title: Pennsylvania State University

text: Since joining the Big Ten in 1991, Penn State teams have won 103 conference regular season and tournament titles.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: Penn State has one of the most successful overall athletic programs in the country, as evidenced by its rankings in the NACDA Director's Cup, a list compiled by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics that charts institutions' overall success in college sports. From the Cup's inception in the 1993–1994 season, the Nittany Lions have finished in the top 25 every year.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: Despite widespread success in the overall athletic program, the school is best known for its football team and draws a very large following. Penn State's Beaver Stadium has the second largest seating capacity of any stadium in the nation, and the 4th largest seating capacity in the world. With an official capacity of 106,572, it is slightly behind Michigan Stadium with an official capacity of 107,601. For decades, the football team was led by coach Joe Paterno. Paterno was in a close competition with Bobby Bowden, the head coach for Florida State, for the most wins ever in Division I-A (now the FBS) history. This competition effectively ended with Paterno still leading following Bowden's retirement after the 2010 Gator Bowl. In 2007, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. Paterno amassed 409 victories over his career, the most in NCAA Division I history. Paterno died on January 22, 2012, at the age of 85. Paterno was posthumously honored by Penn State during the September 17, 2016 football game that marked the 50th anniversary of his first game as head coach.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: The school's wrestling team has also become noticed. Under Cael Sanderson, the Nittany Lions won eight national titles in nine years, from 2011 to 2019.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: The university opened a new Penn State All-Sports Museum in February 2002. This two-level museum is located inside Beaver Stadium.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: In addition to the school-funded athletics, club sports also play a major role in the university, with over 68 club sports organizations meeting regularly. Many club teams compete nationally in their respective sports. The Penn State Ski Team, which competes as part of the United States Collegiate Ski and Snowboard Association (USCSA) in the Allegheny Conference, as well as the Penn State Swim Club, which competes in the American Swimming Association – University League (ASAU), are just a few examples. Some other clubs include baseball, squash, karate, crew, and sailing.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: Penn State's most well-known athletic cheer is "We are...Penn State." Typically, the students and cheerleaders shout, "We are," followed by a "Penn State" response from the rest of the fans. By tradition, this is done three times and followed by "Thank you..." "... You're welcome!"


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: The list of eminent past and present individuals associated with Penn State—as alumni, faculty, and athletic staff—can be found in the list of Pennsylvania State University people.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: Established in 1870, nine years after the university's first commencement exercises, the Penn State Alumni Association has the stated mission "to connect alumni to the University and each other, provide valuable benefits to members and support the University's mission of teaching, research, and service." The Alumni Association supports a number of educational and extracurricular missions of Penn State through financial support and is the network that connects alumni through over 280 "alumni groups", many of which are designated based on geographical, academic, or professional affiliation.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: As of July 1, 2010, the Alumni Association counted 496,969 members within the United States, with an additional 16,180 in countries around the globe. About half the United States alumni reside in Pennsylvania, primarily in the urban areas of Philadelphia (and the surrounding counties), the Pittsburgh Area and in the Centre County region surrounding State College, although alumni can be found in every region of the country and abroad. About 34 percent of United States alumni and 21 percent of international alumni are members of the Alumni Association. With membership totaling 176,426 as of FY2016, the Penn State Alumni Association is the largest dues-paying alumni association in the world, a distinction it has held since 1995.


title: Pennsylvania State University

text: Since 2001, the university, along with all schools in the Big Ten, has participated in the "Big Ten Challenge" website, which is a "competitive" clearinghouse of alumni donation statistics for member schools. Results are tracked to determine a percentage of each school's alumni from the previous decade who gave to their alma mater each calendar year (during the 2005–2006 year, alumni donations from 1996 to 2005 were tallied). With the exception of 2005–2006, when Penn State fell to second behind Northwestern University, Penn State has won the challenge each year since its inception.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Antonio Francesco Gramsci ( , , ; 22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where he remained until his death in 1937.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. His "Prison Notebooks" are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory. Gramsci drew insights from varying sources – not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, and Benedetto Croce. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including Italian history and nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, folklore, religion and high and popular culture.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology, rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the "common sense" values of all and thus maintain the "status quo". Cultural hegemony is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than the use of force to maintain order. This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci also attempted to break from the economic determinism of traditional Marxist thought, and so is sometimes described as a neo-Marxist. He held a humanistic understanding of Marxism, seeing it as a "philosophy of praxis" and an "absolute historicism" that transcends traditional materialism and traditional idealism.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci was born in Ales, in the province of Oristano, on the island of Sardinia, the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci (1860–1937) and Giuseppina Marcias (1861–1932). The senior Gramsci was a low-level official born in the small town of Gaeta, in the province of Latina (in the Central Italian region of Lazio), to a well-off family from the Southern Italian regions of Campania and Calabria and of Arbëreshë (Italo-Albanian) descent. Antonio Gramsci himself believed his father's family had left Albania as recently as 1821. The Albanian origin of his father's family is attested in the surname Gramsci, an Italianized form of "Gramshi", that stems from the definite noun of the placename Gramsh, a small town in central-eastern Albania. Antonio Gramsci's mother belonged to a Sardinian landowning family from Sorgono (in the province of Nuoro). The senior Gramsci's financial difficulties and troubles with the police forced the family to move about through several villages in Sardinia until they finally settled in Ghilarza.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In 1898, Francesco was convicted of embezzlement and imprisoned, reducing his family to destitution. The young Antonio had to abandon schooling and work at various casual jobs until his father's release in 1904. As a boy, Gramsci suffered from health problems, particularly a malformation of the spine that stunted his growth (his adult height was less than 5 feet) and left him seriously hunchbacked. For decades, it was reported that his condition had been due to a childhood accident—specifically, having been dropped by a nanny—but more recently it has been suggested that it was due to Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis that can cause deformity of the spine. Gramsci was also plagued by various internal disorders throughout his life.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci started secondary school in Santu Lussurgiu and completed it in Cagliari, where he lodged with his elder brother Gennaro, a former soldier whose time on the mainland had made him a militant socialist. However, Gramsci's sympathies then did not lie with socialism, but rather with the grievances of impoverished Sardinian peasants and miners, whose mistreatment by the mainlanders would later deeply contribute to his intellectual growth. They perceived their neglect as a result of privileges enjoyed by the rapidly industrialising North, and they tended to turn to a growing Sardinian nationalism, brutally repressed by troops from the Italian mainland, as a response.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In 1911 Gramsci won a scholarship to study at the University of Turin, sitting the exam at the same time as Palmiro Togliatti. At Turin he read literature and took a keen interest in linguistics, which he studied under Matteo Bartoli. Gramsci was in Turin as it was going through industrialization, with the Fiat and Lancia factories recruiting workers from poorer regions. Trade unions became established, and the first industrial social conflicts started to emerge. Gramsci frequented socialist circles as well as associating with Sardinian emigrants on the Italian mainland. Both his earlier experiences in Sardinia and his environment on the mainland shaped his worldview. Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party in late 1913, where he would later occupy a key position and observe from Turin the Russian Revolution.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Although showing a talent for his studies, Gramsci had financial problems and poor health. Together with his growing political commitment, these led to him abandoning his education in early 1915, at age 24. By this time he had acquired an extensive knowledge of history and philosophy. At university, he had come into contact with the thought of Antonio Labriola, Rodolfo Mondolfo, Giovanni Gentile, and most importantly, Benedetto Croce, possibly the most widely respected Italian intellectual of his day. Labriola especially propounded a brand of Hegelian Marxism that he labelled "philosophy of praxis". Although Gramsci later used this phrase to escape the prison censors, his relationship with this current of thought was ambiguous throughout his life.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: From 1914 onward, Gramsci's writings for socialist newspapers such as "Il Grido del Popolo" () earned him a reputation as a notable journalist. In 1916 he became co-editor of the Piedmont edition of "Avanti!", the Socialist Party official organ. An articulate and prolific writer of political theory, Gramsci proved a formidable commentator, writing on all aspects of Turin's social and political events.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci was at this time also involved in the education and organisation of Turin workers; he spoke in public for the first time in 1916 and gave talks on topics such as Romain Rolland, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the emancipation of women. In the wake of the arrest of Socialist Party leaders that followed revolutionary riots in August 1917, Gramsci became one of Turin's leading socialists; he was elected to the party's Provisional Committee and also made editor of "Il Grido del Popolo".


