STYLE and SUBSTANCE

In our July 2022 issue, bow maker Matt Wehling profiled the highly influential maker F. N. Voirin. In this second article he probes deeper into some of Voirin’s artistic and technical advances, which were quickly implemented by most all French makers and paved the way for such luminary makers as Lamy, Sartory and E.A. Ouchard.

François Nicolas Voirin was a pivotal maker in bow history. By changing the shape of the camber and taper of the bow he changed how bows played and sounded. He also gave birth to a new bow aesthetic, and upped the game regarding the precision, craftsmanship and consistency of production. Many of his innovations dominated the way bows looked and felt for three quarters of a century, while others are still with us today. Let’s first look at some of the aesthetic changes he made to bows.

When looking at a Voirin bow next to one from a previous era, it isn’t hard to notice some of the aesthetic changes he implemented. Voirin ushered in a new era with his curvy bows, which have often been considered ‘petite’ (even though the height of his heads is roughly the same as previous makers). Curves are the unifying theme of his aesthetic decisions in nearly every part of his bows. For many years the word ‘feminine’ has been used to describe the style he pioneered, and the box on page 62 compares qualities one finds in many Voirin bows to those found in the bows of one of his immediate predecessors, Dominique Peccatte.

Top Medals won by Voirin in international expositions Left One of the only surviving portrait photos of F.N. Voirin

MEDALS COURTESY JAMES CHAUVELIN

The curves in his work extended down to very minute details. Even the interior parts of his frogs have curved sections where they might previously have been quite angular. On the cello frog in figure 1, one can see the graceful curves that make up the hair channel. This is a part of a bow that no player is ever going to see, yet the utmost care is taken to make the channel graceful and beautiful.

FIGURE 1 This cello frog demonstrates Voirin’s immense dedication to making every facet of his work as elegant and beautiful as possible

FIGURE 2 Underslide pins soldered in on a gold and ivory Voirin viola bow

FIGURE 2 COURTESY JAY IFSHIN/IFSHIN VIOLINS, OTHER PHOTOS LES MECS DE PARIS

Another minute aspect of the bow that he refined are the collars of the button, which also become curvier and more detail-oriented than those of his predecessors. It is doubtful that most bow makers would have been turning their own buttons at this time: lathe work was its own speciality, and in addition lathes were quite expensive tools. A bow maker might have been ordering buttons on which the collars would have already been turned, and then the bow makers themselves might have filed the octagonal shape from the tubular button they had received. But the attention given to the collars on Voirin’s bows suggests that he was instructing whoever was making his buttons that he wanted them manufactured in a very specific fashion – or is it possible they were turning them or modifying them in-house? Boston-based bow maker and restorer Eric Lane says that his collars are ‘particularly beautiful, which you just didn’t find before that’, adding that they are ‘rounded and graceful; he put more thought into the aesthetics of the collar.'

An additional small but important improvement Voirin made was to move away from using iron screws to keep the metal underslide attached to the frog, as was done by Dominique Peccatte and his followers immediately before Voirin. These screws would rust, causing internal pressure in the frogs leading to the frog material splitting. Unfortunately, as William Retford noted, Voirin would use conical pins put into a cylindrically drilled hole, which could lead to the pins falling out. On gold-mounted bows Voirin would solder the pin in place in the metal underslide, a practice also used by the German maker Johann Christoph Nürnberger, who worked with Voirin in the Vuillaume shop in the 1860s (figure 2).

This Peccatte cello bow frog has rusted iron screws, in contrast to the pins in the Voirin frog shown below, and the frog in Figure 2.

This underslide from a Voirin bow shows both that Voirin did not use screws, and that his pins sometimes fell out

The attention to detail is apparent in every aspect of the bow, as is the level of precision. ‘He had a perfect balance between precision while retaining feel,’ says New York bow maker and expert Isaac Salchow. When a bow is too precise, it can become merely a cold, machine-made object. But a skilfully crafted bow can be a unique object to which a musician can relate, an object that helps to release the artistry within the music. Voirin was able to make a highly refined bow, and yet one that still retains its soul.

These are all little details, but the little details add up to elevate the work. However the most important change Voirin made was to revolutionise the way the stick tapers from the handle to the head, and the accompanying changes in the curve of the bow to make the bow play so very differently.

HOW VOIRIN CHANGED THE PLAYABILITY OF THE BOW

In the first article I described how Voirin made the camber, or curve, of the bow different from how bows had followed from the work of François Tourte. Briefly, on the Tourte bow, most of the curve is placed in the middle third of the bow, while Voirin changed this so that the bow is most curved behind the head (figure 3, page 58).

