The Strings

Five instruments, one timbre. The string section is built from the violin, viola, violoncello, double bass, and — by long custom, though not by family — the harp. The first four are bowed, fretless, and share a common method of voice production: a horsehair bow drawn across stretched gut or steel. The harp belongs by mechanism to a different world, and yet has sat among the strings for two centuries without protest from anyone.

The strings are the only family in the orchestra that can be asked, without strain, to play continuously for an hour. They blend with themselves more readily than any other group blends with itself; they cover six octaves between the double bass’s lowest open string and the violin’s upper harmonics; they pass from a whisper to a roar without changing instruments. Of the four sections, theirs is the only one for which a composer may write almost as he would for a single voice.

The section is divided into five desks, of which the first four are bowed: first violins, second violins, violas, violoncellos, and double basses. The strings are tuned in fifths, save the bass, which is tuned in fourths and which sounds an octave below its written pitch. The harp, when present, is tuned diatonically and pedalled chromatically; it is most usefully thought of as a string instrument that does not bow.

The string section, taken whole, is treated by composers as a single instrument. It alone in the orchestra can sustain a four-part chorale with no audible seam between the registers; it alone can cross-fade a chord from low to high without anyone being able to point to the moment of change. The art of writing for strings is, very largely, the art of using this unity well — and of breaking it deliberately when the music asks.

The number of strings on the platform is not fixed. It varies with the music, with the hall, and with the orchestra’s purse. What does not vary is the proportion: a string section is a balanced body, and the ratios between its desks are observed almost without exception.

The convention is written 1st violins / 2nd violins / violas / cellos / double basses. The standard proportions, observed since the late nineteenth century:

• Full symphonic — 16 / 14 / 12 / 10 / 8. The body assumed by Mahler, Strauss, and the late Romantic repertoire. Sixty players in all.
• Standard symphony — 14 / 12 / 10 / 8 / 6. The everyday forces of most professional orchestras: fifty players, sufficient for Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and most of the canon.
• Classical — 10 / 8 / 6 / 6 / 4. Beethoven, Schubert, the Mendelssohn symphonies. Slightly weighted in the cellos, who carry the continuo’s ghost.
• Chamber — 8 / 6 / 4 / 4 / 2 or 6 / 6 / 4 / 4 / 2. Mozart, early Haydn, Stravinsky’s neoclassical scores.
• Reduced chamber — 4 / 4 / 3 / 3 / 2 or even 4 / 3 / 2 / 2 / 1. The Baroque orchestra at its working size. Each player is heard.

Two seatings prevail. In the American arrangement, standardised by Stokowski in the 1920s, the violins sit together at the conductor’s left — firsts in front, seconds beside or behind — with violas to the centre, cellos to the right, and basses ranged behind the cellos. The two violin sections face the audience as one body; antiphonal writing is fused into a single voice.

In the older German or antiphonal seating, first violins sit at the conductor’s left and second violins at the conductor’s right, facing one another across the stage, with violas and cellos between. This is the layout for which Mozart, Brahms, and Mahler conceived their string writing; the stereo dialogue between firsts and seconds — found everywhere in the canon — is intelligible only here.

The harp is seated at the side of the first violins, where the harpist can see the conductor and the strings can hear the instrument. Two harps are placed together; three or more are spread across the rear of the strings, often raised. The harp is rostered with the strings, but the conductor will treat it, in rehearsal, as a soloist within them.

Each desk seats two players, who share a stand. When a part is marked divisi, the two players take separate notes; when it is marked div. a 3 or a 4, the division proceeds by stand. The composer who writes a six-part divisi for the first violins is asking for sixteen players to split into six groups: a practical limit reached in late Strauss and avoided thereafter. Two or three parts is the workable maximum.

The string section is the easiest of the four to write for badly, and the hardest to write for well. Its very flexibility is the snare. A composer may pile any chord upon any other and the strings will, more or less, play it; but a string passage that simply works is not the same as a string passage that lives.

Every line written for strings is, at root, a line drawn by a bow. Sing the line aloud as you write it. If you cannot phrase it with your breath, the player will not phrase it with the bow. Mark the bowings — slurs, that is — wherever the phrase requires them, and leave the rest to the leader. A page of strings without slurs is a page that has not been thought through.

Each string instrument has a comfortable register and an extreme register. In the comfortable register the tone is rich, the intonation secure, and the player relaxed. At the extremes — the violin above C₇, the cello above the staff, the bass anywhere above the bass clef — the sound thins, the player tenses, and the intonation begins to ride. Write to the extremes for effect, not from carelessness.

Each instrument has four strings, and each string has a character. The lowest is the most resonant and the most slow to speak; the highest is the most brilliant and the most exposed. A line crossed from one string to another changes colour, slightly, at the point of crossing. Where the colour matters, indicate the string — sul G, sul D, and so forth.

The most natural string texture is in five real parts, one to a desk. The next most natural is octave doubling: violins above violas, violas above cellos, cellos above basses. The basses, by their nature, sound an octave below the written pitch, and so a cello-and-bass unison line is in fact an octave doubling — the single most-used texture in the literature.

