Barré [jeu barré]

(Fr.: ‘barred’, ‘stopped’; Ger. Quergriff; It. capo tasto; Sp. cejuela).

In the playing of certain fretted plucked string instruments, particularly the lute, guitar and banjo, the term used to describe the technique of stopping all or several of the strings at the same point by holding a finger across them. Although the form of the word is adjectival the term is also used in writings in English as a noun; some English-speaking writers use ‘bar’ or ‘barring’, but the French forms barré or jeu barré are more frequently found. (In the music of the late 17th-century viol masters – particularly that of Marin Marais – the term doigt couché is used; see Fingering, §II, 1.) The earliest references to the barré seem to date from the second half of the 17th century; Francisco Guerau’s introduction to his Poema harmónico (1694), for example, advises the player to become accustomed to using the ‘cejuela … putting the index finger of the left hand over more or less all the strings, depending on your requirements, which is very necessary in order to play certain passages’.

The essential characteristic of the barré is that it is executed with the flat of the finger, whereas the tips of the fingers are used for other fingering. The barré is usually executed with the forefinger, but other fingers are also used, particularly by jazz guitarists for the half-barré (that is, the stopping of two or more, but not all the strings). The purpose of the barré technique is to permit the fingering configurations used on the open strings to be transposed to any position on the fingerboard, the forefinger acting as a moveable nut. The fret at which the barré is applied may be indicated in written music: ‘2^e barré’ is a short form of ‘2^e position barré’, and similarly ‘C II’ stands for ‘cejuela 2’; both indicate a barré at the second fret. If, for ease of execution, the player wishes to use open-string fingering for an entire piece, the strings may be artificially stopped with a Capo tasto (by setting the capo tasto across the first fret, the player can finger a piece in C as if it were in C).