Advice on writing slurs for strings in orchestral music

Hello!

I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I could really use some advice. I’m currently writing an orchestral piece, and there’s a section where the strings play almost entirely on their own. At first, I used a lot of long slurs, but after reading some books and posts about orchestration, I realize that may not have been the best approach. In your opinion, how should I notate slurs in this passage to make my intentions clear to the performers? The section is very slow, so large slurs seem to be impractical.

Thank you very much for your help!

I am a violinist and a former orchestra player, so my advise should be realistic. 

I think most of the slurs you marked on this score is appropriate and practical, given most of the lines are in pianissimo or pianississimo. One useful thing to know is that,

1) if the part you are writing is not the main melody that do not need to be that is not that pronounced, and;

2) if there happens to be a decrescendo leading to a p or pp,

then the string player is able to play the passage as slow as possible on the same stroke and the bow is treated as infinitely long. That may seem ridiculous, but that's the case. You play the "feeling" there.

Tl;dr, 4-5 bar is totally possible with above prerequisite.  

One reason behind this playing style is that, it requires good technique to make the bow change unnoticeable. Due to the structure of bow, there is more tension at the bottom than at the bow tip. That will mean a natural decrescendo playing down bow (from bottom to tip) assuming a constant pressure applied. The reverse happens too, where a natural crescendo will occur playing upbow. So if there are any bow changes, the shift from cresc. to descrec. might be audible. While experienced players may control the pressure to mitigate the effect, they avoid changing bow unless the same phase really require 2 bows to project with expressiveness. Therefore, most of the cases, we keep it done in one single stroke for the above situations. 

 

For the crescendo and ff part, for instance, m.24-28, string players have the tendency to use more bows.

That will mean the slur across measure 27 and 28 will be seperated in to 2 strokes. 

Otherwise, you made good notations. And the principal section player will make the decision for you and confidently use their own sets/rules of strokes as long as the whole section are using the same.😆No worries.

String player here as well. @HoYin Cheung has given great suggestions/advice. 

Side note: I'm currently marking bowings for an orchestra to perform Brahms Symphony 4, and Brahms loved his long slurs! Most of them are impractical and I think he didn't really think about how that would translate to the musician playing...but they do give an insight to how he wanted the players to phrase the music. I rarely mark bowings in my own music as I think it depends on the player/section/orchestra and how their style/approach to music.