Avoid doubling violins and violas in unison except for a particular weight; the viola tone disappears beneath the violins. Cellos and violas in unison is a fine, dark colour, used to magnificent effect in Brahms.

The bow articulates as the breath does. Legato is a slur; détaché is a separate stroke per note, with the bow on the string; martelé is a hammered, decisive stroke; spiccato and sautillé are bouncing strokes for fast, light passages; col legno is the wood of the bow on the string; pizzicato is the bow set down. Each has a region of the bow it lives in, and each fails outside it. Adler is correct that no orchestral writing is wasted as completely as a passage marked spiccato at a tempo too slow to bounce.

Pizzicato sustains poorly and dies fast. It is a punctuation, not a song. The mute (con sordino) veils the sound, darkening and softening; allow at least two beats of rest to mute and to remove. Harmonics — natural and artificial — give a glassy, silvery tone, beautiful in cantabile and useless in tutti.

Piston warns that double-stops, written carelessly, become divisi the moment a player thinks them too awkward. Decide whether you want a chord played by every player on two strings, or split between two halves of the section: the sound is utterly different. The first is brilliant and slightly forced; the second is smooth and roomy. Write the one you mean.

The full string section can roar; a solo string can break a heart. Between these extremes lies most of the literature. A line marked solo is taken by the principal of the desk; soli means the front desk only; the rest of the section continues as marked. Use the solo sparingly — once it is heard, the whole texture of the work is changed.

• Chords of more than three notes will be split between bow strokes. Plan for the split.
• Double-stops involving the open string (G, D, A, E on the violin) are easy at any tempo; without an open string they require a hand shape that takes time.
• Tremolo is the orchestra’s shimmer. Sul ponticello turns the shimmer to glass; sul tasto turns it to mist.
• A string section in unison is the loudest sustaining sound the orchestra can make at piano, and the warmest sound it can make at fortissimo. Use it.
• When in doubt, simplify. A clean line for fourteen first violins will be more beautiful than a clever one for seven.

A short, partial list — five places to begin if one wishes to know what the string section can do, and what composers who loved it have asked it to do.

1. № 01

   Tchaikovsky — Serenade for Strings, Op. 48

   First movement, opening

   A homophonic chorale for the section alone — the string orchestra introducing itself, in C major, with no apologies.

   Listen on Spotify
2. № 02

   Wagner — Lohengrin, Prelude to Act I

   Opening

   Divided strings ascending out of silence — four solo violins, then desks, then the whole section. A study in how to begin.

   Listen on Spotify
3. № 03

   Strauss — Metamorphosen

   For 23 solo strings

   Twenty-three independent parts, no two ever doubled — the string section unbound from itself, in mourning.

   Listen on Spotify
4. № 04

   Bartók — Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

   Third movement (Adagio)

   Glissandi, harmonics, and a divided body that never quite settles. Night-music for the section as instrument.

   Listen on Spotify
5. № 05

   Mahler — Symphony No. 5, Adagietto

   Strings and harp alone

   The section laid bare — first violins above a slow rocking accompaniment, with one harp. Eleven minutes that have outlived their movement.

   Listen on Spotify

Further entries will be added as our study deepens.

The strings are the orchestra’s oldest section because they were, for a hundred and fifty years, the orchestra entire. The wind and brass that surround them now were grafted on, slowly, to a body that had already settled into shape.

The string family of the modern orchestra was settled in northern Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Cremonese makers — Amati, then Stradivari, then Guarneri — gave the violin family the form it still wears, and the music-making practices of Venice and Mantua gave it its first repertoire. By 1600 the violin had displaced the older viol consort in everything but the most conservative chamber circles.

At the court of Louis XIV, Lully assembled the Vingt-quatre Violons du Roy — twenty-four players in five parts (dessus, haute-contre, taille, quinte, basse). It was the first standing, professional, salaried string ensemble of recognisable orchestral size, and it set the template for everything that followed: a fixed body, rehearsed to a uniform style, performing repertoire written expressly for it.

By Haydn’s late symphonies the five-part string texture had reduced to four — first violin, second violin, viola, cello-with-bass — and the section had taken its present hierarchy. Mozart writes the violas as a true inner voice, neither bass nor treble, and the cello-bass split begins, in passages of expressive weight, to open into a fifth real part. The classical orchestra’s strings — roughly 8 / 6 / 4 / 4 / 2 — were the body Beethoven inherited and enlarged.

Beethoven’s Ninth, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Wagner’s Ring, and the late symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler each demanded a larger body. By 1900 the section had reached 16 / 14 / 12 / 10 / 8 — the so-called full symphonic — and there it has stayed. The strings are unique in the orchestra in that their forces have not meaningfully grown for a hundred and twenty-five years.

The twentieth century did not enlarge the string section; it reimagined what one could ask of it. Bartók’s glissandi and night-music textures, Penderecki’s Threnody with its tone-clusters and quarter-tones, Ligeti’s micropolyphony — all wrote for the same fifty players Brahms had used and asked them to sound like nothing Brahms had imagined. The section that had been the orchestra’s body became, in addition, its laboratory.