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Bowing Styles, Vibrato and Portamento in Nineteenth-Century Violin Playing

There are many aspects of nineteenth-century violin playing that have received little attention from scholars. The subject is a vast and complicated one, far beyond the scope of a short article to treat adequately, but there are a number of important areas in which problems have not even been recognized, let alone investigated. For instance, the most substantial recent work on this subject, Robin Stowell's Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1985), provides a useful digest of what the major violin methods of the period say, but because it is mainly confined to these sources, ignoring for the most part journalism and other contemporary accounts, and because it has a rather artificial terminal date of 1840, it fails to illuminate major underlying patterns of continuity and change in nineteenth-century violin playing. It may be valuable, therefore, to put forward a few ideas and suggest a few fruitful lines of enquiry which have until now remained largely unconsidered.