Col legno
Strike or draw the strings with the bow's wood — dry, wooden, percussive
Related
Col legno turns the bow over and brings its wooden stick into contact with the strings. There are two forms: battuto, striking the string with the stick — short, dry, like a wooden tap, often used for skeletal rhythms; and tratto, drawing the stick across the string while the hair still partly touches it, which gives a sustained, rough, scraping line.
The two sound quite different. The usual mistake is to treat col legno as one colour: when the score says only col legno, the common practice is battuto; the "stick plus hair" tratto is quieter, harder to control and more damaging to the bow, so it is rarer. Pitch is not changed, but its presence is thinned.
Sources
- col legno 的两种奏法与音色，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Col legno"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.