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In April 1919, with Togliatti, Angelo Tasca and Umberto Terracini, Gramsci set up the weekly newspaper "L'Ordine Nuovo" (The New Order). In October the same year, despite being divided into various hostile factions, the Socialist Party moved by a large majority to join the Third International. Vladimir Lenin saw the "L'Ordine Nuovo" group as closest in orientation to the Bolsheviks, and it received his backing against the anti-parliamentary programme of the left-communist Amadeo Bordiga.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In the course of tactical debates within the party, Gramsci's group mainly stood out due to its advocacy of workers' councils, which had come into existence in Turin spontaneously during the large strikes of 1919 and 1920. For Gramsci, these councils were the proper means of enabling workers to take control of the task of organising production. Although he believed his position at this time to be in keeping with Lenin's policy of "All power to the Soviets", his stance that these Italian councils were communist, rather than just one organ of political struggle against the bourgeoisie, was attacked by Bordiga for betraying a syndicalist tendency influenced by the thought of Georges Sorel and Daniel De Leon. By the time of the defeat of the Turin workers in spring 1920, Gramsci was almost alone in his defence of the councils.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: The failure of the workers' councils to develop into a national movement convinced Gramsci that a Communist Party in the Leninist sense was needed. The group around "L'Ordine Nuovo" declaimed incessantly against the Italian Socialist Party's centrist leadership and ultimately allied with Bordiga's far larger "abstentionist" faction. On 21 January 1921, in the town of Livorno (Leghorn), the Italian Communist Party ("Partito Comunista d'Italia – PCd'I") was founded. In opposition to Bordiga, Gramsci supported the "Arditi del Popolo", a militant anti-fascist group which struggled against the Blackshirts.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci would be a leader of the party from its inception but was subordinate to Bordiga, whose emphasis on discipline, centralism and purity of principles dominated the party's programme until the latter lost the leadership in 1924.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In 1922, Gramsci travelled to Russia as a representative of the new party. Here, he met Julia Schucht (Yulia Apollonovna Schucht (1896-1980)), a young violinist whom he married in 1923 and with whom he had two sons, Delio (1924-1982) and Giuliano (1926-2007). Gramsci never saw his second son.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: The Russian mission coincided with the advent of fascism in Italy, and Gramsci returned with instructions to foster, against the wishes of the PCd'I leadership, a united front of leftist parties against fascism. Such a front would ideally have had the PCd'I at its centre, through which Moscow would have controlled all the leftist forces, but others disputed this potential supremacy: socialists did have a certain tradition in Italy, too, while the Communist Party seemed relatively young and too radical. Many believed that an eventual coalition led by communists would have functioned too remotely from political debate, and thus would have run the risk of isolation.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In late 1922 and early 1923, Benito Mussolini's government embarked on a campaign of repression against the opposition parties, arresting most of the PCd'I leadership, including Bordiga. At the end of 1923, Gramsci travelled from Moscow to Vienna, where he tried to revive a party torn by factional strife.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In 1924 Gramsci, now recognised as head of the PCd'I, gained election as a deputy for the Veneto. He started organizing the launch of the official newspaper of the party, called "L'Unità" (Unity), living in Rome while his family stayed in Moscow. At its Lyon Congress in January 1926, Gramsci's theses calling for a united front to restore democracy to Italy were adopted by the party.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In 1926, Joseph Stalin's manoeuvres inside the Bolshevik party moved Gramsci to write a letter to the Comintern in which he deplored the opposition led by Leon Trotsky but also underlined some presumed faults of the leader. Togliatti, in Moscow as a representative of the party, received the letter, opened it, read it, and decided not to deliver it. This caused a difficult conflict between Gramsci and Togliatti which they never completely resolved.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: On 9 November 1926, the Fascist government enacted a new wave of emergency laws, taking as a pretext an alleged attempt on Mussolini's life that had occurred several days earlier. The fascist police arrested Gramsci, despite his parliamentary immunity, and brought him to the Roman prison "Regina Coeli".


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: At his trial, Gramsci's prosecutor stated, "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning". He received an immediate sentence of five years in confinement on the island of Ustica and the following year he received a sentence of 20 years' imprisonment in Turi, near Bari.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Over 11 years in prison, his health deteriorated: "His teeth fell out, his digestive system collapsed so that he could not eat solid food... he had convulsions when he vomited blood and suffered headaches so violent that he beat his head against the walls of his cell."


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: An international campaign, organised by Piero Sraffa at Cambridge University and Gramsci's sister-in-law Tatiana, was mounted to demand Gramsci's release. In 1933 he was moved from the prison at Turi to a clinic at Formia, but was still being denied adequate medical attention. Two years later he was moved to the Quisisana clinic in Rome. He was due for release on 21 April 1937 and planned to retire to Sardinia for convalescence, but a combination of arteriosclerosis, pulmonary tuberculosis, high blood pressure, angina, gout, and acute gastric disorders meant that he was too ill to move. Gramsci died on 27 April 1937, at the age of 46. His ashes are buried in the Cimitero Acattolico (Non-Catholic Cemetery) in Rome. Gramsci's death fit with a larger pattern by the Mussolini regime through which the dictator attempted to project a mild image of his regime. Gramsci's premature death was owing to prison conditions. Yet by releasing Gramsci when he was already quite ill, the regime could say that Gramsci died in a hospital rather than in prison. Nevertheless, his death was owing directly to prison conditions. Possibilities are considered (by Gramsci's grandson, Antonio Jr.) that Stalinist regime could be active in preventing Gramsci's release from prison (contacts initiated by NKVD while he was imprisoned) due to his perceived trotskyist sympathies.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci was one of the most influential Marxist thinkers of the 20th century, and a particularly key thinker in the development of Western Marxism. He wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. These writings, known as the "Prison Notebooks", contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory associated with his name, such as:


