Baroque Bows

In March 1999, The Memorial Church received a very generous gift of a set of baroque-style violin bows from the Harvard Business School in honor of Professor Samuel L. Hayes III, Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking, Emeritus.

Professor Hayes, along with his wife Barbara, are great supporters of the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, and of other student early music productions at Harvard, and this gift supplies the appropriate tools for playing music of the baroque period.

It was a lack of knowledge of early music performance practice that sparked the creation of the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra. “When I first arrived at Harvard, I was frustrated by this lack of knowledge when I would engage student orchestras to accompany the Harvard University Choir in concerts at The Memorial Church,” says Dr. Somerville. “It surprised me, as Boston is the only U.S. city with two professional baroque orchestras.” Initially he and co-founder Robert Mealy hoped to be able to afford one bow a year. “This gift has enabled us to realize our dreams much faster and the Church and orchestra are very grateful.”

The design of violins has changed over time as the style of music has changed. For example, modern violins evolved because of the change in concert venues. “The ‘modern’ bow that we all recognize from symphony orchestras was invented in the nineteenth century to play the modern music of the time,” explains Mealy. “It was created to realize an aesthetic of long, seamless melodies, with a brilliant carrying power necessary to fill the new large symphony halls. Baroque bows are the sophisticated technology that was designed to play baroque music.”

Baroque bows are lighter, more flexible, and can easily realize the highly inflected musical rhetoric of their time, and bring out all the spirited gestures that make up this music. The donated bows are constructed after an 18th century design and are made of snakewood, a very beautiful wood with a speckled brown and black grain (hence the name). The big differences between them and modern bows physically are the wood, the lighter weight of the stick, the narrower horse-hair, and the lighter tip, which features an elegant ‘swanshead’ on the end. Tis Marang, the bowmaker, is a resident of the Netherlands, and makes between fifty and one hundred baroque-style bows each year, used by players in many of Europe and America’s top period orchestras.

This gift of bows is exciting because it allows a group such as the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra to play early music as the composer intended. “Any string player truly interested in Bach, Vivaldi, Corelli, Purcell, and dozens of other great composers will want to see how it feels, and how it sounds, to try the music with the equipment for which it was written,” says Thomas Kelly, Professor of Music at Harvard. “These bows are a resource that ought to have the widest possible utility.”

It is an especially important resource as Boston is known for being a center of early music in this country, but there is surprisingly little in the way of early music performance education at local universities. “Having the appropriate tools for music-making is an important part of the early music movement,” says Wesley Chinn ’98, founding president of the Harvard Early Music Society and a baroque violinist. “Advancing early music at Harvard can play a key role in fostering the future of this genre in America.”