d then, the nearer he gets to his
ideal, the more apt his ideal is to escape him. Yet, discounting all
objections, I should say that a master should be able to express
perfectly the composer's idea, reflected by his own sensitive soul.

THE KEY TO INTERPRETATION

"The bow is the key to this mastery in expression, in interpretation: in
a lesser degree the left hand. The average pupil does not realize this
but believes that mere finger facility is the whole gist of technic. Yet
the richest color, the most delicate _nuance_, is mainly a matter of
bowing. In the left hand, of course, the _vibrato_ gives a certain
amount of color effect, the intense, dramatic tone quality of the rapid
_vibrato_ is comparable on the violin to the _tremulando_ of the singer.
At the same time the _vibrato_ used to excess is quite as bad as an
excessive _tremulando_ in the voice. But control of the bow is the key
to the gates of the great field of declamation, it is the means of
articulation and accent, it gives character, comprising the entire scale
of the emotions. In fact, declamation with the violin bow is very much
like declamation in dramatic art. And the attack of the bow on the
string should be as incisive as the utterance of the first accented
syllable of a spoken word. The bow is emphatically the means of
expression, but only the advanced pupil can develop its finer, more
delicate expressional possibilities.

THE TECHNIC OF BOWING

"Genius does many things by instinct. And it sometimes happens that very
great performers, trying to explain some technical function, do not know
how to make their meaning clear. With regard to bowing, I remember that
Joachim (a master colorist with the bow) used to tell his students to
play largely with the wrist. What he really meant was with an
elbow-joint movement, that is, moving the bow, which should always be
connected with a movement of the forearm by means of the elbow-joint.
The ideal bow stroke results from keeping the joints of the right arm
loose, and at the same time firm enough to control each motion made. A
difficult thing for the student is to learn to draw the bow across the
strings _at a right angle_, the only way to produce a good tone. I find
it helps my pupils to tell them not to think of the position of the
bow-arm while drawing the bow across the strings, but merely to follow
with the tips of the fingers of the right hand an imag