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Hegemony was a term previously used by Marxists such as Vladimir Lenin to denote the political leadership of the working class in a democratic revolution. Gramsci greatly expanded this concept, developing an acute analysis of how the ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – establishes and maintains its control.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Orthodox Marxism had predicted that socialist revolution was inevitable in capitalist societies. By the early 20th century, no such revolution had occurred in the most advanced nations. Rather, capitalism seemed more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the "common sense" values of all. People in the working class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: To counter the notion that bourgeois values represented natural or normal values for society, the working class needed to develop a culture of its own. Lenin held that culture was ancillary to political objectives, but for Gramsci, it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests; neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a "historic bloc", taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations, and ideas. In this way, Gramsci's theory emphasized the importance of the political and ideological superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the economic base.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci stated that bourgeois cultural values were tied to folklore, popular culture and religion, and therefore much of his analysis of hegemonic culture is aimed at these. He was also impressed by the influence that the Catholic Church had and the care it had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci saw Marxism as a marriage of the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism and the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to think of it as an expression of their own experience.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci gave much thought to the role of intellectuals in society. He stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. He saw modern intellectuals not as talkers, but as practical-minded directors and organisers who produced hegemony through ideological apparatuses such as education and the media. Furthermore, he distinguished between a traditional intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks "organically". Such "organic" intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but instead articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. To Gramsci, it was the duty of organic intellectuals to speak to the obscured precepts of folk wisdom, or common sense ("senso comune"), of their respective political spheres. These intellectuals would represent excluded social groups of a society, what Gramsci referred to as the subaltern.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In line with Gramsci's theories of hegemonic power, he argued that capitalist power needed to be challenged by building a counterhegemony. By this he meant that, as part of the war of position, the organic intellectuals and others within the working-class, need to develop alternative values and an alternative ideology in contrast to bourgeois ideology. He argued that the reason this had not needed to happen in Russia was because the Russian ruling class did not have genuine hegemonic power. So the Bolsheviks were able to carry out a war of manoeuvre (the 1917 revolution) relatively easily, because ruling-class hegemony had never been fully achieved. He believed that a final war of manoeuvre was only possible, in the developed and advanced capitalist societies, when the war of position had been won by the organic intellectuals and the working-class building a counter-hegemony.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: The need to create a working-class culture and a counter-hegemony relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, whose task was "not" to introduce Marxist ideology into the consciousness of the proletariat as a set of foreign notions but to renovate the existing intellectual activity of the masses and make it natively critical of the status quo. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of critical pedagogy and popular education as theorized and practised in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of Frantz Fanon. For this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci's writings and ideas important to this day.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state. Gramsci does not understand the state in the narrow sense of the government. Instead, he divides it between political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) – the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control – and civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) – commonly seen as the private or non-state sphere, which mediates between the state and the economy. However, he stresses that the division is purely conceptual and that the two often overlap in reality. Gramsci claims the capitalist state rules through force plus consent: political society is the realm of force and civil society is the realm of consent.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci proffers that under modern capitalism the bourgeoisie can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by trade unions and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere. Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in passive revolution by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change. Gramsci posits that movements such as reformism and fascism, as well as the scientific management and assembly line methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford respectively, are examples of this.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Drawing from Machiavelli, he argues that The Modern Prince – the revolutionary party – is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society. For Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that a war of position, carried out by revolutionaries through political agitation, the trade unions, advancement of proletarian culture, and other ways to create an opposing civil society was necessary alongside a war of manoeuvre – a direct revolution – in order to have a successful revolution without danger of a counter-revolution or degeneration.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Despite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from equating political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. He believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a "regulated society", where political society is diminished and civil society is expanded. He defines the "withering away of the state" as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Like the early Marx, Gramsci was an emphatic proponent of historicism. In Gramsci's view, all meaning derives from the relation between human practical activity (or praxis) and the objective historical and social processes of which it is a part. Ideas cannot be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin. The concepts by which we organise our knowledge of the world do not derive primarily from our relation to objects, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts. As a result, there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature, but only historically variable social relationships. Furthermore, philosophy and science do not reflect a reality independent of man. Rather, a theory can be said to be true when, in any given historical situation, it expresses the real developmental trend of that situation.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: For the majority of Marxists, truth was truth no matter when and where it was known, and scientific knowledge (which included Marxism) accumulated historically as the advance of truth in this everyday sense. In this view, Marxism (or the Marxist theory of history and economics) did not belong to the illusory realm of the superstructure because it is a science. In contrast, Gramsci believed Marxism was true in a socially pragmatic sense: by articulating the class consciousness of the proletariat, Marxism expressed the truth of its times better than any other theory. This anti-scientistic and anti-positivist stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce. However, it should be underlined that Gramsci's absolute historicism broke with Croce's tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical destiny. Although Gramsci repudiates the charge, his historical account of truth has been criticised as a form of relativism.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: In a pre-prison article titled "The Revolution against ", Gramsci wrote that the October Revolution in Russia had invalidated the idea that socialist revolution had to await the full development of capitalist forces of production. This reflected his view that Marxism was not a determinist philosophy. The principle of the causal primacy of the forces of production was a misconception of Marxism. Both economic changes and cultural changes are expressions of a basic historical process, and it is difficult to say which sphere has primacy over the other.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: The belief from the earliest years of the workers' movement that it would inevitably triumph due to "historical laws" was a product of the historical circumstances of an oppressed class restricted mainly to defensive action. This fatalistic doctrine must be abandoned as a hindrance once the working-class becomes able to take the initiative. Because Marxism is a philosophy of praxis, it cannot rely on unseen historical laws as the agents of social change. History is defined by human praxis and therefore includes human will. Nonetheless, will-power cannot achieve anything it likes in any given situation: when the consciousness of the working-class reaches the stage of development necessary for action, it will encounter historical circumstances that cannot be arbitrarily altered. It is not predetermined by historical inevitability as to which of several possible developments will take place as a result.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: His critique of economism also extended to that practised by the syndicalists of the Italian trade unions. He believed that many trade unionists had settled for a reformist, gradualist approach in that they had refused to struggle on the political front in addition to the economic front. For Gramsci, much as the ruling class can look beyond its own immediate economic interests to reorganise the forms of its own hegemony, so must the working class present its own interests as congruous with the universal advancement of society. While Gramsci envisioned the trade unions as one organ of a counter-hegemonic force in a capitalist society, the trade union leaders simply saw these organizations as a means to improve conditions within the existing structure. Gramsci referred to the views of these trade unionists as vulgar economism, which he equated to covert reformism and even liberalism.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: By virtue of his belief that human history and collective praxis determine whether any philosophical question is meaningful or not, Gramsci's views run contrary to the metaphysical materialism and copy theory of perception advanced by Friedrich Engels, and Lenin, though he does not explicitly state this. For Gramsci, Marxism does not deal with a reality that exists in and for itself, independent of humanity. The concept of an objective universe outside of human history and human praxis was analogous to belief in God. Gramsci defined objectivity in terms of a universal intersubjectivity to be established in a future communist society. Natural history was thus only meaningful in relation to human history. In his view philosophical materialism resulted from a lack of critical thought, and could not be said to oppose religious dogma and superstition. Despite this, Gramsci resigned himself to the existence of this arguably cruder form of Marxism. Marxism was a philosophy for the proletariat, a subaltern class, and thus could often only be expressed in the form of popular superstition and common sense. Nonetheless, it was necessary to effectively challenge the ideologies of the educated classes, and to do so Marxists must present their philosophy in a more sophisticated guise, and attempt to genuinely understand their opponents' views.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: Gramsci's thought emanates from the organized left, but he has also become an important figure in current academic discussions within cultural studies and critical theory. Political theorists from the center and the right have also found insight in his concepts; his idea of hegemony, for example, has become widely cited. His influence is particularly strong in contemporary political science (see Neo-Gramscianism). His work also heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies in which many have found the potential for political or ideological resistance to dominant government and business interests.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: His critics charge him with fostering a notion of power struggle through ideas. They find the Gramscian approach to philosophical analysis, reflected in current academic controversies, to be in conflict with open-ended, liberal inquiry grounded in apolitical readings of the classics of Western culture.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: As a socialist, Gramsci's legacy has been disputed. Togliatti, who led the Party (renamed as Italian Communist Party, PCI) after World War II and whose gradualist approach was a forerunner to Eurocommunism, claimed that the PCI's practices during this period were congruent with Gramscian thought. It is speculated that he would likely have been expelled from his Party if his true views had been known, particularly his growing hostility to Stalin.


title: Antonio Gramsci

text: A 2021 biography of Gramsci argues that Gramsci erred in his parliamentary resistance to fascism. Elected to parliament by the Communist Party of Italy, Gramsci was allowed to make only one parliamentary speech on 16 May 1925 before he was arrested. In that speech and the debate that followed, Gramsci defended the use of violence by the left, including leftist violence emerging in Russia because he believed it to be better than fascist violence. For Gramsci, this was because "we represent the majority and will defeat you while you (the fascists) represent the minority and will disappear." Gramsci would have been far more effective had he eschewed violence by any party and argued, instead, for the rule of law and a constitutional order. He could have begun his argument by condemning the murder of Giacomo Matteoti who had already called for the rule of law and been murdered by the fascists for that position. That murder produced a crisis for the fascist regime which Gramsci could have exploited. Frétigné also argues that Gramsci and the Socialists more generally were naïve in their assessment of the fascists and as a result underestimated the brutality of which the regime was capable.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: Sergiño Gianni Dest (born November 3, 2000) is a professional soccer player who plays as a full-back for club AC Milan, on loan from La Liga club Barcelona, and the United States national team.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: Born in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and Surinamese-American father, Dest has represented the United States internationally at senior level since 2019.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: Born in the Netherlands to a Surinamese-American father and a Dutch mother Dest played for the youth academy of Almere City until 2012, when he moved to the Ajax youth academy. Initially a forward, he progressed through the ranks of the club until making the switch to a full-back.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: Dest debuted for Jong Ajax on October 15, 2018, in a 2–1 loss against Jong PSV. Dest impressed over the course of the 2018–19 season, making 18 appearances in the Dutch Eerste Divisie and tallying one goal and two assists. He also scored one goal and provided one assist in seven appearances in the prestigious UEFA Youth League.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: On July 27, 2019, Dest made his debut for the Ajax first team in an official game when he started the 2019 Johan Cruyff Shield match against rivals PSV Eindhoven. Ajax won the match 2–0 and claimed the trophy. On August 10, 2019, Dest debuted in the Eredivisie, replacing Noussair Mazraoui in the 54th minute of Ajax's 5–0 home win against FC Emmen. He also appeared as a substitute in qualifying matches for the UEFA Champions League against PAOK and APOEL. In September, Dest was officially promoted to the Ajax first-team squad. On September 17, 2019, he made his first start in the Champions League against Lille OSC, a match which Ajax won 3–0. Dest finished his first senior season with 35 appearances in which he scored two goals—both in a KNVB Cup fixture against Telstar.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: On October 1, 2020, Dest transferred to Barcelona for an initial €21 million fee plus a further €5 million in variables. He signed a five-year contract with the club with a buyout clause set at €400 million. Dest made his debut for Barcelona on October 4, coming on as a 75th minute substitute for Jordi Alba in a 1–1 draw against Sevilla. With the appearance, Dest became the first American to appear for Barcelona in La Liga. On October 20, he became the first American to play for Barcelona in a UEFA Champions League match. Later that month, Dest set another milestone, becoming the first American to play in El Clásico; Barcelona fell to a 1–3 defeat to rivals Real Madrid but Dest's performance in the match was praised. On November 24, 2020, Dest scored his first goal for Barcelona in a 4–0 away win over Dynamo Kyiv in the Champions League group stage. In doing so, Dest became the first American to score a professional goal for the club. On March 21, 2021, he scored a brace in a 6–1 away win over Real Sociedad.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: On September 1, 2022, Dest signed for Serie A club AC Milan on a one-year loan with option to buy for €20 million.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: Dest has dual nationality making him eligible to play for either the United States or the Netherlands and ultimately chose to play for the United States' senior national team. Dest has represented the United States at youth and full international level. He played five games in total for the United States under-17 team, including four appearances at the 2017 FIFA Under-17 World Cup. He represented the United States under-20 team at the 2019 FIFA Under-20 World Cup, where he played four matches. In total, he made 12 appearances and scored one goal for the under-20 team.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: Dest made his senior debut for the United States on September 6, 2019, starting and playing 68 minutes in a 3–0 friendly loss against Mexico. Dest chose to commit his international future to the United States at the senior level on October 28, 2019. He was included in the United States' 26-man roster for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: During the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Dest provided the assist for Christian Pulisic's winning goal in a 1–0 victory over Iran, which sent the United States into the Round of 16. In that next game against Netherlands (his birth nation), he was culpable in leaving too much space for Daley Blind to score the second Dutch goal in a 3–1 defeat for the US.


title: Sergiño Dest

text: Dest combines many key qualities needed in a full-back, including strong attacking prowess, solid defensive play, and being excellent in possession. He has the ability to take players on and his pace is a virtue going forward and defending.


