I’ve run into something on Dorico Pro 5 that has me at odds with my viola-playing son. He says the Playing Technique used by Dorico for Staggered Bowing in long, tied string lines is not the one that is most commonly used, and a different Playing Technique should be available. Here’s what Dorico offers in the Playing Technique section:
My son claims the paired downbow and upbow inside parentheses is not right, and that it should be one or the other used at a time, alternating every measure or so. Dorico currenly offers no way to put a downbow or an upbow inside of parentheses, which would solve this conundrum very quickly.
I don’t know which is right. He claims string players will be confused by Dorico’s markings. What are your opinions on this, Steinberg? Would you be able to add the ability to put downbows and upbows into parentheses into Dorico? Please advise, and thank you for your help. Sorry to bother you.
Gould does agree with your son, that staggered marks should use up and down marks (without parentheses) along the note. (Though she also broadly advises leaving it to the players!)
You can of course create your own Playing Techniques, to incorporate bowings in parentheses.
Ultimately, how you choose to use the available marks is up to you. As a non-string player, I would definitely ask the advice of a string player, if I were going to add bowings.
Indeed!
Unless the composer is a string player with professional experience themselves and knows exactly what bowing they would like, better leave it to the players.
I have seen these also notated without parenthesis as regular up- and down bow symbols - with a bit of offset to the notes (so to make clear not to change the bow at an exact rhythmic position).
As a string player, I’d interpret the parenthesised ups and downs as ‘free bowing’, i.e. change bow direction whenever you like, not necessarily on the beat. If you really want it on the beat, then I’d say don’t tie the notes in the first place.
But a concert master or section leader may prefer to indicate how often to change the bowing, and where this should happen (approximately). Offsetting a bowing mark from a visible beat, as @k_b points out, is generally understood to mean ‘change bowing here, but not everyone at the same time’. In general, orchestras like to have the bowing as uniform as possible. The free bowing indication will likely be overruled. Better not to bother about notating it at all. Just write a long note and leave it to the players/conductor to figure out how to play it convincingly.
“ask two string players how to achieve correct bowing,
and you will get three answers.”
no matter how careful I’ve been with my bowing (being an amateur violist, professional pianist, and even going over my bow markings with a VERY professional violinist) I’ve had string players completely reverse everything I’ve written. To the point I’ve had to insist a few times where certain “special effects” were required and not optional.
Yes, to me this makes the most sense. In fact, it’s how I had it written in the first place, before I handed the score to my son for review (he’s 37, BTW, and a viola clinician) who insists that something has to go there. Let me try talking to him again tonight. I’ll see if I can wiggle some kind of proper logic out of him and report back.
As long as everything is written exactly the way I think is best, I’m not stubborn at all!
A shorthand I’ve seen often in orchestral scores is single, parenthesized upbow/downbow marks to indicate ‘change bow roughly here’—dependent on tempo and dynamics there may be two in a bar, one every four bars or anything else. But still, this is a shorthand for a concertmaster/section principal to pencil in, not to be printed.
I play cello for an (amateur) community chamber ensemble, and I have encountered such bowing directions before. I interpret it as an editorial suggestion which means pick your bowing freely, and in a section the composite sound can mean one where re-bowing is less obvious (thus creating a more cohesive sustain). Though as others have said, and perhaps in larger professional orchestras, the exact bowing put in front of every player and divided within a section will probably be best left to section leaders to decide, as they usually want to. Nothing gets a group of string players more riled up than starting an argument about the best bow directions
My son sighed and agreed that no instruction was probably best, given the default that comes with Dorico (he’s a Finale user and refuses to leave it yet). He’d still rather put in a parenthesized marking here or there, but I’m in the “let the director/concertmaster/etc. figure it out” camp. I do worry with @PjotrB about the viola section, but I guess I’ll just have to have faith that the cellos will catch them.
