in the hands of a professional player
for four or five or more hours every single day for decades.
It's like incredible, the relationship they have.
- [Narrator] One day Viotti wandered into Tourte's shop,
not realizing they were about to transform classical music.
Tourte worked with Viotti for months, using the new wood.
He did some revolutionary things to the bow.
He made it concave and longer.
He added a metal ferrule and he kindled a straight piece
of wood, rather than one already curved.
He nervously handed his creation to Viotti.
Who after playing it famously announced,
(speaking in foreign language)
The violin, it is the bow.
Their collaboration changed the course of music.
It made the modern orchestra
with all its nuances and shadings possible,
and gave a guy named Beethoven, some ideas.
- I just found bowmaking by complete coincidence.
I stepped on my fiddle case and put a crack in the fiddle.
So I just noticed this violin shop
that opened up not too far away.
And I walked in there to see if they could repair the crack
of my fiddle and there was a man named Robert Shallock
in there making a bow.
And this real life bowmaking might be exactly what I wanted
because bows were works of art.
But at the same time,
they were tools that had to function perfectly.
Ended up moving to France and becoming a bowmaker.
(orchestral music)
(bell tolling)
(speaking in foreign language)
- And the workshop.
Watch your head.
I remember during the '70s when I was a student,
a bowmaker, it was almost no bowmakers.
- Both World Wars put a massive dent in bowmaking
and the Second World War, it almost died out.
- It was like an endangered species.
Like you kill the last passenger pigeon
and you can't resurrect the passenger pigeon.
You can't resurrect.
You couldn't have resurrected
the French technique of working.
- And the state got involved with the French state
to save the trade and they started a school.
There'd been a violin making school in Mirecourt
and they added a bowmaking workshop.
And Bernard Ouchard was employed as the teacher.
Any bowmaker today, working in that tradition,
in the Old French tradition, can trace their apprenticeship
back to Bernard Ouchard
because we all learned from graduates of that classroom.
There were 18 students graduated from it.
- Talented young people.
Among them, Stephane Thomachot.
Stephane Thomachot, Versailles
- What brought me to Mirecourt when I was 15 years old,
when I applied to go in the school.
You know, 42 years later it's,
I said the providence, you say that?
- I spent two years with Stephane,
working in Stephane's place, everything was very relaxed.
Radio would be on, we'd be joking, drinking beer.
In the Chuck's place, it was very quiet and studious,
serious stuff going on.
That stuck with me, I think.
I still drink beer and have the radio on in the workshop.
But that approach, this is, it's important to do this right,
I got from Chuck.
So there's a lot taken from Chuck and a lot added in there
from Stephane Thomachot.
They're the two most important bowmakers around.
- Let me see, there's interesting pictures.
Oh, I have a picture of Chuck.
That was in a cafe in Paris.
And another one, I have many of Chuck.
This one.
This tool was made by Chuck.
He gave me that 30 years ago and I am still using.
This is good opportunity to dedicate this bow to Chuck.
(speaking in foreign language)
You look at the bow and say, "Ah"
and you feel like with a good painter or
a chapter of Dostoevsky...
It's an emotion just like that.
There is a big bunch now of young really good bowmakers,
but I don't always understand them.
I mean, understand the style.
But the bows are very well made.
I don't understand.
Maybe it's the beginning of the end for me.
I start to be an older, how we say that in English?
And old cheese? No an old fart.
(strings plucking)
When Josephine was young in the school,
I said that you have to work well in the school,
because if you don't work in the school,
you will be a bowmaker or even worse, a violin maker.
You have to work.
Josephine works well, but she became a bowmaker.
(speaking in foreign language)
And Josephine, she's probably like me.
She has difficult with the authority in general of us.
She wants to be her own boss.
- Since the beginning, I know that I didn't see my life
in the company and work so much for what,
for I don't know,
but to make money.
(strings music)
(speaking in foreign language)
And after that, she stayed in front of me for,
I think almost two years or something like that.
(speaking in foreign language)
- I first met Charles with my mom and my brother, Jamie.