title: Michelle Thomas

text: Michelle Doris Thomas (September 23, 1968 – December 23, 1998) was an American actress. She was known for her roles as Justine Phillips on the NBC sitcom "The Cosby Show" (1988–90), as Myra Monkhouse on the ABC/CBS sitcom "Family Matters" (1993–98), and as Callie Rogers on the CBS soap opera "The Young and the Restless" (1998).


title: Michelle Thomas

text: Michelle Thomas was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on September 23, 1968, to Phynjuar "Penwah" Thomas, a stage actress, and musician father Dennis Thomas, a saxophonist and founding member of the band Kool & the Gang. Thomas grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and graduated from West Essex High School in 1987.


title: Michelle Thomas

text: As a child, she would accompany her mother at her theater rehearsals and performances. Her mother was her first acting coach, and coached her throughout the course of her career. A friend of her mother who had heard Michelle Thomas sing before had requested that she enter Miss Talented Teens. Thomas was crowned Miss Talented Teen New Jersey at the state's Hal Jackson's Talented Teen pageant, and then in July 1984, at the age of 15, she was crowned Miss Talented Teen International in Montego Bay, Jamaica from among 35 state and national representatives.


title: Michelle Thomas

text: In 1983, Michelle Thomas appeared in her first television commercial. In December 1984, she appeared with Hal Jackson on "Soul Train" after having won the Miss Talented Teen International pageant earlier in the year.


title: Michelle Thomas

text: From 1988 to 1990, Thomas portrayed Justine Phillips, the girlfriend of Theo Huxtable, on "The Cosby Show". She appeared on various television programs, including "A Man Called Hawk" in 1989 and "Thea" in 1994. Thomas had a role in "Dream Date" in 1989 and had a small role in "Hangin' with the Homeboys" in 1991.


title: Michelle Thomas

text: Thomas appeared in music videos for Mint Condition, Chubb Rock, and Dru Hill. Her publicist was Kahdijah Bell, daughter of Ronald Bell of Kool & the Gang. Thomas was a guest host of the weekly music series "Soul Train" in May 1996 and March 1997.


title: Michelle Thomas

text: From 1993 to 1998, she portrayed the role of Myra Monkhouse, the girlfriend of Steve Urkel, on "Family Matters". After the sitcom ended in 1998, Thomas portrayed Callie Rogers, an aspiring singer and love interest of Malcolm Winters, on the daytime soap "The Young and the Restless". In October 1998, Thomas took a medical leave from the series due to her ill health. Thomas had been in the studio recording music before her sudden turn in health. She appeared posthumously in the role of Anne in the film "Unbowed" in 1999.


title: Michelle Thomas

text: In August 1997, Thomas was diagnosed with a rare cancer, an intra-abdominal desmoplastic small-round-cell tumor (DSRCT). Thomas never smoked or drank alcohol, and was a vegetarian. Her mother added that "they'd give her a sedation that was supposed to put her out for 20 minutes and she'd be asleep for four days. Her body couldn't take it." Thomas underwent surgery to remove a lemon-sized tumor shortly before landing her "The Young and the Restless" role in the spring of 1998. She underwent surgery again in October 1998 after a second cancerous growth ruptured. After being released from the hospital, Thomas flew home to New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with her family in Weehawken, New Jersey.


title: Michelle Thomas

text: On December 23, at age 30, Thomas died in New York City at Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Thomas' longtime friend and former boyfriend, was among those at her bedside. On December 26, 1998, a Muslim funeral service was held, per her request. She was buried in New Jersey.


title: Violin

text: The violin, sometimes known as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular use. The violin typically has four strings (some can have five), usually tuned in perfect fifths with notes G3, D4, A4, E5, and is most commonly played by drawing a bow across its strings. It can also be played by plucking the strings with the fingers (pizzicato) and, in specialized cases, by striking the strings with the wooden side of the bow (col legno).


title: Violin

text: Violins are important instruments in a wide variety of musical genres. They are most prominent in the Western classical tradition, both in ensembles (from chamber music to orchestras) and as solo instruments. Violins are also important in many varieties of folk music, including country music, bluegrass music, and in jazz. Electric violins with solid bodies and piezoelectric pickups are used in some forms of rock music and jazz fusion, with the pickups plugged into instrument amplifiers and speakers to produce sound. The violin has come to be incorporated in many non-Western music cultures, including Indian music and Iranian music. The name "fiddle" is often used regardless of the type of music played on it.


title: Violin

text: The violin was first known in 16th-century Italy, with some further modifications occurring in the 18th and 19th centuries to give the instrument a more powerful sound and projection. In Europe, it served as the basis for the development of other stringed instruments used in Western classical music, such as the viola.


title: Violin

text: Violinists and collectors particularly prize the fine historical instruments made by the Stradivari, Guarneri, Guadagnini and Amati families from the 16th to the 18th century in Brescia and Cremona (Italy) and by Jacob Stainer in Austria. According to their reputation, the quality of their sound has defied attempts to explain or equal it, though this belief is disputed. Great numbers of instruments have come from the hands of less famous makers, as well as still greater numbers of mass-produced commercial "trade violins" coming from cottage industries in places such as Saxony, Bohemia, and Mirecourt. Many of these trade instruments were formerly sold by Sears, Roebuck and Co. and other mass merchandisers.


title: Violin

text: The components of a violin are usually made from different types of wood. Violins can be strung with gut, Perlon or other synthetic, or steel strings. A person who makes or repairs violins is called a luthier or violinmaker. One who makes or repairs bows is called an "archetier" or bowmaker.


title: Violin

text: The word "violin" was first used in English in the 1570s. The word "violin" comes from "Italian "violino", [a] diminutive of viola. The term "viola" comes from the expression for "tenor violin" in 1797, from Italian and Old Provençal "viola", [which came from] Medieval Latin as a term which means "stringed instrument," perhaps [coming] from Vitula, Roman goddess of joy..., or from related Latin verb "vitulari", "to cry out in joy or exaltation." The related term ""Viola da gamba"" meaning "bass viol" (1724) is from Italian, literally "a viola for the leg" (i.e. to hold between the legs)." A violin is the "modern form of the smaller, medieval viola da braccio." ("arm viola")


title: Violin

text: The violin is often called a fiddle, either when used in a folk music context, or even in Classical music scenes, as an informal nickname for the instrument. The word "fiddle" was first used in English in the late 14th century. The word "fiddle" comes from "fedele, fydyll, fidel, earlier fithele, from Old English "fiðele" "fiddle," which is related to Old Norse "fiðla", Middle Dutch "vedele", Dutch "vedel", Old High German "fidula", German "Fiedel", "a fiddle;" all of uncertain origin." As to the origin of the word "fiddle", the "...usual suggestion, based on resemblance in sound and sense, is that it is from Medieval Latin "vitula"."


title: Violin

text: The earliest stringed instruments were mostly plucked (for example, the Greek lyre). Two-stringed, bowed instruments, played upright and strung and bowed with horsehair, may have originated in the nomadic equestrian cultures of Central Asia, in forms closely resembling the modern-day Mongolian Morin huur and the Kazakh Kobyz. Similar and variant types were probably disseminated along east–west trading routes from Asia into the Middle East, and the Byzantine Empire.


title: Violin

text: According to "Encyclopædia Britannica", the direct ancestor of all European bowed instruments is the Arabic "rebab" (ربابة), which developed into the Byzantine lyra by the 9th century and later the European rebec. Several sources suggest alternative possibilities for the violin's origins, such as northern or western Europe. The first makers of violins probably borrowed from various developments of the Byzantine lyra. These included the vielle (also known as the "fidel" or "viuola") and the "lira da braccio".


title: Violin

text: The violin in its present form emerged in early 16th-century northern Italy. The earliest pictures of violins, albeit with three strings, are seen in northern Italy around 1530, at around the same time as the words "violino" and "vyollon" are seen in Italian and French documents. One of the earliest explicit descriptions of the instrument, including its tuning, is from the "Epitome musical" by Jambe de Fer, published in Lyon in 1556. By this time, the violin had already begun to spread throughout Europe.


title: Violin

text: The violin proved very popular, both among street musicians and the nobility; the French king Charles IX ordered Andrea Amati to construct 24 violins for him in 1560. One of these "noble" instruments, the "Charles IX", is the oldest surviving violin. The finest Renaissance carved and decorated violin in the world is the Gasparo da Salò (1574) owned by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria and later, from 1841, by the Norwegian virtuoso Ole Bull, who used it for forty years and thousands of concerts, for its very powerful and beautiful tone, similar to that of a Guarneri. "The Messiah" or ""Le Messie"" (also known as the "Salabue") made by Antonio Stradivari in 1716 remains pristine. It is now located in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford.


title: Violin

text: Significant changes occurred in the construction of the violin in the 18th century, particularly in the length and angle of the neck and a heavier bass bar. The majority of old instruments have undergone these modifications, and hence are in a significantly different state than when they left the hands of their makers, doubtless with differences in sound and response. But these instruments in their present condition set the standard for perfection in violin craftsmanship and sound, and violin makers all over the world try to come as close to this ideal as possible.


