Pizzicato is a string-playing technique, most associated with the violin, viola, cello, and double bass, in which the player plucks the string directly with a finger rather than drawing the bow across it, producing a shorter, more percussive, sharply attacked tone than a bowed note. Indicated in a score by the marking "pizz.", with a return to normal bowing marked "arco," pizzicato has been used as a coloristic effect from the Baroque period onward and appears prominently in orchestral and chamber writing, including the entirely pizzicato third movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4, and in genres including jazz and popular music, where plucked double bass is the default rather than the exception.
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Pizzicato is a playing technique that involves plucking the strings of a string instrument. The exact technique varies somewhat depending on the type of instrument:On bowed string instruments it is a method of playing by plucking the strings with the fingers, rather than using the bow. This produces a very different sound from bowing, short and percussive rather than sustained.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Bartok, or snap, pizzicato?
A hard pluck that snaps the string against the fingerboard, named for Bartok's String Quartet No. 4 (1928).
It is a forceful way of plucking a string so that the string is pulled vertically away from the fingerboard and allowed to snap back, striking the wood and producing a sharp, percussive crack rather than an ordinary pluck. It is named for Bela Bartok, who used it in the fourth movement of his String Quartet No. 4 (1928), though Gustav Mahler had already asked for a similar effect in his Seventh Symphony, instructing the players to pluck the strings so hard that they hit the wood.
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