Issue Four
It's been a struggle getting this fourth newsletter ready! We have reached an all time high with more customers than ever trying out instruments and bows in the shop and ordering music by post. We now have extra shop and office staff to deal with the rush.
We had such a good response over the article on choosing an instrument (May 2001) that Nick Woodward has written a more specialised article about choosing a bow for this issue. There is also a general update on various developments, the usual sheet music news and another "top 5" list…
There have been a lot of requests for information on different types of strings - we are working on it!  Hopefully we'll have something down for the next issue, which will be out in the Spring.
If you require anything sent by post before Christmas please order as soon as possible. Although we send out everything first class and usually the same day we cannot guarantee that items will arrive by the next day in December. We also  need to give our suppliers

plenty of warning for the same reason.
Best wishes from everyone in the shop for the festive season!

•Florence Lovegrove

It is surprising how many players do not seem to recognise the importance of the bow. Many customers put the majority of their effort and money into the instrument - the bow tags along behind. For some people the choice of bow is less important than the colour of the case. If it doesn't do very much then a charge of a few hundred pounds can seem excessive. But why then, are people prepared to pay up to tens of thousands of pounds for what is effectively a stick with a bit of hair on it?
The answer is fairly simple: the bow does everything. The left hand plays the notes, but the right hand makes the music. What the left hand does is like typing - it's either right or wrong. The right arm, the bowing arm is where the tone and the rhythm come from. We might all be playing exactly the same notes with the left hand but it's what we do with the right hand that makes us different players.   Interestingly, we know that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, but they also have separate musical functions.  Pitch is determined by the right side of the brain, and rhythm by the left. The analytical left brain controls the 'driving' or 'giving' hand, the more intuitive right brain the 'receiving' hand, which takes the creative lead in variation and improvisation. It is quite possible to have perfect pitch and a poor sense of rhythm - or great timing but bad tuning. I expect we all know people in both categories.
However, since almost all left handed people learn to play right handed violins and are some of the best musicians I've met, there has to be a large area of crossover between the two halves of the brain. A recent survey suggested that the section of a string
player's brain that controls the fingers of the left

continued on  page 3