Author: Cheng Dan

What is the relationship between violin and bow? For the vast majority of Chinese people, there seems to be no relationship between them. More precisely, very few people understand the relationship between them. Playing the qin is like this, and making the qin and bow is even more so. Based on my personal experience, when I go to a place where I make a qin to see it, if I want to try the sound of the qin, the qin maker often hands over a snake shaped wooden stick with three yellow hairs scattered on it. If you go to the place where the bow is made to see the bow and aim at it to try its performance, then the bow maker can hand you a violin with three loose strings hanging, which is already very polite.

In fact, even for someone like me who started playing the qin in elementary school, my understanding of the relationship between the qin and bow only began after I completed my studies in violin acoustics at the Norwegian University. The incident happened in 1993, which was the period when I reached the pinnacle of my playing skills. At that time, I owned an ancient Italian violin and a bow specially made for me by my bow maker Azler (Belgium) based on my playing style. At that time, when playing the qin, I felt that every note was like a small stone hitting the rubber and bouncing back. That feeling is extremely satisfying. At that time, my mood was that having this set of bows for a lifetime would be like having no wasted work, and doing nothing until death would be enough. Perhaps it was this premature self satisfaction that offended God, so in that year, God arranged for a thief to wait for me behind the Liszt Academy of Music in Hungary. When I parked my car to eat, he stole my precious treasure along with my BMW car. After that, I traveled to countless piano shops around the world, looking for a piano that sounded like a small stone hitting a rubber and bounced back. However, such a qin finally did not appear. In 1994, I participated in the violin restoration summer studio in the United States. More than 20 experienced violin makers and restorers have come from around the world. Our master is Niguo Guosong, an 80 year old expert in violin making and restoration, who was then the president of the American Violin Making Association. It was in that studio that I found a bow from Yang Quin, the renowned bow maker in New York who worked as our bow repairman. With that bow, I was surprised to find that almost any type of qin played had a sound like small stones hitting the rubber and bouncing back. That made me realize that the sound of that feeling was not played by a qin, but by a bow. What surprised me even more was that when I used another bow to perform Velikovsky's spider dance on the same piano, I felt my left hand was clumsy, but with his bow, my left hand suddenly flew agilely.