- I showed them my shop and a week later he came back
with a bow that he had made that was that long.
He whittled it out of a piece of, I don't know,
some kind of wood.
- My mom would say from time to time,
that someday, you're gonna make a bow.
Charles is gonna show you how to make a bow.
And I thought he was, she was crazy.
Like, there's no way I can do something like that.
- [Charles] Cody had eye for design.
He had great hand-eye coordination.
He knows about music.
His whole family played music,
and he's got a drive to be great at something.
To succeed at bowmaking, you need to want to be the best
because bowmaking is a very narrow field.
There's only room for the best and what we're doing.
- He taught me how to make my first three bows.
- And from there, he just went off the charts.
His level of work is right up there with everyone.
And there's nobody in the world that works any better
than he does. as far as I'm concerned.
He's already there,
he just has to spend his life discovering stuff.
- The best thing about bowmaking is carrying on this trade
because so many things like that are just fading
in the modern world.
(speaking in foreign language)
- You know, you can really see the strength of this wood
when you look at the shaving.
Like, a lot of wood shaving like this,
you just pull it and it'll fall apart.
In pernambuco wood it's like a spring.
This is one of, if not the strongest wood in the world.
And then there's the dye, so,
in a little while you'll start to see the pink come out.
And before long, this whole jar will be pink.
The wood I actually use, 99% of the time
I bought in Brazil at a little mill back in the '80s.
It's been drying and seasoning for basically 30 years.
And so I know the trees these boards came out of.
In my wood, I'll go through it,
and there'll be just like veins of one tree.
I can recognize the tree in each of these boards.
(people speaking in background)
(speaking in foreign language)
- So this being the mother tree,
he will expect lots of its children to be around.
So you can see the seedlings that we eventually take back
to the greenhouse, like this one
to plant somewhere else.
So these are only, so you see how many
only in this small area.
We have three of them
and all around we could take 50 home.
- I'd say that if somebody, you know, came upon this bow
in the future, and the bow, and it was all beat up,
and then when they looked at it,
they'd probably think it was an early 19th century bow.
Looking good.
I really hope Milena likes this bow.
I really feel that it's a special stick.
It's just got this special power in the wood itself.
- This is very exciting.
There it is.
- [Woman] Amazing.
- And then look at directions on the back
of like this sleeve of a bubble wrap.
- Any cool nuts in it?
- It has a nut here, and then it has like gravy stuff here,
interesting.
Curious what you think.
- Curious what I think.
This is the Espey bow right here.
And when I got it, I instantly wanted, I just,
I wanted it to be like a revelation instantly.
It was so different from my bow that I was a little nervous
and worried and because it just, it felt so different.
I felt like I couldn't grab the string.
I was really nervous to say yes,
when I felt so uncomfortable physically at first.
And so what I decided to do was not play on my bow
for a week.
I just only played on the new bow
just to see if I could get used to it.
It had a very luminous and lively sound.
The sound was very,
it just felt like it was really spinning and alive.
And then I played it in concert and it felt slightly easier
to play on, so I thought this is a good sign.
That was actually the best thing I could have done
for my own playing,
letting go and realizing the potential of this relationship.
It really helped me understand myself better.
And I just want to keep exploring that.
(audience applauding)
(audience cheering)
(birds chirping)
(speaking in foreign language)
(men laughing)
- It's just exploded all over the world,
that set of techniques.
They've been passed along, you know.
I've passed along to a few people
and they're passing it on
and other people, you know, learning at the same time
as me are passing it on.
And so it's just blossomed.
I don't think it's possible to retire
when you have a trade like bowmaking.
It's not something you retire from,
it's basically your life.
So I don't have any intention of retiring.
I'm just excited about some of these sticks I just found.
I see a piece of wood like this,
and I can see the finished bow and,
or I can see other bows that look like it, you know,
really old bows that are 150 years old.
Here's a really interesting stick.
I think this might be the next bow, I think.
Yeah, this is the one I'm really curious about.