Pizzicato
The pizzicato (in Italian, “pinched” and in the plural pizzicati) is a technique of musical interpretation that must be applied by the performer of a plucked string instrument when appropriate or when the relevant indication appears in a score. It consists of pinching the strings with the fingertips in instruments such as the violin, viola, cello, double bass, octabajo or acoustic or electroacoustic guitar. This interpretive technique will vary depending on the musical instrument that is played. must execute it.
Description of the technique
Play (?·i)The pizzicato is a technique that consists of plucking or stretching the strings of a stringed instrument with the fingers. When a string is struck or plucked, as in the pizzicato, sound waves are generated that do not belong to a harmonic series. Like when a string is bowed. This complex timbre is called inharmony. The inharmony of a string depends on its physical characteristics, such as tension, stiffness, and length. The inharmony disappears when the strings are bowed because the stick-slip action of the bow is periodic, so it drives all string resonances in exact harmonic ratios, even if you have to drive slightly outside its natural frequency.
The exact technique can be subject to some variations depending on the type of stringed instrument.
On bowed string instruments
On a bowed string instrument it is a method of playing that consists of plucking the string with the fingers, instead of using the bow. This produces a very different result than bow movements, the sounds are short and percussive rather than sustained.
This technique on the violin consists of plucking the string with the right hand still holding the bow. If a string player has to play pizzicato for an extended period of time, the performer may rest the bow on their lap or music stand. Fiddlers and violists can also hold the instrument in the banjo playing position, lying flat on the lap, and pluck the strings with the thumb of the right hand. This technique is rarely used and usually only in the movements that constitute a pizzicato from start to finish.
A technique similar to this, where the strings are actually plucked like on a guitar, is required in the fourth movement of the Spanish Capricho (Scena e canto gitanosa) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, where violins and cellos have to play in pizzicato "quasi chitarra". The music of such a movement is made up of three and four note chords, which are plucked and strummed just like the instrument it is imitating, the guitar.
On guitar
In instruments like the guitar that are played without a bow, the pizzicato is performed by playing normally but with the hand resting on the strings. It is a moderately pressed form, bearing an audible resemblance to pizzicato played on a bowed string instrument, with its relatively soft sounds. those of duration. For more details on this technique, see palm mute.
On keyboard instruments
On a keyboard instrument, such as the piano, the pizzicato may be employed (although rarely seen) as one of several techniques involving direct manipulation of the strings known collectively as &# 34;string piano".
In electronic music
The pizzicato is also a genre of electronic music born in 1995, which mainly used violins played with this technique and a trance environment. sash! he was one of its creators, who went around the world with the song Encore une fois. During the following years this musical genre was declining, until its practical disappearance in 2000.
Variants
Pizzicato Bartók
This is a particularly strong pizzicato in which the string is stretched vertically and bounces off the fingerboard of the instrument. This technique is known as Bartók pizzicato , after this great composer used it extensively in his orchestral repertoire.
A famous display of the use of the Bartók pizzicato is found in the third movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 7. In it, violins are instructed by a footnote to "strike the note so hard that the strings hit the wood."
On the double bass this style of pizzicato was used in jazz music from the 1920s and later used in the rockabilly style. Because an unamplified double bass is generally the quietest instrument in a jazz ensemble, many players in the 1920s and 1930s used this technique by pulling the strings so they would make a "whipping" sound; rhythmic against the fingerboard. This allowed the double bass to cut its way through the ensemble sound more effectively than simply plucking the strings, and thus be more easily heard on sound recordings, as recording equipment in the early days of phonography did not favor the low frequencies.
Left hand pizzicato
You can also use the fingers of the left hand for the pizzicato, either when they are not in use or are leaving their previous position. This allows for pizzicati in places where there would normally not be time to bring the right hand from or to the playing position with the bow. The use of the left-hand pizzicato is relatively uncommon and is most often found in the solo violin repertoire. Two famous examples of this type of pizzicato are Capricho no. 24 by Niccolò Paganini and Zigeunerweisen by Pablo Sarasate.
