Extended Playing Techniques in the Romantic Era

This post focus on some of the experimentation with Timbre, or Tone-Colour, in the Romantic Era.

Col Legno:

Chopin piano concerto no. 2 in F Minor:

This is a selection of bars from the music which shows you the player instructions to play "Col Legno" at specific points (purple circles) and "Ord" (Ordinary; green circles)

Listen to it being played now from 27minutes and 9 seconds in this video, you can see the violins turn their bows to play with the stick.

Con Sordino:

Con Sordino is the Italian term for playing with a mute on. Other ways it can be written are: "Sourdines" (French) and "mit dämpfer" (German). In SQA-land, we only need to know the Italian.

Here's an example of a fully muted piece for strings. This is covered in more detail in its own post - I encourage you to go look at that to deepen your sense of Romantic music.

Blended & Extended: Col Legno, Pizzicato and Arco

Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, where he has used 3 distinct string playing techniques in one go.

Look at the music, then listen to the section in the video from 8 minutes 16 seconds. You can see the players playing with the stick of the bow. It's a bizarre and percussive effect. Play it back a few times to really listen closely. It goes very fast.