Pierre Tourte was the father of the great Parisian bow maker Francois Tourte (1747-1835). It was Francois who worked assiduously to improve the techniques of bow making and explore the nature of the many rare tropical hardwoods being imported into Paris from the French holdings of the West Indies and South America.

We know very little concerning the details of the life of Pierre Tourte[1]. He is listed in the 18th century records as a carpenter working in the Faubourg St Antoine, a new suburban area, east of the Bastille and outside the walls of Paris. This new district had particular Royal privileges of commerce, (together with the “Quinze Vingts” hospice and the Notre-Dame cloister). Shops in this location were not subject to the strict mandates of the very powerful Parisian trade corporations and their rules of the division of labor into distinct trades.

Because of this arrangement the district of the Faubourg St Antoine supported the many specialist trades of crafts people such as musical instrument making, rope, making soap making, carpentry, box making, frame making, marquetry and small metal works of various kinds. Many apprentices, some of whom were furloughed from the armed forces, were responsible for the menial tasks within the musical instrument business such as the making of tuning pegs, buttons, tailpieces and bows leaving the luxury items to the established masters of the trade. Under the rules of the City of Paris corporations the workers in these zones were not allowed to add any makers mark to their work. Many worked on a contract basis to the larger shops, who then applied their own brand stamps or labels to the imported work.[2]

The Paris musical instrument museum has a hurdy gurdy (Vielle a Roue) made by Pierre Tourte that carries his hand written label dated 1730. This instrument is particularly important as it indicates Pierre’s expertise in both metal and woodworking, two crafts that have to be combined to achieve its construction. The tools required and knowledge of fine metal working are likewise required to make the equally difficult mechanism of the new design of violin bows, which were replacing the simple clip-in frogs of the traditional model. This conjunction of trades was illegal in those workshops subject to the strict rules of the City of Paris Corporations. and Pierre’s ability to control the entire production of the bow and achieve the fine tuning of balance and weight must have given him a great business advantage just at the time of changes in musical style and fashion.

These 18th century French bows hint at the spirit of the times. They take advantage of the new and exotic materials then being imported into France from the new colonies of the Guyana’s. Tourte’s snakewood is of the highest quality from old growth trees. It is worked and treated in a precise style using the classical motifs of the fluting of Greek columns allied with fashionable verve and style in the shaping of the tips and buttons. The iron bow screws carry a precisely swaged thread that is larger in diameter than its shaft, which aids the precision fit of the tines of the bow frog to the stick The thicknessing of the sticks shows an appreciation of the opposing forces of torsion and elasticity and their balance points are wholly precise and exacting so that the whole machine allows the player to mold and form the attack and the manipulation of tones at will.

Some years before the career of Giuseppe Tartini Francesco Maria Veracini introduced the long bow with its high head onto the concert stage The Veracini bow exhibited an advance in design with its so called “swan head”breaking step from the traditional baroque model with its short stick and lower pike head. This new bow designed by Pierre Tourte proved to be the perfect tool to enable musicians to adapt and explore the musical inventions of Corelli and bring them to an eager and wider audience. The development of the swan head bow was a leap of faith from the point of view of design engineering and it used the properties of durability of the new range of woods that were being imported into France from the Americas. Guyana Snakewood is an extremely dense and stiff wood that presents many problems when it is used for violin bows. If the sticks are made too strong the tension of the hair and the torsion in the stick during playing are enough to overcome the cohesive strength of the wood’s structure and the head of the bow may break at its neck across the narrowest part of the swan head where the wood’s grain is shortest. In order to alleviate this Pierre Tourte utilized fluting of the bow stick in order to increase the overall elasticity of the stick. This concave fluting that follows the eight graded facets of the stick reduces the overall weight of the bow and yet maintains its lateral stability. Many of the pre-Tourte bows had flutes that ran the entire length of the bow with a change in profile at the highest hand position around three inches in front of the frog but this causes the finger grip on the bow to be uncomfortable. In those bows of Pierre Tourte that I have seen there is no evidence of lapping and the first part of the stick has a simple octagonal profile with the fluting commencing just in front of the highest hand position. These carefully graded flutes are resolved at the tip of the swan head and end in a graceful fluted shoe that perfectly accommodates the wedge and mortise of the bow hair. This detailing is expertly attained and has a strength of character that no other maker thought fit or was able to emulate. To obviate the common problem of breakage of the head he made the thinnest part of the stick somewhat behind the neck of the swan head so that this area of flexibility would break the focus of the rebound response of the bow. This fine tuning of the stick leaves much of the fine articulation up to the dexterity of the player and creates controllable nuances in the sound that the bow can draw from the instrument’s strings.

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[1] Bernard Millant, Jean-François Raffin and the historian Bernard Gaudfroy published the information that they were able to find in their work “l’Archet Français”
[1] The edifice called the Quinze Vingt was founded in the year 1260, when King Louis IX of France built a hospice on the rue Saint Honoré to be able to care for the 300 poor blind people in Paris. At that time people counted in dozens or scores, therefore the name Quinze-Vingts (fifteen-twenty) (15 x 20 is 300) relates the number of the blind who were part of the institution. In 1780 the institutional component was transferred to the Rue de Charenton

Michel Corrette (10 April 1707 – 21 January 1795) was a French musician and author of many musical method books. the violin, cello, bass, flute, recorder, bassoon, harpsichord, harp, mandolin, and voice. They carried titles such as l’Art de se perfectionner sur le violon (The Art of Achieving Perfection in playing of the Violin), le Parfait Maître à chanter (The Perfect Mastersinger) and L′école d′Orphée (The School of Orpheus), a violin treatise describing the French and Italian styles. Corrette’s music tutors are valuable because they give insights into playing styles and techniques of the 18th century.

