The Short

STRING BOWING 265
on the string with the point of the bow, thus producing a light staccato.’ 467 And Busby's Dictionary explained punta d'arco
as: ‘with the end, or with a slight touch of the bow’. 468 Johann Adam Hiller seems to have understood the term
differently, applying it to the staccato produced at the point of the bow by a series of short strokes in one up-bow; 469
but this would not fit most of the instances where the expression appears in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century
music.
All the passages marked ‘punta d'arco’ in Ex. 7.2 are places where the natural instinct of the modern player would be
to use the middle or lower half of the bow with an off-the-string stroke which would now be known as spiccato; but it
seems clear that this instinct did not come so naturally to eighteenth-century and even nineteenth-century players.
Defining the word ‘spiccato’ in his
467
Dizionario, art. ‘Punta d'arco’.
468
Thomas Busby's Dictionary of 300 Musical Terms, 3rd edn., rev. by J. A. Hamilton (London, [1840]), 40.
469 Anweisung zum Violinspielen, 41.