The pizzicato of the left hand can also be played while notes are being played on the bow, this is an effect that appears mainly in late-century repertoire XIX and later. Examples of this technique can be seen in the works of Henryk Wieniawski, Alban Berg (Concerto for violin and orchestra, «In memory of an angel»), Igor Stravinsky (Three pieces for quartet de cuerda), among many others.
Two-hand pizzicato
The two-handed pizzicato is another colorful pizzicato technique used in Rimsky-Korsakov's Spanish Capricho. In the score it is represented by the indications m.s. and m.d., which correspond to left hand for the left hand and right hand for the right hand. In this case, the open string E is plucked alternately and in rapid succession by the left and right hands.
Pizzicato under slur
Maurice Delage in his Quatre poèmes hindous for soprano and chamber orchestra requires some pizzicati under slur in the cello part. This effect is achieved by playing a note and then stopping a new note on the same string, without plucking the string again. Known as the hammer-on technique by guitarists, this technique is not typically applied on bowed instruments.
Pizzicato glissandi
Bartók also made use of the pizzicato glissandi which is played by pressing a note and then sliding the stopping finger up or down the string. This technique can be heard in his work Music for strings, percussion and celesta .
Graphic representation
In musical notation a composer usually tells the performer to use pizzicato with the abbreviation “pizz.” placed above the staff at the beginning of the sequence of notes he wants to be carried out in accordance with that indication. While the return to the use of the bow is indicated by the Italian term "arco".
- A pizzicato Bartók It is often represented by a circle with a small vertical line passing through the top of it. This sign is placed above the note in question or in writing Bartók pizz. at the beginning of the corresponding step.
- A left hand pizzicato is usually indicated in writing with a small cross above the note.
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When the composer wishes two or more strings to be strummed with the fingernails as if they were guitar strings, he should write "quasi chitarra" ("almost guitar").
History and examples
In Western classical music
In classical music, stringed instruments are most often played with the bow, and composers give specific directions for playing pizzicato where required. The oldest work in which the pizzicato is used in classical music is Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda written in 1638 by Claudio Monteverdi, where the performer is instructed to Pinch the strings with two fingers of the right hand.
In 1756, Leopold Mozart in his work Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule tells the performer to use the index finger of the right hand to play it. This method has been the most common to execute a pizzicato, although sometimes the middle finger is used. The bow is held in the hand at the same time unless there is enough time to move it down and up again between passages that are played with bowing movements.
Antonio Vivaldi, in the Ah Ch'Infelice Semper from his cantata Cessate, omai cessate, combining the pizzicato with the movements arc to create a unique sound. He also included the pizzicato in the second movement of Winter from The Four Seasons .
Pieces of classical music performed entirely in pizzicato include:
- J. S. Bach: the ninth movement Magnificat (1723-1733).
- Johann Strauss II and Josef Strauss: Pizzicato Polka (1869).
- Léo Delibes: the Divertissement: Pizzicati belonging to the third act of ballet Sylvia (1876).
- Piotr Ilich Chaikovski: the third movement of Symphony No. 4 (1877-1878).
- Béla Bartók: the fourth movement String Quartet n.o 4 (1927).
- Benjamin Britten: the second movement of the Simple Symphony (1934).
- Leroy Anderson: Plink, Plank, Plunk! (1951).
In other musical genres
In jazz, bluegrass, and the few styles of popular music that use the double bass (such as psychobilly and rockabilly), the pizzicato is the usual way of playing the double bass. This is unusual for an instrument in the violin family, because regardless of whether that family is used in jazz music (for example, jazz fiddle), popular music, traditional music (for example, bluegrass fiddle), or in classical music, which is usually played using bow movements for most of the performance. In the musical performance of the classical double bass, the pizzicati are usually performed while the bow is held in the hand. In such a case the string is normally only plucked with one finger. In contrast, in jazz, bluegrass, and other non-classical styles, players generally don't stay holding the bow and are free to use two or three fingers to pluck the string.