By the mid 1700’s the French playing style started to be influenced by the one used in the Italian theatre. The Italian taste in music was in turn influenced by the Italian public’s enthusiasm for Italian poetic metrical structure. In order to achieve better expression in virtuosic performance, bows were lengthened from the 60cm length of the ordinary Corelli bow to around 68cm. The bows were finely regulated in thickness and more flexible than their predecessors. High quality snakewood (Brosimum guianense) from French and Dutch Guiana became the material of choice for French bows. Stick profiles could by completely cylindrical in the Italian style or octagonal at the frog end, slowly achieving a cylindrical profile before the balance point of the stick. Some high-quality bows were also cannulated.

Andrew Dipper  bows are of the type illustrated by Corrette in his violin tutor. This depicts a bow with a so-called swan head which is an adaptation of the lower Pike Head type of the Corelli bow This medium sized bow head allows for a hair ribbon barely wider than 7mm. The hair ribbon is also cambered by the shaping of the frog’s hair channel, which gives the bow very different playing characteristics than the modern bow with its flat hair ribbon. The Hill collection at the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, England has examples of this kind of bow. The weight range of the Corrette bow is from 52-54 grams and its frog is adjustable by means of the usual screw and button. The stick of the bow is regulated in diameter to enhance poetical expression within the music.

The frogs on Dipper modern reproductions of these bows are usually made from amourette wood or various other hard and heavy tropical hardwoods because of the necessity for strength and the fine and accurate shaping of their geometry. The historical bows often used ivory or bone as a frog material because it offers great resistance to wear through daily use. Corrette writes that the bow hold of the Italian bow was substantially higher up the bow stick than the French hold and nearer the balance point of the stick. This made the articulation of the bow on the string somewhat easier in the nuanced passages of the music.

The Cramer bow is distinctive because of its ‘battle axe’ head profile. It came into use in the court orchestras of Mannheim, Munich and Dresden after 1760, where it became synonymous with the dynamic Mannheim style of orchestration and performance. It supplanted the Italian model of Tartini, whose design was typified by a somewhat awkward and rather fragile swan head with a long tip.

The Tartini bow rose to prominence between 1730-1760 and its design was specially formulated to produce skillful manipulations of tone on the Neapolitan gut strings that were then in use amongst the acolytes of Tartini.  At the beginning of the 1800’s the general use of this bow was eased out of fashionable circles by the finely crafted bows of the Tourte design that featured a wider and flatter hair ribbon and frogs with metal fittings and mother-of-pearl decorative motifs plaques and inlays.

The Cramer bow, on the other hand fitted a different musical use and was designed for volume dynamics and percussive attack techniques of large ensembles, techniques that might have compromised the somewhat weaker and elevated heads of the Tartini models.  It was promoted and in fashion between 1760-1785 notably in Manheim where Wilhelm Cramer spent the early portion of his career, and in London where Cramer emigrated in 1772. Many makers of the period made their own interpretation of the Cramer model.  F. Tourte and the English Dodd family made notable advances in its design until It faded from use and was displaced by the common modern bow after 1830.

The Cramer model bow is longer than most Italian models, measuring around 70-71 cm but is shorter than the modern standard length of around 74.5cm. Interestingly in some cases the early models of this bow had sticks that were partially fluted, a feature that increases the  flexibility of the stick and reduces its weight while maintaining its strength and flexibility . It is notable that this rare detail implies an evolutionary connection with the fluted snakewood baroque bows of the 1700-1760 period. Styles varied in their fine details and weights rose gradually from 55 grams or less to 57 grams or more.  Many were made of dense and heavy rare tropical hardwoods and the area of inherent weakness in the short grain where the head meets the stick seems thin and fragile in early examples. The head design becomes much more robust in later ones, particularly in those from England made by the Dodd family. Some of the Cramer pattern bows were fitted with finely profiled ivory frogs that have a characteristic floral pattern cut out at their front and rear. I presume that these over decorative examples were intended as part of the accoutrements of the court orchestras, since their decoration matches the designs of the embroidered floral patterns some of the court uniforms that were then in fashion.

A notable characteristic of the Cramer model is the specially shaped head whose design incorporates a thin palette of wood that extends the back of the tip plate towards the bow frog, giving the design its familiar battle axe profile. This detail lends strength to the back of the head behind the hair mortise and players have noted that this feature aids immediacy of the response to the bow in spiccato strokes. From a maker’s point of view this novel head design seems intended to maximize the strength of the bow. An analysis of the design suggests that it does this by shifting the point load from the area immediately behind the bow head, moving it rearwards toward the frog. In some historic examples that I have measured there is a flex point, around 3-4 cm behind the head that shows a notable but subtle thicknessing pattern, seemingly intended to damp percussive shocks that might otherwise break off the head of the bow.  The appearance of the Cramer bow seems therefore to be linked to a special use in large orchestras assembled for large venues with potentially rowdy audiences. Contemporary accounts of the public performances by large orchestras in Mannheim, London and Paris of the period support this idea.

The famous bow collector and violinist Michael Woldemar records that the type of bow used by Viotti was similar in head design from the Cramer bow but lacked the palette extension at the rear of the head mortise. The Cramer bow is furnished with a significantly lighter hair ribbon than the modern bow and the ribbon has a camber to it shaped by the track in the bow frog. The Individual hairs are lighter in weight and thinner in diameter than the standard modern ones, which preserves the overall delicacy of the design. The bows typically weigh less than the modern standard, being in the 50-57 gram range, a weight that includes the hair tensioning mechanism and the special silk and tinsel wrap. The tensioning mechanisms of the original bows are precise and are normally, in the French models, fitted with an iron screw with swaged thread and brass or bronze eyelet.