title: Violin

text: To this day, instruments from the so-called Golden Age of violin making, especially those made by Stradivari, Guarneri del Gesù, and Montagnana, are the most sought-after instruments by both collectors and performers. The current record amount paid for a Stradivari violin is £9.8 million (US$15.9 million at that time), when the instrument known as the Lady Blunt was sold by Tarisio Auctions in an online auction on June 20, 2011.


title: Violin

text: A violin generally consists of a spruce top (the soundboard, also known as the "top plate", "table", or "belly"), maple ribs and back, two endblocks, a neck, a bridge, a soundpost, four strings, and various fittings, optionally including a chinrest, which may attach directly over, or to the left of, the tailpiece. A distinctive feature of a violin body is its hourglass-like shape and the arching of its top and back. The hourglass shape comprises two upper bouts, two lower bouts, and two concave C-bouts at the "waist", providing clearance for the bow. The "voice" or sound of a violin depends on its shape, the wood it is made from, the graduation (the thickness profile) of both the top and back, the varnish that coats its outside surface and the skill of the luthier in doing all of these steps. The varnish and especially the wood continue to improve with age, making the fixed supply of old well-made violins built by famous luthiers much sought-after.


title: Violin

text: The majority of glued joints in the instrument use animal hide glue rather than common white glue for a number of reasons. Hide glue is capable of making a thinner joint than most other glues. It is reversible (brittle enough to crack with carefully applied force and removable with hot water) when disassembly is needed. Since fresh hide glue sticks to old hide glue, more original wood can be preserved when repairing a joint. (More modern glues must be cleaned off entirely for the new joint to be sound, which generally involves scraping off some wood along with the old glue.) Weaker, diluted glue is usually used to fasten the top to the ribs, and the nut to the fingerboard, since common repairs involve removing these parts. The purfling running around the edge of the spruce top provides some protection against cracks originating at the edge. It also allows the top to flex more independently of the rib structure. Painted-on faux purfling on the top is usually a sign of an inferior instrument. The back and ribs are typically made of maple, most often with a matching striped figure, referred to as "flame", "fiddleback", or "tiger stripe".


title: Violin

text: The neck is usually maple with a flamed figure compatible with that of the ribs and back. It carries the fingerboard, typically made of ebony, but often some other wood stained or painted black on cheaper instruments. Ebony is the preferred material because of its hardness, beauty, and superior resistance to wear. Fingerboards are dressed to a particular transverse curve, and have a small lengthwise "scoop," or concavity, slightly more pronounced on the lower strings, especially when meant for gut or synthetic strings. Some old violins (and some made to appear old) have a grafted scroll, evidenced by a glue joint between the pegbox and neck. Many authentic old instruments have had their necks reset to a slightly increased angle, and lengthened by about a centimeter. The neck graft allows the original scroll to be kept with a Baroque violin when bringing its neck into conformance with modern standards.


title: Violin

text: The bridge is a precisely cut piece of maple that forms the lower anchor point of the vibrating length of the strings and transmits the vibration of the strings to the body of the instrument. Its top curve holds the strings at the proper height from the fingerboard in an arc, allowing each to be sounded separately by the bow. The sound post, or "soul post", fits precisely inside the instrument between the back and top, at a carefully chosen spot near the treble foot of the bridge, which it helps support. It also influences the modes of vibration of the top and the back of the instrument.


title: Violin

text: The tailpiece anchors the strings to the lower bout of the violin by means of the tailgut, which loops around an ebony button called the tailpin (sometimes confusingly called the "endpin", like the cello's spike), which fits into a tapered hole in the bottom block. The E string will often have a fine tuning lever worked by a small screw turned by the fingers. Fine tuners may also be applied to the other strings, especially on a student instrument, and are sometimes built into the tailpiece. The fine tuners enable the performer to make small changes in the pitch of a string. At the scroll end, the strings wind around the wooden tuning pegs in the pegbox. The tuning pegs are tapered and fit into holes in the peg box. The tuning pegs are held in place by the friction of wood on wood. Strings may be made of metal or less commonly gut or gut wrapped in metal. Strings usually have a colored silk wrapping at both ends, for identification of the string (e.g., G string, D string, A string or E string) and to provide friction against the pegs. The tapered pegs allow friction to be increased or decreased by the player applying appropriate pressure along the axis of the peg while turning it.


title: Violin

text: Strings were first made of sheep gut (commonly known as catgut, which despite the name, did not come from cats), or simply gut, which was stretched, dried, and twisted. In the early years of the 20th century, strings were made of either gut or steel. Modern strings may be gut, solid steel, stranded steel, or various synthetic materials such as perlon, wound with various metals, and sometimes plated with silver. Most E strings are unwound, either plain or plated steel. Gut strings are not as common as they once were, but many performers use them to achieve a specific sound especially in historically informed performance of Baroque music. Strings have a limited lifetime. Eventually, when oil, dirt, corrosion, and rosin accumulate, the mass of the string can become uneven along its length. Apart from obvious things, such as the winding of a string coming undone from wear, players generally change a string when it no longer plays "true" (with good intonation on the harmonics), losing the desired tone, brilliance and intonation. String longevity depends on string quality and playing intensity.


title: Violin

text: A violin is tuned in fifths, in the notes G, D, A, E. The lowest note of a violin, tuned normally, is G, or G below middle C (C4). (On rare occasions, the lowest string may be tuned down by as much as a fourth, to D.) The highest note is less well defined: E, the E two octaves above the open string (which is tuned to E) may be considered a practical limit for orchestral violin parts, but it is often possible to play higher, depending on the length of the fingerboard and the skill of the violinist. Yet higher notes (up to C) can be sounded by stopping the string, reaching the limit of the fingerboard, and/or by using artificial harmonics.


title: Violin

text: The arched shape, the thickness of the wood, and its physical qualities govern the sound of a violin. Patterns of the node made by sand or glitter sprinkled on the plates with the plate vibrated at certain frequencies, called "Chladni patterns", are occasionally used by luthiers to verify their work before assembling the instrument.


title: Violin

text: Apart from the standard, "full" () size, violins are also made in so-called "fractional" sizes of , , , , , , , and even . These smaller instruments are commonly used by young players, whose fingers are not long enough to reach the correct positions on full-sized instruments.


title: Violin

text: While related in some sense to the dimensions of the instruments, the fractional sizes are not intended to be literal descriptions of relative proportions. For example, a -sized instrument is not three-quarters the length of a full size instrument. The body length (not including the neck) of a full-size, or , violin is , smaller in some 17th-century models. A violin's body length is , and a size is . With the violin's closest family member, the viola, size is specified as body length in inches or centimeters rather than fractional sizes. A full-size viola averages . However, each individual adult will determine which size of viola to use.


title: Violin

text: Occasionally, an adult with a small frame may use a so-called size violin instead of a full-size instrument. Sometimes called a "lady's violin", these instruments are slightly shorter than a full size violin, but tend to be high-quality instruments capable of producing a sound comparable to that of fine full size violins. 5 string violin sizes may differ from the normal 4 string.


title: Violin

text: The instrument which corresponds to the violin in the violin octet is the mezzo violin, tuned the same as a violin but with a slightly longer body. The strings of the mezzo violin are the same length as those of the standard violin. This instrument is not in common use.


title: Violin

text: Violins are tuned by turning the pegs in the pegbox under the scroll or by adjusting the "fine tuner" screws at the tailpiece. All violins have pegs; fine tuners (also called "fine adjusters") are optional. Most fine tuners consist of a metal screw that moves a lever attached to the string end. They permit very small pitch adjustments much more easily than the pegs. Turning a fine tuner clockwise causes the pitch to become sharper (as the string is under more tension), and turning it counterclockwise, the pitch becomes flatter (as the string is under less tension). Fine tuners on all four of the strings are very helpful when using those with a steel core, and some players use them with synthetic strings. Since modern E strings are steel, a fine tuner is nearly always fitted for that string. Fine tuners are not used with gut strings, which are more elastic than steel or synthetic-core strings and do not respond adequately to the very small movements of fine tuners.


title: Violin

text: To tune a violin, the A string is first tuned to a standard pitch (usually A=440 Hz). (When accompanying or playing with a fixed-pitch instrument such as a piano or accordion, the violin tunes to the corresponding note on that instrument rather than to any other tuning reference. The oboe is generally the instrument used to tune orchestras where violins are present since its sound is penetrating and can be heard over the other woodwinds.) The other strings are then tuned against each other in intervals of perfect fifths by bowing them in pairs. A minutely higher tuning is sometimes employed for solo playing to give the instrument a brighter sound; conversely, Baroque music is sometimes played using lower tunings to make the violin's sound more gentle. After tuning, the instrument's bridge may be examined to ensure that it is standing straight and centered between the inner nicks of the f-holes; a crooked bridge may significantly affect the sound of an otherwise well-made violin.


title: Violin

text: After extensive playing, the tuning pegs and their holes can become worn, making the pegs liable to slip under tension. This can lead to the pitch of the string dropping somewhat, or if the peg becomes completely loose, to the string completely losing tension. A violin in which the tuning pegs are slipping needs to be repaired by a luthier or violin repairperson. Peg dope or peg compound, used regularly, can delay the onset of such wear while allowing the pegs to turn smoothly.


