Chopping (from Three Bilitis Movements)

Today I continued with orchestration of Carnival, so there's really nothing interesting to upload compared to the last post on the subject.

So I thought I'd post this section from my piece for recorder and string quartet, for 2 reasons. One, it's being played at Utzon Room next weekend (Sunday 8th, concert details here). Two, today I was chatting with some composers on Facebook about how to notate 'chopping', which occurs in this piece.

'Chopping' is a bluegrass violin technique. You hit a string with the hair of the bow hard enough that it 'bites' and gives a percussive sound. When you lift the bow, you get a sound too because the rosined hair is sticky from digging deep.

There's no standard notation for chopping. I like to use a right-angle triangle as the notehead, because it looks like an axe when you see it with the note stem :) The passage is tricky to play but it's short. I've since typeset this passage but here's my handwritten page.