The School of Szimsia Bajour - part 1

(obs.: this stab is a part of a letter I wrote to a colleague from another university in response to an inquiry about the violin-bow dynamic. I thought it would be interesting to share it with the bloggers.)

In Argentina I studied with a Jewish Polish immigrant who studied in Moscow with David Oistrakh, and with a lesser known teacher, Boris Belenky (БЕЛЕНЬКИЙ, Борис Владимирович), who actually happened to teach some of the greatest violinist in Russia, including the late Andrei Korsakov. My teacher's name was Szymsia Bajour (April 4, 1928 - February 8, 2005) - his son set up a simple but beautiful website to celebrate his heritage: www.sbajour.com.ar

The concept of "violin - bow dynamic opposition", which he termed in Spanish "violin contra arco" (violin against bow) was CENTRAL to his teaching system. I could not stress this enough - it was the ground stone of everything related to posture and position, as well as the root from which all other sound producing techniques came.

The violin-bow dynamic opposition in Bajour's system is akin to another of his concepts (the "attraction of the bow toward the bridge") in that they could be described as "motionless movements", that is: those were dynamic tendencies that were balanced by certain counter movements or plain physical oppositions, rather than actual "movements" of the violin upward or the bow toward the bridge. Another such concept in Bajour's system was treating the pressure exerted by the bow on the string in terms of sustaining the tension of the bow (the one created by the deviation of the hair from their position of straight rest) through a note. In my own teaching, I compare this to the effect of buoyancy as defined by the principle of Archimedes. Then, the push experience by the bow equates to the push of the "displaced liquid".

Depending on my students' scientific literacy, I might resort to the example of certain binary stars. They don't exactly orbit around each other, but around their common center of gravity, which might as well be a perfectly empty spot. Similarly, neither the bow "presses" the string nor the violin "pushes up" the bow - their forces create a dynamic balance that creates stability throughout all the motions implied in playing.