From Zero to Mozart
Stage 5The bowLesson 20 of 38 · The bowLATER

Sautillé, and the continuum

Sautillé is a fast bouncing stroke where the bow bounces itself — you're not lifting each note. The springiness of the stick does the work at speed. It's a LATER stroke, and the useful thing to understand now is how it relates to spiccato: they're the same gesture at two different speeds.

Sautillé — the bounce that happens to you

  • The stick springs. At a fast enough tempo, a small, light stroke in the middle of the bow starts to bounce on its own — the stick flexes and rebounds and you just keep it going. The hair barely leaves the string.
  • Dead centre of the bow, where the stick flexes most.
  • Fast only — roughly above 120–130 notes a minute. Slower than that and it won't self-sustain, and you're back to spiccato.
  • Sound: light, glittering, brilliant, and more connected than spiccato — the notes blur together a little.
100 bpm
Repeated notes, fast — the kind of figure that turns into sautillé at speed. Written just as fast notes with (sometimes) dots. You don't 'do' the bounce; you find the tempo where a small light stroke starts bouncing itself.

The continuum — tempo moves you along it

This is the whole idea, and it's the one thing to take away:

Slow bounce → you lift and drop each note → that's spiccato. Speed it up. At some point you can't lift each note individually any more, and the bounce transfers to the flex of the stick → that's sautillé. Same gesture. Different speed. Not two unrelated tricks.

So the way in, later, is: get a comfortable spiccato going, then gradually play it faster and faster until it "takes off" and starts bouncing on its own. You don't switch techniques; you slide along the continuum.

Try it

Try

Nothing to drill here yet — this one is genuinely LATER. But you can feel the idea: play a light détaché on open A in the middle of the bow, small strokes, and slowly speed up. Keep it light. Somewhere fast, the bow may start to skip a little on its own. That skip is the seed of both spiccato and sautillé.

The usual mistake

Trying to actively bounce a sautillé — pumping the hand up and down fast. It can't keep up, and the stroke collapses. Sautillé is let to happen: a small, loose, fast stroke, and the stick does the bouncing. The other mistake is expecting a slow sautillé — there's no such thing; below its tempo it's spiccato.