Musicians’ Preferences for Different Variants of Bow Skew in a Violin Performance

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to better understand musicians’ aural perceptions of violin performances in a musical context with three different variants of bow skew. Forty-six music majors from a large college of music participated in the study. Listeners heard the same music excerpt performed by a professional violinist with varying degrees of bow skew. The excerpt was performed three times: 1) normal performance, 2) in constant contact, with the bow placed at a fixed point between the bridge and fingerboard with skew to the bow added by the swing of the arm, and 3) with a straight bow, bowing as perpendicular to the strings as possible. Asked to rank the three excerpts according to their preference for the most musical performance, participants aurally preferred overwhelmingly the normal bowing excerpt, which exhibited the most skew in the bow.