title: Violin

text: The tuning G–D–A–E is used for most violin music, including Classical music, jazz, and folk music. Other tunings are occasionally employed; the G string, for example, can be tuned up to A. The use of nonstandard tunings in classical music is known as "scordatura"; in some folk styles, it is called "cross tuning". One famous example of scordatura in classical music is Camille Saint-Saëns' "Danse Macabre", where the solo violin's E string is tuned down to E to impart an eerie dissonance to the composition. Other examples are the third movement of "Contrasts", by Béla Bartók, where the E string is tuned down to E and the G tuned to a G, Niccolò Paganini's First Violin Concerto, where all four strings are designated to be tuned a semitone higher, and the Mystery Sonatas by Biber, in which each movement has different scordatura tuning.


title: Violin

text: In Indian classical music and Indian light music, the violin is likely to be tuned to D–A–D–A in the South Indian style. As there is no concept of absolute pitch in Indian classical music, musicians can use any convenient tuning to maintain these relative pitch intervals between the strings. Another prevalent tuning with these intervals is B–F–B–F, which corresponds to Sa–Pa–Sa–Pa in the Indian carnatic classical music style. In the North Indian Hindustani style, the tuning is usually Pa-Sa-Pa-Sa instead of Sa–Pa–Sa–Pa. This could correspond to F–B–F–B, for instance. In Iranian classical music and Iranian light music, the violin ls different tunings in any Dastgah, the violin is likely to be tuned (E–A–E–A) in Dastgah-h Esfahan or in Dastgāh-e Šur is (E–A–D–E) and (E–A–E–E), in Dastgāh-e Māhur is (E–A–D–A). In Arabic classical music, the A and E strings are lowered by a whole step i.e., G–D–G–D. This is to ease playing Arabic maqams, especially those containing quarter tones.


title: Violin

text: While most violins have four strings, there are violins with additional strings. Some have as many as seven strings. Seven is generally thought to be the maximum number of strings practical on a bowed string instrument; with more than seven strings, it would be impossible to play any particular inner string individually with the bow. Violins with seven strings are very rare. The extra strings on such violins typically are lower in pitch than the G-string; these strings are usually tuned to C, F, and B. If the instrument's playing length, or string length from nut to bridge, is equal to that of an ordinary full-scale violin; i.e., a bit less than , then it may be properly termed a violin. Some such instruments are somewhat longer and should be regarded as violas. Violins with five strings or more are typically used in jazz or folk music. Some custom-made instruments have extra strings which are not bowed, but which sound sympathetically, due to the vibrations of the bowed strings.


title: Violin

text: A violin is usually played using a bow consisting of a stick with a ribbon of horsehair strung between the tip and frog (or nut, or heel) at opposite ends. A typical violin bow may be overall, and weigh about . Viola bows may be about shorter and heavier. At the frog end, a screw adjuster tightens or loosens the hair. Just forward of the frog, a leather thumb cushion, called the grip, and winding protect the stick and provide a strong grip for the player's hand. Traditional windings are of wire (often silver or plated silver), silk, or baleen ("whalebone", now substituted by alternating strips of tan and black plastic.) Some fiberglass student bows employ a plastic sleeve as grip and winding.


title: Violin

text: Bow hair traditionally comes from the tail of a grey male horse (which has predominantly white hair). Some cheaper bows use synthetic fiber. Solid rosin is rubbed onto the hair, to render it slightly sticky; when the bow is drawn across a string, the friction between them makes the string vibrate. Traditional materials for the more costly bow sticks include snakewood, and brazilwood (which is also known as Pernambuco wood). Some recent bow design innovations use carbon fiber (CodaBows) for the stick, at all levels of craftsmanship. Inexpensive bows for students are made of less costly timbers, or from fiberglass (Glasser).


title: Violin

text: The violin is played either seated or standing up. Solo players (whether playing alone, with a piano or with an orchestra) play mostly standing up (unless prevented by a physical disability such as in the case of Itzhak Perlman). In contrast, in the orchestra and in chamber music it is usually played seated. In the 2000s and 2010s, some orchestras performing Baroque music (such as the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra) have had all of their violins and violas, solo and ensemble, perform standing up.


title: Violin

text: The standard way of holding the violin is with the left side of the jaw resting on the chinrest of the violin, and supported by the left shoulder, often assisted by a shoulder rest (or a sponge and an elastic band for younger players who struggle with shoulder rests). The jaw and the shoulder must hold the violin firmly enough to allow it to remain stable when the left hand goes from a high position (a high pitched note far up on the fingerboard) to a low one (nearer to the pegbox). In the Indian posture, the stability of the violin is guaranteed by its scroll resting on the side of the foot.


title: Violin

text: While teachers point out the vital importance of good posture both for the sake of the quality of the playing and to reduce the chance of repetitive strain injury, advice as to what good posture is and how to achieve it differs in details. However, all insist on the importance of a natural relaxed position without tension or rigidity. Things which are almost universally recommended are keeping the left wrist straight (or very nearly so) to allow the fingers of the left hand to move freely and to reduce the chance of injury and keeping either shoulder in a natural relaxed position and avoiding raising either of them in an exaggerated manner. This, like any other unwarranted tension, would limit freedom of motion, and increase the risk of injury.


title: Violin

text: Hunching can hamper good playing because it throws the body off balance and makes the shoulders rise. Another sign that comes from unhealthy tension is pain in the left hand, which indicates too much pressure when holding the violin.


title: Violin

text: The left hand determines the sounding length of the string, and thus the pitch of the string, by "stopping" it (pressing it) against the fingerboard with the fingertips, producing different pitches. As the violin has no frets to stop the strings, as is usual with the guitar, the player must know exactly where to place the fingers on the strings to play with good intonation (tuning). Beginning violinists play open strings and the lowest position, nearest to the nut. Students often start with relatively easy keys, such as A Major and G major. Students are taught scales and simple melodies. Through practice of scales and arpeggios and ear training, the violinist's left hand eventually "finds" the notes intuitively by muscle memory.


title: Violin

text: Beginners sometimes rely on tapes placed on the fingerboard for proper left hand finger placement, but usually abandon the tapes quickly as they advance. Another commonly used marking technique uses dots of white-out on the fingerboard, which wear off in a few weeks of regular practice. This practice, unfortunately, is used sometimes in lieu of adequate ear-training, guiding the placement of fingers by eye and not by ear. Especially in the early stages of learning to play, the so-called "ringing tones" are useful. There are nine such notes in first position, where a stopped note sounds a unison or octave with another (open) string, causing it to resonate sympathetically. Students often use these ringing tones to check the intonation of the stopped note by seeing if it is harmonious with the open string. For example, when playing the stopped pitch "A" on the G string, the violinist could play the open D string at the same time, to check the intonation of the stopped "A". If the "A" is in tune, the "A" and the open D string should produce a harmonious perfect fourth.


title: Violin

text: Violins are tuned in perfect fifths, like all the orchestral strings (violin, viola, cello) except the double bass, which is tuned in perfect fourths. Each subsequent note is stopped at a pitch the player perceives as the most harmonious, "when unaccompanied, [a violinist] does not play consistently in either the tempered or the natural [just] scale, but tends on the whole to conform with the Pythagorean scale." When violinists are playing in a string quartet or a string orchestra, the strings typically "sweeten" their tuning to suit the key they are playing in. When playing with an instrument tuned to equal temperament, such as a piano, skilled violinists adjust their tuning to match the equal temperament of the piano to avoid discordant notes.


title: Violin

text: The fingers are conventionally numbered 1 (index) through 4 (little finger) in music notation, such as sheet music and etude books. Especially in instructional editions of violin music, numbers over the notes may indicate which finger to use, with "0" or "O" indicating an open string. The chart to the right shows the arrangement of notes reachable in first position. Not shown on this chart is the way the spacing between note positions becomes closer as the fingers move up (in pitch) from the nut. The bars at the sides of the chart represent the usual possibilities for beginners' tape placements, at 1st, high 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers.


title: Violin

text: The placement of the left hand on the fingerboard is characterized by "positions". First position, where most beginners start (although some methods start in third position), is the most commonly used position in string music. Music composed for beginning youth orchestras is often mostly in first position. The lowest note available in this position in standard tuning is an open G3; the highest note in first position is played with the fourth finger on the E-string, sounding a B5. Moving the hand up the neck, the first finger takes the place of the second finger, bringing the player into "second position". Letting the first finger take the first-position place of the third finger brings the player to "third position", and so on. A change of positions, with its associated movement of the hand, is referred to as a "shift," and effective shifting maintaining accurate intonation and a smooth legato (connected) sound is a key element of technique at all levels. Often a "guide finger" is used; the last finger to play a note in the old position continuously lightly touches the string during the course of the shift to end up on its correct place in the new position. In elementary shifting exercises the "guide finger" is often voiced while gliding up or down the string, so the player can establish correct placement by ear. Outside of these exercises it should rarely be audible (unless the performer is consciously applying a portamento effect for expressive reasons).


