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
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. My analysis showed that a stronger and lighter bow was needed that could only be made with a hollow stick made from high-density carbon fiber composite. Nobody had ever made such a bow before and since I could not get this thought out my head, I started Arcus as a result. A couple years into the project I found out that Mozart in fact used a much lighter “baroque” bow with clip-in-frog and light (unwound) gut strings. Today, I am still playing Mozart, mostly in a quartet, on the viola. And I’m really enjoy playing 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.