Double Bass Dragonetti

[LouisF]

I don't know if this of interest. It came up on a feed today:

How Domenico Dragonetti Changed the Double Bass Forever

 

[Jon Stefaniak]

I read the Palmer (oxford press) book this article references.. it's good. This article seems like a poor summery. Admittedly, I stopped reading about halfway through since I am already familiar with the details of Dragonetti's life and career.

I hate reading sentences like:
"Dragonetti’s design was the primary influence for the underhanded technique of the German bow, as Bottesini was in influencing the French bow, otherwise known as the overhand technique."
I don't think this could be true at all. It doesn't even make sense- is he talking about the bows, or the technique of playing them, or both? He even mentioned German bow in the same paragraph as distinct from Dragonetti's Italian bow. I'm sure the Italians would be delighted to claim they invented both French and German bows (this is actually something that Riccardo Muti said to my teacher, I assume as a joke)... but that doesn't make sense at all - As if the bass was played only pizzicato until the grand maestros showed up.
Maybe in 200 years, they'll be saying Gary Karr invented the German bow.

Playing traditions go back, and examples of bows too...

 

[eerbrev]

I read the Palmer (oxford press) book this article references.. it's good. This article seems like a poor summery. Admittedly, I stopped reading about halfway through since I am already familiar with the details of Dragonetti's life and career.

I hate reading sentences like:
"Dragonetti’s design was the primary influence for the underhanded technique of the German bow, as Bottesini was in influencing the French bow, otherwise known as the overhand technique."
I don't think this could be true at all. It doesn't even make sense- is he talking about the bows, or the technique of playing them, or both? He even mentioned German bow in the same paragraph as distinct from Dragonetti's Italian bow. I'm sure the Italians would be delighted to claim they invented both French and German bows (this is actually something that Riccardo Muti said to my teacher, I assume as a joke)... but that doesn't make sense at all - As if the bass was played only pizzicato until the grand maestros showed up.
Maybe in 200 years, they'll be saying Gary Karr invented the German bow.

Playing traditions go back, and examples of bows too...

Thanks, LouisF for the link to this article.

I concur - it's resisting the complexity of the truth.

I won't go so far as to say we have many examples of bass bows, because we're actually pretty short on extant lower string bows of any kind in comparison to upper string bows (and basically absent of "double bass" bows of any kind before the very late 18th ce as far as I know), but there are clear underhand and overhand traditions in several areas of Europe long before both of these players were glimmer in their parents' eyes. Cellists especially, in the baroque era, likely did both depending on who they were playing with.

That doesn't mean that either of these players weren't important or influential for technique, of course. Indeed, Dragonetti DID make quite a mark on bow making and underhand bows, but he was also iterating on his own ideas all the time - so that an early "Dragonetti" bow is much different from a late "Dragonetti" bow. That iteration continued after he died, and his ideas about frog size, weight distribution, length, etc all folded into the many schools of bowmaking across Germany, and England in particular.

Bottesini, too, was influential in encouraging a more widespread adoption of overhand playing for contrabass players, but he was just a part of it. Ideas of standardization of bowings, fingerings, instruments, and bows across orchestras really came to the fore in the latter part of his lifetime, as industrialized concepts of standardization became more obsessively popular across the Eurocentric world (meaning the colonizing cultures of the Americas and Europe, because that's all I can personally speak to). Having an entire orchestra playing basses in 4ths with an overhand grip (or at least everyone with a standardized grip) made a lot of people happy not because it was better, but just because it was "all the same" for the sake of sameness. So Bottesini was influential in a "right place, right time" way in that respect.

Of course, he was also very good so people wanted to play like him, too, and thought they needed his gear (just like now).

The Italians, of course, invented neither bow, nor did the French or Germans - it came with the ancestors of the viols and violins with the Moorish Invasion.

It's funny you mention Gary Karr, though. He used to get French bow sticks modded to accept Geman frogs because he found the quality of German bows at the time to be really inferior. So he is actually quite influential on the 20th-century development of the underhand bow as well as 20th-century repertoire in pushing them to have higher and higher standards.

The Viennese bassists, Dragonetti, and Bottesini stumbled, so that Gary could walk, so players like Edgar Meyer, Joel Quarrington, and others could run.