Page:Essentials in Conducting.djvu/115

Rh a shade high or low, and can determine precisely when the violinist has his strings tuned to an absolutely perfect fifth, will have far less trouble with out-of-tune playing than otherwise; for a great deal of sharping and flatting (particularly in the case of wind instruments) is the result of inaccurate tuning.

Since an orchestra contains such a large proportion of stringed instruments it will be very greatly to the interest of the conductor to take up the study of some instrument belonging to the violin family, and to learn to play it at least a little. If this is altogether impracticable at the beginning, the next best thing for him to do is to study bowing, learning not only the bowing signs and their meaning, but familiarizing himself thoroughly with the principles underlying the art. For this purpose some good work on bowing should be studied, but meanwhile a few words on the subject at this point will give the absolute beginner at least a small amount of indispensable information. The signs commonly employed in music for violin, viola, violoncello, and doublebass, to indicate various manners of bowing, are as follows:

The ordinary staccato mark (  or   ) means a long quick stroke, either up or down as the case may be. The absence of slurs indicates a separate stroke of the bow for each tone. Sometimes the player is directed to use the lower half, the upper half, or the middle of the bow, such directions being given by printing the words "lower half," et cetera, above the passage, or by giving the initials of these words (sometimes in German). When no bowing is indicated, a phrase beginning with a weak beat commonly has an up-bow for the first tone, while