For a number of years I have been fascinated by the idea of using the materials from a place to make instruments whose sound is therefore of that place, in particular violin bows and and stringed instruments. Working with the land at Lossenham offered me the opportunity to create and explore sound production by constructing bows from materials gathered or connected with Lossenham and the Priory.

Materials forming the bow have a direct influence on its sound. Pernambuco a wood native to Brazil, is the favourite wood of the modern bow, is now endangered and scarce, it is favoured because of its brittle strength, its density transmits sound waves at speed through its length working with the violin to produce a strong bright tone that project to the back of large auditoriums.

Before the modern pernambuco violin bow, all bows were made of the native European woods such as yew, beech, larch, also fruit woods cherry and pear depending on the woods available locally. These baroque bows were shorter and lighter and curved outward making them expressive and quick, ideal for the rhythms and expressions of baroque music where musicians were often expected to add there own flourishes to the noted music of composers such as Bach and Handel, the baroque bows sound fades and rises with a similarity to speech or singing, rather than the strong melodic sound of todays modern bow.

My aim is to explore the materiality of these early bow woods some of which can be found at Lossenham and compare their individual sound in relation to the Lossenham landscape. The bow or bows will be played as part of a soundscape, composed by Russell Burden, in which hydrophone recordings of the natural life within the Priory ponds at Lossenham will be overlaid with the string sound of the bows. The strings offer a human element to the composition, echoing the sites settlement by bronze and iron age people and the eventual founding of the Priory.

The natural and human history of place feed into the material choices made for the bow. The bow stick is made from a small piece of a large fallen yew. Yew is an ancient spiritual tree wood whose mythology harks back to early and pre-christian rites, and one I felt had a strong connection to the founding of the Carmelite Priory, and possibly the beliefs held before the arrival of early christianity. The bow frog is the fruit wood cherry, sourced from managed log stacks at Lossenham, with a tip faceplate and frog faceplate of bone, reminding us of mortality, we are born of the earth and return to the earth.

Working with site specific materials can present certain challenges, especially for string instrument bows whose role is functional and requires strength, flexibility and an understanding of the forces at work to produce sound. Therefore although baroque bows rarely have a faceplate, in this instance I created a bone faceplate to protect the brittle yew tip if it gets knocked, and also a bone faceplate on the frog which is in this instance is made from Lossenham cherry wood as apposed to the usual ebony or box wood, which is harder and more durable.

Early baroque bows are usually created to from a straight stick which bends to form a convex camber when the hair is tightened, more modern bows are gently heated and manipulated to form a camber which is a concave giving the stick extra strength. The grain of the piece of yew wood gently curved and I decided to shape the stick with grain following this natural concave camber, it would then have the strength of a transitional bow, a bow that sits between the early baroque and early modern bow form. I also decided to mortice the stick and fit a screw adjuster for the frog, this would allow the bow hair tension to be finely adjusted much like a modern bow.