(It.).
A direction to pluck the string(s) of a (generally bowed) instrument with the fingers. It is normally abbreviated ‘pizz.’. In Tobias Hume’s The First Part of Ayres (1605) instruction is given in ‘The Souldiers Song’ to ‘Play three letters with your Fingers’, and in ‘Harke, Harke’ to ‘Play nine letters with your finger’. Another early indication is found in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624), in which the players are asked to put the bow aside and ‘pluck the strings with two finger’. Heinrich Biber, in the string accompaniment to the ‘Nightwatchman’s Call’ (1673), writes ‘Testudine: ohne Bogen’. ‘Testudine’ (It. testuggine: ‘tortoise’) can also mean the shields used by soldiers in battle: perhaps Biber wanted to imitate the sounds of clashing shields. He also called for what can be interpreted as a snap pizzicato in the violone part of the Battalia. He says that the string must not be struck by the bow but plucked strongly by the right hand, probably imitating a cannon shot. Other early examples require that, for example, the violin be put under the right arm and plucked like a guitar (Carlo Farina: Capriccio stravagante, 1627) or that the player play ‘senz’arco’ with ‘the tip of the finger’ (J.J. Walther: ‘Capriccio X’, Hortulus chelicus, 1688). In Musick’s Recreation on the Viol, Lyra-Way (3/1669) John Playford said that plucking with the left hand is called the Thump. Leopold Mozart (Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, 1756) devoted a long paragraph to defining pizzicato and explaining how it is to be played, and wrote that ‘the strings are plucked with the index-finger or with the thumb of the right hand’; the thumb should be used only when ‘whole chords are to be taken in one’.
In orchestral music, pizzicato was relatively uncommon before the Classical era, though Bach frequently used it to accompany the voice or to accompany a solo instrument in concerto slow movements. There are many examples of it in Haydn’s symphonies and other music of the Classical era, and composers naturally came to use it in operas to imitate a plucked instrument, for example Mozart in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Pedrillo’s ‘Im Mohrenland’, to imitate his guitar) or in Don Giovanni to represent the serenade (‘Deh vieni alla finestra’). Its truly dramatic use in orchestral music, however, had to await the age of Beethoven; notable examples are the passage linking the third and fourth movements of his Symphony no.5 or the concluding pages of the Allegretto of his Symphony no.7. Particularly striking later uses of pizzicato in orchestral music must include the Scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, where the strings are exclusively pizzicato, and the thrummed pizzicato accompaniment to the cadenza in Elgar’s Violin Concerto.
Paganini was the first composer to make extensive use of left-hand pizzicato (usually indicated by a +); he asked for it either simultaneously or in alternation with bowed notes (e.g. in the 24th Caprice). In their cello and violin methods, Jean-Louis Duport (Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle, 1806) and Baillot (L’art du violon, 1834) wrote of both left- and right-hand pizzicato, as did Galamian in his method (Contemporary Violin Technique, 1962). Extensive use was made of both in early 20th-century music, including Bartók’s striking use of pizzicato slides and a hard pizzicato in which a string is snapped back onto the fingerboard, a device indicated by the sign:
Brahms, in his Cello Sonata op.99 (4th movement, bars 128ff) asked for a slurred pizzicato, which is achieved by stopping a string firmly with the left-hand finger (or leaving it open), plucking that string with the right hand and then removing or putting down another finger on the same string. The two notes are thus successively produced, but both must be within the compass of the player’s hand or a slide effect would result. Multiple stop pizzicatos are normally played from the bottom string to the top, though in some cases, for example where there are repeated chords (as in Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta), alternate bottom-to-top and top-to-bottom may be indicated, usually by upward and downward arrows (though the signs for up- and down-bow have occasionally been used for this). In jazz and dance-band music of the 20th century, the double bass part is often pizzicato throughout, sometimes requiring such techniques as ‘slapping’ the string. Other special pizzicato effects used in 20th-century music include plucking with the fingernail, to produce a rather sharp sound, or plucking close to the bridge which produces a dry sound lacking in resonance.
See also Violin, §I, 5(iii)(f) and, for the use of the term as applied to guitar playing, Punteado.
SONYA MONOSOFF/R