title: Violin

text: In the course of a shift in low positions, the thumb of the left hand moves up or down the neck of the instrument so as to remain in the same position relative to the fingers (though the movement of the thumb may occur slightly before, or slightly after, the movement of the fingers). In such positions, the thumb is often thought of as an 'anchor' whose location defines what position the player is in. In very high positions, the thumb is unable to move with the fingers as the body of the instrument gets in the way. Instead, the thumb works around the neck of the instrument to sit at the point at which the neck meets the right bout of the body, and remains there while the fingers move between the high positions.


title: Violin

text: A note played outside of the normal compass of a position, without any shift, is referred to as an "extension". For instance, in third position on the A string, the hand naturally sits with the first finger on D and the fourth on either G or G. Stretching the first finger back down to a C, or the fourth finger up to an A, forms an extension. Extensions are commonly used where one or two notes are slightly out of an otherwise solid position, and give the benefit of being less intrusive than a shift or string crossing. The lowest position on the violin is referred to as "half position". In this position the first finger is on a "low first position" note, e.g. B on the A string, and the fourth finger is in a downward extension from its regular position, e.g. D on the A string, with the other two fingers placed in between as required. As the position of the thumb is typically the same in "half position" as in first position, it is better thought of as a backwards extension of the whole hand than as a genuine position.


title: Violin

text: The upper limit of the violin's range is largely determined by the skill of the player, who may easily play more than two octaves on a single string, and four octaves on the instrument as a whole. Position names are mostly used for the lower positions and in method books and etudes; for this reason, it is uncommon to hear references to anything higher than seventh position. The highest position, practically speaking, is 13th position. Very high positions are a particular technical challenge, for two reasons. Firstly, the difference in location of different notes becomes much narrower in high positions, making the notes more challenging to locate and in some cases to distinguish by ear. Secondly, the much shorter sounding length of the string in very high positions is a challenge for the right arm and bow in sounding the instrument effectively. The finer (and more expensive) an instrument, the better able it is to sustain good tone right to the top of the fingerboard, at the highest pitches on the E string.


title: Violin

text: All notes (except those below the open D) can be played on more than one string. This is a standard design feature of stringed instruments; however, it differs from the piano, which has only one location for each of its 88 notes. For instance, the note of open A on the violin can be played as the open A, or on the D string (in first to fourth positions) or even on the G string (very high up in sixth to ninth positions). Each string has a different tone quality, because of the different weights (thicknesses) of the strings and because of the resonances of other open strings. For instance, the G string is often regarded as having a very full, sonorous sound which is particularly appropriate to late Romantic music. This is often indicated in the music by the marking, for example, "sul G" or "IV" (a Roman numeral indicating to play on the fourth string; by convention, the strings are numbered from thinnest, highest pitch (I) to the lowest pitch (IV). Even without an explicit instructions in the score, an advanced violinist will use her/his discretion and artistic sensibility to select which string to play specific notes or passages.


title: Violin

text: If a string is bowed or plucked without any finger stopping it, it is said to be an "open string". This gives a different sound from a stopped string, since the string vibrates more freely at the nut than under a finger. Further, it is impossible to use vibrato fully on an open string (though a partial effect can be achieved by stopping a note an octave up on an adjacent string and vibrating that, which introduces an element of vibrato into the overtones). In the classical tradition, violinists will often use a string crossing or shift of position to allow them to avoid the change of timbre introduced by an open string, unless indicated by the composer. This is particularly true for the open E which is often regarded as having a harsh sound. However, there are also situations where an open string may be specifically chosen for artistic effect. This is seen in classical music which is imitating the drone of an organ (J. S. Bach, in his Partita in E for solo violin, achieved this), fiddling (e.g., "Hoedown") or where taking steps to avoid the open string is musically inappropriate (for instance in Baroque music where shifting position was less common). In quick passages of scales or arpeggios an open E string may simply be used for convenience if the note does not have time to ring and develop a harsh timbre. In folk music, fiddling and other traditional music genres, open strings are commonly used for their resonant timbre.


title: Violin

text: Playing an open string simultaneously with a stopped note on an adjacent string produces a bagpipe-like drone, often used by composers in imitation of folk music. Sometimes the two notes are identical (for instance, playing a fingered A on the D string against the open A string), giving a ringing sort of "fiddling" sound. Playing an open string simultaneously with an identical stopped note can also be called for when more volume is required, especially in orchestral playing. Some classical violin parts have notes for which the composer requests the violinist to play an open string, because of the specific sonority created by an open string.


title: Violin

text: Double stopping is when two separate strings are stopped by the fingers and bowed simultaneously, producing two continuous tones (typical intervals include 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, and octaves). Double-stops can be indicated in any position, though the widest interval that can be double-stopped naturally in one position is an octave (with the index finger on the lower string and the pinky finger on the higher string). Nonetheless, intervals of tenths or even more are sometimes required to be double-stopped in advanced repertoire, resulting in a stretched left-hand position with the fingers extended. The term "double stop" is often used to encompass sounding an open string alongside a fingered note as well, even though only one finger stops the string.


title: Violin

text: Where three or four simultaneous notes are indicated, the violinist will typically "split" the chord, choosing the lower one or two notes to play first before immediately continuing onto the upper one or two notes, with the natural resonance of the instrument producing an effect similar to if all four notes had been voiced simultaneously. In some circumstances, a "triple stop" is possible, where three notes across three strings can be voiced simultaneously. The bow will not naturally strike three strings at once, but if there is sufficient bow speed and pressure when the violinist "breaks" (sounds) a three note chord, the bow hair can be bent temporarily onto three strings, allowing each to sound simultaneously. This is accomplished with a heavy stroke, typically near the frog, and produces a loud and aggressive tone. Double stops in orchestra are occasionally marked divisi and divided between the players, with some division of the musicians playing the lower note and some division playing the higher note. Double stops (and divisi) are common in orchestral repertoire when the violins play accompaniment and another instrument or section plays melodically.


title: Violin

text: In some genres of historically informed performance (usually of Baroque music and earlier), neither split-chord nor triple-stop chords are thought to be appropriate; some violinists will arpeggiate all chords (including regular double stops), playing all or most notes individually as if they had been written as a slurred figure. However, with the development of modern violins, triple-stopping has become more natural due to the bridge being less curved. In some musical styles, a sustained open string drone can be played during a passage mainly written on an adjacent string, to provide a basic accompaniment. This is more often seen in folk traditions than in classical music.


title: Violin

text: Vibrato is a technique of the left hand and arm in which the pitch of a note varies subtly in a pulsating rhythm. While various parts of the hand or arm may be involved in the motion, the result is a movement of the fingertip bringing about a slight change in vibrating string length, which causes an undulation in pitch. Most violinists oscillate below the note, or lower in pitch from the actual note when using vibrato, since it is believed that perception favors the highest pitch in a varying sound. Vibrato does little, if anything, to disguise an out-of-tune note; in other words, misapplied vibrato is a poor substitute for good intonation. Scales and other exercises meant to work on intonation are typically played without vibrato to make the work easier and more effective. Music students are often taught that unless otherwise marked in music, vibrato is assumed. However, it has to be noted that this is only a trend; there is nothing on the sheet music that compels violinists to add vibrato. This can be an obstacle to a classically trained violinist wishing to play in a style that uses little or no vibrato at all, such as baroque music played in period style and many traditional fiddling styles.


title: Violin

text: Vibrato can be produced by a proper combination of finger, wrist and arm motions. One method, called "hand vibrato" (or "wrist vibrato"), involves rocking the hand back at the wrist to achieve oscillation. In contrast, another method, "arm vibrato", modulates the pitch by movement at the elbow. A combination of these techniques allows a player to produce a large variety of tonal effects. The "when" and "what for" and "how much" of violin vibrato are artistic matters of style and taste, with different teachers, music schools and styles of music favouring different styles of vibrato. For example, overdone vibrato may become distracting. In acoustic terms, the interest that vibrato adds to the sound has to do with the way that the overtone mix (or tone color, or timbre) and the directional pattern of sound projection change with changes in pitch. By "pointing" the sound at different parts of the room in a rhythmic way, vibrato adds a "shimmer" or "liveliness" to the sound of a well-made violin. Vibrato is, in a large part, left to the discretion of the violinist. Different types of vibrato will bring different moods to the piece, and the varying degrees and styles of vibrato are often characteristics that stand out in well-known violinists.


title: Violin

text: A vibrato-like motion can sometimes be used to create a fast trill effect. To execute this effect, the finger above the finger stopping the note is placed very slightly off the string (firmly pressed against the finger stopping the string) and a vibrato motion is implemented. The second finger will lightly touch the string above the lower finger with each oscillation, causing the pitch to oscillate in a fashion that sounds like a mix between wide vibrato and a very fast trill. This gives a less defined transition between the higher and lower note, and is usually implemented by interpretative choice. This trill technique only works well for semi-tonal trills or trills in high positions (where the distance between notes is lessened), as it requires the trilling finger and the finger below it to be touching, limiting the distance that can be trilled. In very high positions, where the trilled distance is less than the width of the finger, a vibrato trill may be the only option for trill effects.


title: Violin

text: Lightly touching the string with a fingertip at a harmonic node, but without fully pressing the string, and then plucking or bowing the string, creates harmonics. Instead of the normal tone, a higher pitched note sounds. Each node is at an integer division of the string, for example half-way or one-third along the length of the string. A responsive instrument will sound numerous possible harmonic nodes along the length of the string. Harmonics are marked in music either with a little circle above the note that determines the pitch of the harmonic, or by diamond-shaped note heads. There are two types of harmonics: natural harmonics and artificial harmonics (also known as "false harmonics").


