bow to someone/something
bow
verb[ I or T ]
uk /bəʊ/ us /boʊ/
to play an instrument that has strings, using a long, thin piece of wood with hair from the tail of a horse stretched along it:
I'm not bowing, but using my fingers pizzicato.
You can achieve a completely different tone by bowing the strings nearer to the bridge.
Pizzicato - plucking rather than bowing - is a feature throughout the piece, but some of the pizzicato notes are played with the left hand while the right continues to bow.
String players play more continuously than other musicians in the orchestra - violinists tend to bow through every movement.
The string players bowed lightly, producing the most delicate sounds possible.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Musical instruments
accordion
acoustically
aerophone
alphorn
alto
drum kit
drum machine
drumbeat
drumhead
drumroll
ocarina
oud
over-pedal
panpipes
paradiddle
tubular bells
tuned
tuning fork
tuning peg
ukulele

Examples of bowing

bowing

In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives. Some of these examples may show the adjective use.

Probably unknown to the arrangers, adjustments in subtle nuances (bowing, articulation, timbre) appropriate for string writing were made by the veteran string musicians.
Bowing to tradition and engaging in ' historical reconstruction' creates nothing but deadly theatre.
This enabled a greater freedom in their playing, particularly in the bowing.
The echocardiogram showed bowing of the ventricular septum from left to right with normal ventricular shortening fraction (29%).
Sound-producing gestures, including both excitatory gestures such as hitting, stroking, bowing, blowing, singing, kicking, etc., and modifying gestures such as modulations of pitch and timbre.
This action normally takes place by bowing, plucking, blowing or striking.
If the latter, this has significant implications for the tempos of the slow movements, where too slow a speed would make the indicated bowing impossible.
Beyond the different rhythmic and bowing patterns, teachers and students should var y the for mat of the exercises as much as possible.
These gestures include string choice, finger position, and bowing parameters.
For instance, a difference between continuous bowing and tremolando on a string instrument might be reflected in the iterative characteristics of the response.
By bowing the string from within the gestural space of a wind instrument, new expressive potentialities of the model are opened.
For instance, experimenting with different interpretations of analytical structural slurs in relation to questions of phrasing and bowing.
Bowing generates a different pattern of amplitudes than plucking, and the amplitudes of the higher harmonics are relatively greater at more intense excitation levels.
Deformation of the bones often indicates fracturing and the position and degree of bowing or fracturing should be noted.
Some bowing of the arm bones can occasionally be seen.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.