But to go along with these accompanying changes in the camber, Voirin changed the form of how the stick tapers from its thinnest point right behind the head to the thickest point, very near the grip. The way the dimensions change can be called the graduations, or sometimes the taper, of the bow stick.

(For this next section I will assume I have two bows where the sticks have been planed perfectly round, so that I can refer to the dimensions of the bow stick as the diameter of the stick at any given point. In fact, most round bows are not perfectly round, either by accident or design of the maker.)

Let’s consider two bows where the diameter of the bow is going to increase from 5.0mm just behind the head to 7.5mm at the thickest point. If we measure at various points along the bow where the diameters are in increments of 0.5mm, these two bows might show tapers similar to these hypothetical drawings seen in figure 4.

FIGURE 3 Top Tourte-style camber, with most of the curve in the middle third of the bow Bottom With a Voirin bow, most of the curve is in the third directly behind the head

FIGURE 4 This more detailed version of figure 3 shows the differences in graduation between a Tourte bow stick (top) and one by Voirin (bottom)

The top bow in figure 4 is typical of the graduation scheme used by F.X. Tourte, while the bottom bow is typical of Voirin bow. The taper for the Tourte bow is very regular, the horizontal lengths between the 0.5mm graduations very evenly spaced (compare lines a, b and c). However on the Voirin bow, the distance between 5.5mm to 6.0mm (e) is a little greater than between 5.0mm and 5.5mm (d) and in turn the distance between the measurements of 6.0mm to 6.5mm (f) is again a little larger than the distance between 5.5mm to 6.0mm (e). This pattern of gradual increase continues until the bow reaches its largest diameter. The change in taper happens much more quickly on a Voirin bow than on a Tourte.

A more detailed analysis of these trends can be seen in these two graphs comparing the graduations of an early Tourte bow and a Voirin bow. With these graphs it is not assumed they are perfectly round, and data is included for both the height and width of the sticks at various points along the taper.

Graph showing graduations of a bow by F.X. Tourte

Graph showing graduations of a bow by F.N. Voirin

THE TAPER FOR THE TOURTE BOW IS VERY REGULAR, WITH THE HORIZONTA L LENGTHS BETWEEN THE GR A DUATIONS VERY EVENLY SPACED

Data for Tourte bow graph

Data for Voirin bow graph

IMAGES AND GRAPHS MATT WEHLING

The different graduations, coupled with the different camber scheme, revolutionised how the bow played and became the dominant way French bows were made for the next 80 years. (Please see part one of this article in the July 2022 issue for more on the playability and sound of Voirin bows.)

It is quite possible that Voirin’s graduation scheme was initiated by his employer Vuillaume. In 1856 (the year after Voirin came to Paris to work with Vuillaume) the Belgian musicologist and composer François-Joseph Fétis wrote a book on Stradivari that included a short chapter on Tourte. The source for most of the information in the book was Vuillaume, and the book included a precise mathematical way to calculate the graduations of a Tourte bow. Fétis wrote that this mathematical formula was ‘discovered’ by Vuillaume by measuring many examples of Tourte’s work. The method states, ‘We shall find that the profile of the bow is represented by a logarithmic curve of which the ordinates increase in arithmetical progression.’ Plotting a Tourte bow shows a very close correlation to the Vuillaume–Fétis formula. A statistician who reviewed this correlation and compared the plot of the Tourte bow, a plot of the Vuillaume–Fétis formula and a plotted example of Voirin graduations, said: ‘That Voirin guy completely broke the mould!’ (Careful readers may note that the first article on Voirin states: ‘Generally, the Voirin progression is more logarithmic in nature and the Tourte is more linear.’ With more research I see I made an uninformed statement and I apologise for the error.)

VOIRIN THE ENTREPRENEUR

F.N. Voirin had learnt much about being a successful businessman since his departure from the provincial town of Mirecourt when he was in his early twenties. He developed a product (the bow) that raised the standard within its field (the mounts ‘are crafted with a precision beyond the capability of most of Voirin’s colleagues’, as violin and bow expert Philip Kass wrote). His output was highly consistent both artistically (‘It’s like he came up with a new style and had the bows minted,’ says Eric Lane) and on a practical level (They ‘always have a great comfort in their playing’ and work well all the way from frog to tip, according to Belgian bow maker and expert Pierre Guillaume). He was able to build a reliable team with a consistent output. He was successful at what we now call branding – having a name that meant something to potential customers – and in fact was part of the first generation of makers to physically brand every bow consistently (and refused to sell unbranded bows to wholesale clients). While his bows themselves would influence the direction of French bow making for eight decades, his personal example also must have inspired his protégé Alfred Lamy, as well as Eugène Sartory.