Diary of a composer by Matthias Kadar - video 3 - the opinion of "very" young students about the Cello Concert composition

Welcome to the new episode of Matthias' diary about his composition making. Matthias Kadar is the author for Cicerone of a beautiful composition interactive course. He's now writing a Cello Concerto and once again he offers to our readers a new perspective: this time he interviewed two of his youngest students, who were asked about their envision of how such a complex composition should sound. What could you expect? Uncertainty? Too easy thoughts? Childish ignorance or spontaneity?

Well, you'll have another confirmation that new generations are "really" advanced. Watch this, and below find another part,  taken from the “History of Cello”, an article based on the research by Vincent Liu published in the “journal of music and dance” in 2011.

History of the Bow

Francois Tourte (1747-1835), born 10 years after the death of great violin maker Antonio Stradivari was the “most brilliant bow maker in history.” He passionately worked on his art in his small workshop in Paris until his vision began to fail at the age of 85. By working with the most prominent musicians of the time, Tourte paved the way for modern bow-making, establishing an ideal model of the bow by “standardising the dimensions, weight, and balance, and…by introducing or reintroducing pernambuco wood from Brazil, the only kind of wood that provides the optimum combination of flexibility, elasticity, resistance, and weight.” Tourte took his bow-making very seriously: he chose each of the 200 hair for their “perfect roundness and uniform length” (Prieto, 2006). His bows were renowned for their incomparable beauty and perfection and ability to extract an instrument’s full range of rich sounds.

What is the bow made of?

The stick of the bow is made of pernambuco wood, which comes from trees called "Brasilian" or "palo brasil". The frog is made of ebony; tortoiseshell and ivory were used in the past, but these materials are now prohibited to prevent the extinction of turtles and elephants. The ferrule is generally made of gold or silver. The protective wrapping where the fingers grasp the bow (above the frog) is made of leather, silver wire, or gold wire but was formerly whalebone. A steel screw at the end of the bow adjusts the tension of the hair, which is made from white horse hair, usually from colder regions (Faber, 2006).

...to be continued