title: Violin

text: Natural harmonics are played on an open string. The pitch of the open string when it is plucked or bowed is called the fundamental frequency. Harmonics are also called "overtones" or "partials". They occur at whole-number multiples of the fundamental, which is called the first harmonic. The second harmonic is the first overtone (the octave above the open string), the third harmonic is the second overtone, and so on. The second harmonic is in the middle of the string and sounds an octave higher than the string's pitch. The third harmonic breaks the string into thirds and sounds an octave and a fifth above the fundamental, and the fourth harmonic breaks the string into quarters sounding two octaves above the first. The sound of the second harmonic is the clearest of them all, because it is a common node with all the succeeding even-numbered harmonics (4th, 6th, etc.). The third and succeeding odd-numbered harmonics are harder to play because they break the string into an odd number of vibrating parts and do not share as many nodes with other harmonics.


title: Violin

text: Artificial harmonics are more difficult to produce than natural harmonics, as they involve both stopping the string and playing a harmonic on the stopped note. Using the "octave frame" (the normal distance between the first and fourth fingers in any given position) with the fourth finger just touching the string a fourth higher than the stopped note produces the fourth harmonic, two octaves above the stopped note. Finger placement and pressure, as well as bow speed, pressure, and sounding point are all essential in getting the desired harmonic to sound. And to add to the challenge, in passages with different notes played as false harmonics, the distance between stopping finger and harmonic finger must constantly change, since the spacing between notes changes along the length of the string.


title: Violin

text: The "harmonic finger" can also touch at a major third above the pressed note (the fifth harmonic), or a fifth higher (a third harmonic). These harmonics are less commonly used; in the case of the major third, both the stopped note and touched note must be played slightly sharp otherwise the harmonic does not speak as readily. In the case of the fifth, the stretch is greater than is comfortable for many violinists. In the general repertoire fractions smaller than a sixth are not used. However, divisions up to an eighth are sometimes used and, given a good instrument and a skilled player, divisions as small as a twelfth are possible. There are a few books dedicated solely to the study of violin harmonics. Two comprehensive works are Henryk Heller's seven-volume "Theory of Harmonics", published by Simrock in 1928, and Michelangelo Abbado's five-volume "Tecnica dei suoni armonici" published by Ricordi in 1934.


title: Violin

text: Elaborate passages in artificial harmonics can be found in virtuoso violin literature, especially of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Two notable examples of this are an entire section of Vittorio Monti's "Csárdás" and a passage towards the middle of the third movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. A section of the third movement of Paganini's Violin Concerto No. 1 consists of double-stopped thirds in harmonics.


title: Violin

text: When strings are worn, dirty and old, the harmonics may no longer be accurate in pitch. For this reason, violinists change their strings regularly.


title: Violin

text: The strings may be sounded by drawing the hair of the bow held by the right hand across them ("arco") or by plucking them ("pizzicato") most often with the right hand. In some cases, the violinist will pluck strings with the left hand. This is done to facilitate transitions from pizzicato to arco playing. It is also used in some virtuoso showpieces. Left hand pizzicato is usually done on open strings. Pizzicato is used on all of the violin family instruments; however, the systematic study of advanced pizzicato techniques is most developed in jazz bass, a style in which the instrument is almost exclusively plucked.


title: Violin

text: The right arm, hand, and bow and the bow speed are responsible for tone quality, rhythm, dynamics, articulation, and most (but not all) changes in timbre. The player draws the bow over the string, causing the string to vibrate and produce a sustained tone. The bow is a wooden stick with tensioned horsetail hair, which has been rosined with a bar of rosin. The natural texture of the horsehair and the stickiness of the rosin help the bow to "grip" the string, and thus when the bow is drawn over the string, the bow causes the string to sound a pitch.


title: Violin

text: Bowing can be used to produce long sustained notes or melodies. With a string section, if the players in a section change their bows at different times, a note can seem to be endlessly sustainable. As well, the bow can be used to play short, crisp little notes, such as repeated notes, scales and arpeggios, which provide a propulsive rhythm in many styles of music.


title: Violin

text: The most essential part of bowing technique is the bow grip. It is usually with the thumb bent in the small area between the frog and the winding of the bow. The other fingers are spread somewhat evenly across the top part of the bow. The pinky finger is curled with the tip of the finger placed on the wood next to the screw. The violin produces louder notes with greater bow speed or more weight on the string. The two methods are not equivalent, because they produce different timbres; pressing down on the string tends to produce a harsher, more intense sound. One can also achieve a louder sound by placing the bow closer to the bridge.


title: Violin

text: The sounding point where the bow intersects the string also influences timbre (or "tone colour"). Playing close to the bridge ("sul ponticello") gives a more intense sound than usual, emphasizing the higher harmonics; and playing with the bow over the end of the fingerboard ("sul tasto") makes for a delicate, ethereal sound, emphasizing the fundamental frequency. Shinichi Suzuki referred to the sounding point as the "Kreisler highway"; one may think of different sounding points as "lanes" in the highway.


title: Violin

text: Various methods of attack with the bow produce different articulations. There are many bowing techniques that allow for every range of playing style. Many teachers, players, and orchestras spend a lot of time developing techniques and creating a unified technique within the group. These techniques include legato-style bowing (a smooth, connected, sustained sound suitable for melodies), collé, and a variety of bowings which produce shorter notes, including ricochet, sautillé, martelé, spiccato, and staccato.


title: Violin

text: A note marked "pizz." (abbreviation for "pizzicato") in the written music is to be played by plucking the string with a finger of the right hand rather than by bowing. (The index finger is most commonly used here.) Sometimes in orchestra parts or virtuoso solo music where the bow hand is occupied (or for show-off effect), "left-hand pizzicato" will be indicated by a + (plus sign) below or above the note. In left-hand pizzicato, two fingers are put on the string; one (usually the index or middle finger) is put on the correct note, and the other (usually the ring finger or little finger) is put above the note. The higher finger then plucks the string while the lower one stays on, thus producing the correct pitch. By increasing the force of the pluck, one can increase the volume of the note that the string is producing. Pizzicato is used in orchestral works and in solo showpieces. In orchestral parts, violinists often have to make very quick shifts from arco to pizzicato, and vice versa.


title: Violin

text: A marking of "col legno" (Italian for "with the wood") in the written music calls for striking the string(s) with the stick of the bow, rather than by drawing the hair of the bow across the strings. This bowing technique is somewhat rarely used, and results in a muted percussive sound. The eerie quality of a violin section playing "col legno" is exploited in some symphonic pieces, notably the "Witches' Dance" of the last movement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Saint-Saëns's symphonic poem "Danse Macabre" includes the string section using the "col legno" technique to imitate the sound of dancing skeletons. "Mars" from Gustav Holst's "The Planets" uses "col legno" to play a repeated rhythm in time signature. Benjamin Britten's "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" demands its use in the "Percussion" Variation. Dmitri Shostakovich uses it in his Fourteenth Symphony in the movement 'At the Sante Jail'. Some violinists, however, object to this style of playing as it can damage the finish and impair the value of a fine bow, but most of such will compromise by using a cheap bow for at least the duration of the passage in question.


title: Violin

text: A smooth and even stroke during which bow speed and weight are the same from beginning of the stroke to the end.


title: Violin

text: Literally "hammered", a strongly accented effect produced by releasing each bowstroke forcefully and suddenly. Martelé can be played in any part of the bow. It is sometimes indicated in written music by an arrowhead.


title: Violin

text: Tremolo is the very rapid repetition (typically of a single note, but occasionally of multiple notes), usually played at the tip of the bow. Tremolo is marked with three short, slanted lines across the stem of the note. Tremolo is often used as a sound effect in orchestral music, particularly in the Romantic music era (1800-1910) and in opera music.


title: Violin

text: Attaching a small metal, rubber, leather, or wooden device called a "mute", or "sordino", to the bridge of the violin gives a softer, more mellow tone, with fewer audible overtones; the sound of an entire orchestral string section playing with mutes has a hushed quality. The mute changes both the loudness and the timbre ("tone colour") of a violin. The conventional Italian markings for mute usage are "con sord.", or "con sordino", meaning 'with mute'; and "senza sord.", meaning 'without mute'; or "via sord.", meaning 'mute off'.


title: Violin

text: Larger metal, rubber, or wooden mutes are widely available, known as "practice mutes" or "hotel mutes". Such mutes are generally not used in performance, but are used to deaden the sound of the violin in practice areas such as hotel rooms. (For practicing purposes there is also the mute violin, a violin without a sound box.) Some composers have used practice mutes for special effect, for example, at the end of Luciano Berio's "Sequenza VIII" for solo violin.


title: Violin

text: Since the Baroque era, the violin has been one of the most important of all instruments in classical music, for several reasons. The tone of the violin stands out above other instruments, making it appropriate for playing a melody line. In the hands of a good player, the violin is extremely agile, and can execute rapid and difficult sequences of notes.