Ricochet

How to produce clear and controlled bounced bowings on the violin

BORN Buenos Aires, Argentina

STUDIED WITH Nicolas Chumachenco, Lorand Fenyves, Ana Chumachenco, Shmuel Ashkenasi

TEACHES University students aged 15–27

Many string players fear ricochet bowing, but it isn’t as hard as it looks. One of the biggest obstacles to doing it well is having the preconception that you need to make the bow jump. In actual fact, the trick is to get the bow to bounce all by itself. The moment your mind and body become too involved, you will tense up and ruin the stroke. With the right combination of balance, alignment and release, you will learn how to make the bow ‘want’ to do all the work for you.

EXERCISES

EXERCISE 1 For a video demonstration, see bit.ly/3nKtMs1

Make sure there is enough rosin on your bow and that the hair is tight enough. Then try exercise 1.

Hold the bow with your index and ring fingers and thumb, loosely enough to allow the stick to pivot beneath the grip. Pretend it is a paper cup of water: you don’t want to squash it or to let it fall.

Drop the bow on to the string and let it bounce. This is easiest with flat hair, parallel to the bridge.

Continue the bounce in a down bow, by letting your fingers slowly lead your forearm so that the bow makes tiny jumps all by itself, like chattering teeth. How long can you keep it going?

How do different bow holds, angles, contact points and areas affect the bounce? Use different combinations of two and three fingers to hold the bow, to explore the role that each finger plays.

Practise in the mirror, film yourself and stay aware, to make sure that you are bowing straight

This exercise can be quite addictive, like seeing how many times you can make a stone skip across the surface of a lake! Practise controlling the bounce by applying the same principles to exercise 2, using the energy from the initial down bow to feed the impulse for each up bow. Then make up your own exercises to experiment further. Be careful not to let your scroll droop or point up towards the ceiling when you add more notes in the left hand.

ROLLING RICOCHET

With rolling ricochet, as before, the idea is to get the bow to jump by itself. Try exercise 3 in legato, again experimenting to find the best way to use your bow.

In particular, keep your right shoulder blade free, the elbow light, and avoid pressing with your index finger. Then increase in speed and release the index finger slightly, to allow the bow to jump. It should do this naturally, unless you are doing something physically to prevent it. In the instant before each down bow, take a moment to think about hand coordination, the curvature of the bridge and balance. Once the stroke has started, there will be nothing more you can do! If you lose the jump, practise the first exercise again.

REPERTOIRE

Ricochet might be a ‘fancy’ stroke, but it appears in different levels of repertoire, even in school orchestras. Practise examples 1 and 2 using the principles explored in exercises 1–2. For the rolling ricochet passages in examples 3–5, make sure that the bottom and top notes of each slur sound clearly, like a bouncing ping-pong ball. This will help with timing, which is crucial in allowing the bow to jump. To practise this:

• Play the first and last note of the slur separately (as in example 3B)

• Gradually start to ghost the notes in between

• Increase the sound until you are playing the line as written, but continue to focus on producing a clear, even first and last note of each slur. The E string will need less work than the G.

• One of the trickiest ricochet strokes is the ‘three plus one’, as in example 6A. It’s important to play this with clarity and control, not so fast that you can hardly hear what is happening!

• Find a feeling of gravity: without the bow, hold your right wrist up so that your fingers are pointing to the ceiling. Let it fall. Repeat.

• Pick up your bow and practise example 6A in legato, then syncopated (example 6B) and then dotted (example 6C)

• In example 6D, release the index finger a little bit, on open strings that correspond to the music, to allow the bow to jump Reintegrate the left hand. To begin with, it can be easier to think of each group as an up bow up-beat followed by three jumping notes on a down bow (example 6E).

• Return to example 6A. Give a slight accent on the first note of each group, for clarity and musical importance. Listen to the result and adapt as necessary. Your sound is the best teacher.

IN YOUR PRACTICE

If you want to improve your ricochet, try to spend five minutes to half an hour experimenting with it every day, independently of any work on pieces. Invent exercises to help you create different ricochet characters and colours depending on what you want to hear, to learn more about yourself as a player. Gradually you will train your body to adapt in whichever way necessary to recreate the sound qualities that you have in your mind.

If things don’t work out as planned to begin with, stay calm! Getting over-involved and trying to make the bow jump by pushing or throwing it too much will only make things worse. Instead, take a break, play some legato strokes or go back to exercise 1, to reconnect with the jumping feeling.

TIPS FOR TEACHERS

Ricochet should be learnt in a playful way. It’s a fun bow stroke and it shouldn’t be hard work. If a student is struggling with it and feels stressed, take a break from it for a few months, but never give up! Most players will be able to do it eventually. If they are having serious difficulties, I recommend they try Alexander technique, to help them release any unwanted physical tension. You could also try supporting the scroll for them as they play. Encourage them to listen to what the sound is telling them, and to feel how each sound relates to what they are doing with their bodies. They will need to do a lot of exploration to guide themselves through this process.

INTERVIEW BY PAULINE HARDING

FURTHER MATERIALS

Very little is written on ricochet, but I do recommend reading the relevant paragraphs in Galamian’s Principles of Violin Playing and Teaching and Flesch’s The Art of Violin Playing.