Violin Video Lesson: Understanding Left Hand Pizzicato

So, this is called pizzicato and it's done with the right hand fingers, makes a slightly percussive kind of a sound. Well, what if this kind of pizzicato could be done with the left hand fingers? What would that sound like? Well, this is called left hand pizzicato. I propose we have a look at how this is done.

And with that, welcome to Virtualsheetmusic.com's "Meet the Expert." My name is William Fitzpatrick, and I am the Henri Temianka Professor of Violin at the Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music, which is located on the campus of Chapman University. And am as well director of MusiShare and the MusiShare Young Artists Program. Okay, so let's take a look at how left hand pizzicato works.

Well, if we look closely, it very much resembles a rotation from the left arm elbow. Now, let's put a finger, let's say the third finger, on the E string and pull it away, as I just did. It produces this sound. This is called left hand pizzicato. I remember Miss DeLay explaining to me how the finger goes to and from the string. She said, "If A were the starting point of the finger and C were the arrival point and B was here at the top, then we've formed a triangle." She asked the question, "What's the quickest way to get to C?" Well, from A it would be C, not A up to B, down to C. Or the reverse coming away, it would be C to A, and not C all the way up and back.

So let's look a little closer at this left hand pizzicato. Let's look at the third finger, again on the E string. Remember, it looks like that. Why don't I slow it down so that you can see it even better?

That's great. But you know, we can use our other fingers as well. For example, we can do it with a fourth finger, third finger (what we just did), second finger, first finger. Now, we can as well do four one or four two or three one or three two. And to top it off, we can do four three two one. But you know, to really do it more effectively, we need to use our bow. If we drop the bow to the string, it makes a similar sound to a pizzicato. If we use this one for our fourth finger, which can't be pizzed, we hear all five notes. Here, have a listen.

Why don't I slow that down as well so that we can really see it? Using this is really, really cool, so why I don't I show you how I used it in one of my melodies, "Number Two."

Now, lots of different composers have used left hand pizzicato for quite a long time. Here are two examples, two very famous examples of that usage. First, let's look at Sarasate's "Zigeunerweizen." Did you see the three one bow on the third finger and then pizz the first? Or the two zero? Here, let me show you: three one, two zero. And then, of course, there's the very, very famous variation in Paganini's "24th Caprice." Let's see, there's three one, two zero, four two, one zero, even four one. Oh, unless we forget the second part of the variation, which contains a four three two one on all four strings. Have a look.

Well, like I said, left hand pizz sort of resembles that rotation that I talked about before. We can use it to both put our fingers on the string, but in this case, we use it to take our fingers off the string, which gives us a real expressive possibility. A whole range of possibilities such as, suppose I wanted to do the left hand pizz, suppose I wanted to do it while I was actually playing a piece such as Wieniawski. You see, I can even use it to help articulation with a slur. But this gets into a whole, whole nother conversation. Let me do another video on that a little later.

So, that's it for this discussion about left hand pizzicato. If you have a comment or a question to ask me, please feel free to post it below. But as always, do take care and here's hoping that your practicing is becoming more and more efficient, and this is leading you to even better performances.

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