Hello. My name is Karen Stephenson, and I'm number two cello with the Philharmonia Orchestra. I'd like to introduce you to my cello. The body of the cello is made of wood, normally maple or spruce. At the top here, we have the scroll, and then four pegs, which hold in place the four metal strings, which are A, the highest, D, G, and C, the thickest string at the bottom, and they reduce in thickness to the top string. Now, these four strings are drawn down the cello and over the wooden bridge, and then into the tailpiece at the end. And at the bottom, we have the spike, which anchors us to the floor. We tune the strings with the four pegs, and also with four tiny adjusters on the tailpiece, as well. To make a sound, we can do two things. We can use the finger, which is plucking, or pizzicato, or we can use the bow. The bow is made of wood on the top, and on the bottom, horsehair. And we use this little screw here to tighten it and loosen it when we put it away at the end of a busy day. So, to make the sound, we draw the horsehair part of the bow along the string, like this. We can do an attack to make it sound more exciting. We can do short notes or long notes. And everything you can imagine in between. So, when we play with a bow, we set off a series of vibrations. The string vibrates, which then is transmitted through the bridge, which makes the plates vibrate on the cello and the air on the inside vibrates as well. There's a sound post which connects the top plate to the back plate. And all this air is vibrating and then the sound comes out of the F holes here. So, it's really um the body of the cello is is an amplification device. So, we have the four open strings of the cello. But, that wouldn't be very interesting if we only played those. So, we need to use our left hand. Now, we have five fingers. We number them one to four. 1 2 3 4 like this. This is the first finger. The second finger. Third. And fourth. And that is called first position as well. And then we can move our hand up in different positions. So, this is fourth position. One. Two. Three. Four. Now, don't worry about the thumb because we can use the thumb as well. And that just has a special symbol when we see it written in the music. And we can use the thumb higher up the cello. The cello has an enormous range, and it's been said that it's most typical of the range of the human voice. And composers often like to exploit this. Um one One of my favorite examples is Verdi's Requiem, the Offertorio, which starts with the cello section using the whole cello. I love the role that the cello has in the orchestra because we can play the basslines, we can be the driving force along with the double basses, um underpinning everything in the orchestra, but also, as a cellist, we get given glorious melodies to play as well. We get to play everything on the cello, so we're always kept very busy. I'd now like to talk about vibrato. Here is a note without vibrato. Have a look at my left hand. Without vibrato, my left hand is very still. Vibrato is a way we color the sound, and we we rotate the fingers like this. And you can make different sounds. You can do a fast vibrato, Very passionate, or you could do a very quiet poca vibrato. My teacher used to get me to practice vibrato by going up and down the string and then gradually getting smaller and smaller and smaller until you get the the rotations, the feeling in the arm correct. Here is an example of a well-known piece for cello, but I'm going to play it without vibrato first. It's The Swan by Saint-Saëns. Not very interesting. So, here it is with some vibrato. An example of using a small amount of vibrato is something that we do a lot in the Philharmonia when everybody plays vibrato at the same time, it can sound too much. And in French music, sometimes, for example, we use poca vibrato as in this passage from Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi. Next, I'd like to talk about pizzicato, which is plucking the string with the finger. We can use any of our fingers. Most cellists use this finger, but you can use this finger or all the fingers if you want to. Here's an example of some pizzicato from the repertoire from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the Scherzo. We can also play chords, strumming with the thumb like a guitar. And we can make aggressive pizzicato sounds like the Bartok pizz, where you take hold of the string, pull it away from the fingerboard, and it slaps back down again. In the Philharmonia, we're often required to play very loudly or very quietly, so we need techniques to do this. To play loudly, we play nearer the bridge, and we use a lot of heavy arm weight, and sometimes a fast bow, like in the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. We often have to play really quietly. To do this, we play over the fingerboard with the bow. That's marked sul tasto in the part. And we use a very light bow, which is called flautando, as in the opening of Stravinsky's Firebird. We can use double stops, which is playing two or more strings at the same time. A very famous example of this is the opening of Elgar's Cello Concerto. Another technique is using harmonics. This is where you touch the string with the left hand, but you don't press down. Those are called natural harmonics. One example of this is in Stravinsky's Firebird. We can also do stopped harmonics, which are very difficult. You put the thumb on the string, and then you use another finger to touch the string higher up, and you can get all sorts of different notes then. This part of the bow is called the frog or the heel, and we can use it to play very aggressively. This is the point of the bow, and we can do something called tremolando with that, which is when we move the bow very quickly right at the tip. It's a lovely effect when all the string sections are doing that at the same time. If we want to make it even more mysterious, we can play it sul pont, which means on the bridge. A fun technique on the cello is bouncing the bow or spiccato bowing. Beethoven uses this in the trio of his fifth symphony. Another thing we can do is bounce the bow and do lots of notes, but all in one bow. This is called up bow spiccato. Violinists love doing it. We don't get to do it very often, but we do it sometimes in symphonies like Mahler's Fourth Symphony. First of all, I'll show you the bow stroke. We can also use ricochet bowing, which is when you really throw caution to the wind and you actually throw your bow at the string. A really good example of this is Rossini's William Tell Overture. Shifting is when we move between two notes on the same string. It's often something that people worry about because it's a long way up and it's a long way down. The key is to make sure that you're comfortable on the note that you leave before you go up to the top note. This is one of the cello solos from Elgar's Enigma Variations. I think it's probably easier in some ways to play the cello than the violin because you don't have to hold it in the air all the time. But we do get calluses on our fingers and they can get very, very sore, particularly if you haven't played for a few days. And also, one of the worst things is your spike slipping in concerts. So, you have to make sure that you get a really good grip with the floor. Also, we have to be careful what we wear. I find it much easier to wear trousers than a skirt, which might get in the way. And also, we can't wear any buttons or anything that rattles against the back of the cello, and we can't wear dangly earrings. Um unless you just wear one on one side. When I travel out and about with the cello, you get lots of comments from people like, "Bet you can't get that under your chin." Or what have you got in there, a machine gun? Or your mother-in-law. I find it quite amusing, really. And I don't mind carrying it around because I have a fantastic light cello case, which is made of carbon fiber, which um actually means my cello in its case weighs less than certain other instruments you might not expect. And when we travel on airplanes, I'm very lucky because I get to have a seat for my cello. The number of ways you can fix or attach a cello to a seat in a plane is unbelievable. Sometimes, we go on on planes and there's about five men per cello strapping it up with lots and lots of ropes and lots and lots of fuss and bother. And then other airlines, you get on and they give you an extension belt and you do it yourself, and it's absolutely fine. So, if anybody's watching this from any airlines, the extension belt is fine and we can do that ourselves. There are many brilliant things you can do on the cello, too many to list here. But here are some of my favorites. The first is an impression of seagulls. A really cool thing you can do on the cello is cello twirling, which looks great when you do it in a section, and you can even do a Mexican wave of cello twirling. Not a lot of people know this, but you can actually play the cello with pieces of fruit. My favorite is an orange, but I have used grapefruit and a lemon. So, here we have the swan with an orange. If you've enjoyed learning about the instruments in the orchestra, why not try our iPad app, The Orchestra, featuring Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Fully interactive video playback lets you view the orchestra from all angles, and the revolutionary beat map shows you who is playing when. Follow along with synchronized scores. Hear the inside scoop in audio commentaries, and get a 360° view the instruments. Available for download in the App Store on iTunes.