Tailed Bridge Guitar - Bowing Behind The Bridge

Bowing Behind The Bridge

The technique is also widely used in many modern classical works on bowing instruments.The extended technique involves in that case bowing the instrument on the afterlength, the short length of string behind the bridge. The tone is very high and squeaky. By playing the instrument at a string part behind the bridge, the opposed part starts to resonate. The tone is louder at harmonic relations of the bridge string length. On violins the tone can be very high, even above our hearing capacity. Depending on the instrument the pitch of the tones may or may not be perceived (cellos and double basses are more likely to produce recognizable pitches because of the longer length of their strings). This technique is used extensively in Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Another example is found in Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite where bowing behind the bridge in a violin cadenza represents a donkey’s braying.

Read more about this topic:  Tailed Bridge Guitar

Famous quotes containing the words bowing and/or bridge:

    We have been a-shopping ... all this morning, to buy silks, caps, gauzes, and so forth. The shops are really very entertaining, especially the mercers; there seem to be six or seven men belonging to each shop; and every one took care, by bowing and smirking, to be noticed.
    Frances Burney (1752–1840)

    It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
    Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

    And you O my soul where you stand,
    Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
    Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
    Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
    Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O, my soul.
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)