The cello is a very fine instrument - just ask Yo-Yo Ma - but it has some fundamental weaknesses. The most obvious one is that there's no way to play more than two of its four strings simultaneously.

Fortunately, a solution is at hand. Scratch that: two solutions.

One comes from the German cellist and composer Michael Bach, who has developed a curved cello bow with loosely strung hairs that can be drawn across all four cello strings at once. The result is a rich, warm mass of overtones that is a far cry from the broken chords cellists generally have to use to play, say, Bach's Suites for Solo Cello.

Frances-Marie Uitti, an American cellist and composer now living in Amsterdam, has a different idea. Over the course of several decades, she's become expert at playing with two bows at once - one in the normal position atop the strings and the other between the strings and the body of the cello - so that the number of string combinations available to her increases instantly.

Both cellists will be in town this week for the Other Minds Festival, the 13th annual installment of the dizzyingly eclectic contemporary-music shindig curated by Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian. The festival culminates in three concerts beginning Thursday in Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.

Before that, though, Bach, Uitti and the seven other composers in this year's crop - who include Morton Subotnick, Dieter Schnebel, Elena Kats-Chernin and Dan Becker - will spend several days together in residence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside. Will the week feature a compare-and-contrast session on new cello techniques?

Don't count on it. Asked about the other, each of these two musical innovators responds with something between chilly tact and lofty indifference - perhaps because they each see themselves as trying to solve distinct problems.

For Bach - who has no family connection to Johann Sebastian (his father changed the family name from Bachtischa after immigrating to Germany from Crimea) - the curved bow is a comprehensive answer to the cellist's woes.

"Violin and cello technique are so highly developed that to find something that can compete is very hard," he said in a recent interview at the festival office. "But I think my bow can. I don't need the conventional bow anymore."

He uses the curved bow for everything from the suites of his namesake to contemporary works, and insists that a cellist with a little practice could use it just as well for standard Romantic repertoire such as the Saint-Saëns or Dvorák concertos (he isn't interested). He worked with the late Mstislav Rostropovich over several years to try to find a way to make the bow available for other soloists.

Uitti, by contrast, regards the two-bow technique as just one of several she's pioneered for expanding the scope of contemporary music (she's also developed an electronic form of the instrument with six strings and no resonating body), and she wouldn't urge it on anyone else.

"The genesis goes back to the '70s, when I was living in Rome and improvising a lot with the people who were there," she said over the phone from the Netherlands. "Then when I started doing solo improvisations, I was playing just one note or two at a time, and I felt the lack of explicit harmony.

"I tried unscrewing my bow and putting the wood below the strings; I tried a curved bow. But let's face it - I'm a complicated person, and I wanted complicated techniques. So I came up with two bows.

"If you try to play with one in each hand, of course, you're limited to the four open strings. But with both bows in your right hand - well, that has stood me in good stead ever since."

The idea of a curved bow like Bach's goes back many decades - a violin bow based on a similar conception was developed during the 1930s to play J.S. Bach's solo pieces - but he has introduced a number of innovative wrinkles. In particular, his bow features a hinge at its base that enables the player, with a little practice, to tighten and loosen the hairs in midstream.

The bow also produces new twists on old sonorities. A string player is occasionally called on, for instance, to play with the wood of the bow, a technique called col legno that produces a sharply percussive sound. When Bach plays col legno, he has the option of tapping the string with both the hairs and the wood, which adds a sibilant rustle to the mix.

Uitti's method, meanwhile, has its own special benefits. Only with two bows, for instance, can a cellist play on two strings that aren't adjacent, or play two notes with different articulations.

Naturally, both approaches to the cello have been catnip for contemporary composers. Schnebel composed "Mit diesen Händen" ("With These Hands") for Bach in 1992, an extended work that will open the festival.

By her count, Uitti has collaborated with "hundreds" of composers over the years, including such modernist and postmodernist luminaries as György Kurtág, Giacinto Scelsi, Louis Andriessen, Sylvano Bussotti and Iannis Xenakis.

And both - perhaps unsurprisingly - worked with John Cage, a composer always drawn to new and distinctive resources of sound. Bach's work with Cage on one of his late works for solo cello even resulted in a little numismatist's nightmare.

"The German post office issued a stamp marking the 75th anniversary of the Donaueschingen Festival, and they put a single note on it that the designer said was from a Cage manuscript. Cage's publisher was paid for it," Bach said.

"Six years later, my wife showed me this stamp and I realized that the writing was mine, which they'd taken without my permission. So I sued the German government, and in the end the stamp was withdrawn."

Postmasters take note: Don't mess with cellists

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/02/PKTNV7D1F.DTL&hw=Changing+the+Rules&sn=001&sc=1000

Inventive cellist captures festival's spirit

UNUSUAL BOW GIVES BACH A NEW SOUND

By Richard Scheinin
 

As German cellist Michael Bach performed a solo cello suite by J.S. Bach at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco on Thursday, the visuals were all wrong. His bow was curved, for one thing: Was this archery or music? And the bow hairs were so loosely strung that they resembled a narrow band of nylon hosiery, bending to flow across each of the cello's four strings as the instrumentalist drew out each note of a stately sarabande.

