About Arcus

We began production of the Arcus bows in a small workshop in Klagenfurt, Austria in 1999. In 2008 we moved the production to new and much larger premises in Würzburg.

In our shop you can not only find all the Arcus bows, but also a full range of accessories and a collection of superb instruments. Here our focus lies on new instruments with excellent sound and perfect playability. Another specialty of ours is the sound adjustment of violins, violas and celli. We also make perfect rehairs for wooden bows.

Bernd Müsing: My Arcus Story

Bernd Müsing:

My Arcus Story

It all began with Mozart. As a violin student I was working on the G-major violin concerto and found my bow to be both too soft and too heavy to play this music properly. Many years later I went bow shopping in the hope of finding a bow that would solve this problem, but no matter how much money I was willing to spend, I couldn’t find it. At the time, I was head of research and development at one of Germany’s largest bicycle factories and tried to apply my technical skills to this problem. What I then found out was that Mozart played with light clip-in frog bows, the kind we really only know today as baroque bows.

 

My further research and calculations then showed that only a bow with a hollow stick made of high-density carbon fiber composite could be stiff enough for modern strings and light enough at the same time. The extremely difficult implementation of the design and the manufacturing turned out to be a major challenge, which took us several years to overcome. Since then, I have continued to do research to understand bows, strings, instruments and musicians better, and to find the most perfect solution. I still play Mozart with great enthusiasm. Not as a soloist, of course, but in the orchestra and especially in the string quartet. In addition, I have since switched to the viola, on which my large hands fit much better, and I really enjoy playing with my Arcus ~P9~.

Making our bows requires quite a bit of machinery but even more craftsmanship of the highest level. Only the use of the finest materials and close co-operation between all our bowmakers allows us to achieve the level of perfection the Arcus bows are renown for.