With strings, wood and 150 horsehairs

For courageous performers and composers, the fingering and bowing or otherwise sound-producing hand is allowed to do anything. The only question is how to notate and perform what is required!

After years of exchanging ideas with her trio colleagues, the experienced and successful violist Barbara Maurer has created a clear compilation of "everything that is possible with strings, wood and 150 horsehairs". She describes the respective execution in detail and discusses the notation possibilities. Many music examples and drawings complement the explanations in a beneficial way.

The chapter on partials is also very informative for those not involved in New Music, as the production of harmonics is fundamentally explained here with many practical tips; the extreme "Fawsett" harmonics, which are produced with the bow, are already presented in this first chapter. This continues in the chapter on pitches, which first summarizes the basics of clefs, difference tones, resonance tones and glissandi and then goes on to give a detailed account of microtones, trills and scordatura. The largest part of the work is devoted to sound production with and without a bow, and it is so adventurous that I cannot describe it briefly. The last 30 pages of the A4-format book are addressed to composers with valuable advice on score notation and to performers on their work during rehearsals and performances.

Barbara Maurer, Saitenweise. New sound phenomena on string instruments and their notation, BV 446, € 26.90, Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden 2014