The performance of J.S. Bach's Suite No. 6 in D major was ruminative, athletic "" and flexible. Because Bach's BACH.Bow, as he calls it, lets him to do what other cellists, with their straight bows, only dream about: simultaneously play all four strings of the instrument. At Kanbar Hall in the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, where the festival concludes March 8, Michael Bach seemed to be feeding a bit of helium into his J.S. Bach, making the four-voice polyphony buoyant and immediate.

Honestly, I've enjoyed other cellists' renderings of the suite more than this one, which for me lacked earthy depths. But the Other Minds Festival of New Music, in its 13th year, is about opening possibilities, expanding and even inventing musical languages. And that's what Michael Bach, who spent 17 years developing his bow, is up to. He's a radical thinker, as is pretty much everyone involved with the festival, which ranges across the fascinating, weird, bumpy and often ingenious new-music landscape.

The program opened with German post-modernist Dieter Schnebel's work, generated from the rhythms of a text by Heinrich Boll, dealing with the experiences of World War II. Michael Bach played excerpts: chorale-like chords, long and breathlike; then scratched quiverings and lilting or desperately whinnying slides. These carefully contrasted and articulated sounds emerged from Schnebel's tool kit, matched to the technical possibilities of the bow, with Bach adjusting bow-hair tension to vary effects.

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http://www.mercurynews.com/music/ci_8501488

Meeting of the Minds

By Beeri Moalem

The concert began with Bach performing Dieter Schnebel’s Mit Diesen Händen, with his custom-designed, curved bow. Arched and convex instead of the usual concave, the unique shape allows for a wide range of tightness in the bow hair. The “BACH.bow” is a result of 17 years of research and design. Loosening the hairs lets the strands embrace all four strings at once, enabling four-voice harmony on one string instrument. The result does not sound like a quartet, but there is a certain power that comes from the player’s struggle to negotiate four voices.

Schnebel’s piece opens with a sustained chorale of eerie chords suspended in the distance. Aside from the difficulty of activating all four strings at once with the bow in the right hand, the left hand has to contort and stretch to finger each voice of the chord. But Bach managed this with concentrated dexterity and, amazingly, succeeded in voicing the lines with even balance and pure intonation. The sections of Mit Diesen Händen are abstract and pensive, employing extended techniques and achieving new sounds. Its more sharply articulated movements require the use of a smaller, tighter bow, while the sustained movements use a longer, looser bow.

The cellist returned after intermission to play some Bach — J.S. that is. “It is our 13th year,” announced Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian, “and wouldn’t you know it, we’ve had some bad luck.” Two of the featured artists were kept away by health problems. And so J.S. Bach received his Other Minds debut, filling in for the absentees.

Every string player knows about the difficult polyphonic writing in Bach’s solo suites, and the awkward chords. But with the use of Michael Bach’s special bow, the chords in four movements from the Sixth Suite in D Major (BWV 1012) sounded smooth and full. The looseness of the bow hairs did not compromise articulation — it was there when needed. The dance movements were slowly and thoughtfully performed, and the sound, whether owing to the unique bow, the excellent cello, or Bach’s skill, was particularly mellifluous.

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Bach was featured again, this time with his own composition. Before the concert and in the program notes, he detailed at length the contrivances and mathematical calculations through which he and John Cage came up with a series of compositions titled One13. Here Bach played against prerecorded versions of himself. Glissandos converged, intersected, and diverged, resulting in fascinating spectrums of sound.

The collaboration that followed between Bach and Cage, 18-7-92 (which refers to July 18, 1992, when the piece was conceived), featured a grand total of one note over the span of about 10 minutes. Bach figured out a way to play the same F-sharp in 20 different ways, reveling in the minute differences of each. When Amirkhanian asked Bach why this would be interesting, he seemed dumbfounded, as if the question had not even occurred to him. Cage once said (to paraphrase) that if something is boring, you keep doing it until it stops being boring. Unfortunately, this piece never reached that stage. It is a neat concept, but one that does not translate well to a concert presentation.

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http://www.sfcv.org/2008/03/11/meeting-of-the-minds/

The medical misfortunes fell disproportionately on the opening-night program. German composer Dieter Schnebel stayed home, forbidden by his doctor to travel, although his music was performed as scheduled by cellist Michael Bach.

More grievous was the loss of cellist-composer Frances-Marie Uitti, who wrenched her back the day before the concert. That scotched what had promised to be a compare-and-contrast session between her and Bach on unusual techniques for playing the cello.

Bach's approach involves a specially designed bow with a widely curved back, strung loosely enough to allow him to get the hairs of the bow across all four strings of the instrument at once. Uitti plays with two standard bows at once.

Bach's bow - there are actually two of them, one strung more loosely than the other, which he switches between as necessary - showed its benefits most clearly in excerpts from Schnebel's 1992 piece "Mit diesen Händen," written for the performer. It begins with a series of appealing, if conventional, four-note chords played with a richness that a traditional cellist could only approximate. But when the rhetoric grew more vigorous, the usefulness of the technology seemed harder to discern.

In Uitti's absence, Bach substituted with four movements from the Sixth Suite of his famous (though unrelated) namesake - played, again, with a resplendent string tone but a laborious rhythmic profile - as well as a brief unpublished Capriccio by Paganini, transcribed for cello.

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/08/DD9BVFV06.DTL&feed=rss.classical