Video: Primrose on Sound Production
Primrose's playing was admired for many reasons, but in particular the Scottish virtuoso’s bow arm was remarkable for its fluidity, beauty of sound and range of expression. It's a bow arm to aspire to!
While many recordings of Primrose's playing exist, only a few remaining videos have survived for us to SEE his bow arm and analyze it visually. Fortunately, in David Dalton's book "Playing the Viola" Primrose himself shares detailed descriptions of his bow arm concepts, though he takes his time revealing them!
In "Playing the Viola," Primrose shies away from over-analyzing the mechanics of the bow arm (or any technique, really) lest over-thinking interfere with his performance. There's a reluctance to go into detail, but David Dalton (bless him!) patiently presses Primrose. The result is two entire chapters of nuanced explanations on bow arm pedagogy.
It's easy to shrug and say that Primrose's bow arm was a natural talent, something he was born with. Indeed, Primrose himself frequently states that a student either has a great bow arm or doesn't. But that dismissive attitude is at odds with Primrose's descriptions of how hard he himself worked to imitate the fluidity of his teacher Ysaye's bow arm, or to capture the warmth Kreisler's sound, which he was fortunate to hear live.
Throughout the bow arm chapters of "Playing the Viola," it's clear that Primrose DID think deeply about the mechanics of his bow arm. Not only that, he had a number of ingenious solutions to capture the feeling of his own bow arm to share with his students. What emerges is someone who learned by imitation and intuition, and only came to analyze HOW he was doing what he was doing when it came time to teach the concepts to others.
In this video and future ones, I'll share some of Primrose's bow arm wizardy, as well as my own thoughts on how to apply his principles to develop a beautiful bow arm.
