Picture an orchestra. How are the cellists holding their instruments? Chances are, in your mental image, they’re playing with endpins — the pointy-tipped metal rods that anchor the cello to the floor and raise it to a comfortable playing height.
Musical instruments, like technologies and fashions, adapt to the changing times. These days, playing the cello with an endpin is considered the default, but it hasn’t always been that way. Before endpins became standard, cellists often played by gripping the instrument between their calves, a position that requires strength and finesse.
Even today some cellists opt not to use an endpin. At Trinity Church’s holiday performance of Handel’s “Messiah” in December, the cellists cradled their instruments between their legs for the three-hour performance — no small feat of endurance. Uptown on the same night, the New York Philharmonic was playing the same repertoire. Those cellists used endpins.
This divide between Baroque cellists (like Trinity’s) and modern players (like the Philharmonic’s) is often explained by a generalization: Cellists after 1850 or so used endpins, whereas before 1850 they didn’t. And so, cellists playing earlier music in a historically minded way often forgo an endpin.
But the history of the endpin is far more complicated, having to do with issues of gender, disability and plain stubbornness. Valerie Walden, author of “One Hundred Years of Violoncello,” writes that the endpin, throughout its history, has had “decidedly amateur or womanish overtones and professional musicians probably regarded it as an affront to their male pride.”
Some of this may have to do with what musicologists call the “interface” between cello and thighs, an area often sexualized, which seems to be a major source of cellists’ anxiety both historically and today. But the endpin’s story is also about cellists not wanting to change their ways, even when they would benefit from something to lean on.
Endpins and other lifting devices for the cello have been around since at least the 1600s, nearly as long as the cello itself. The earliest endpins, usually wooden, can be seen in some Baroque visual art — in scenes of merry companies swilling tankards of ale, or of courtly musicians entertaining the nobility.
A 1620 etching in a treatise by Michael Praetorius shows an early cello with a knobbly endpin. Praetorius’s cello has five strings rather than the usual four. But that’s not unusual: The early cello was totally unstandardized, coming in different shapes and sizes, with any number of strings and all kinds of tunings.
The instrument could also be held in a variety of ways: “da gamba,” or “between the legs”; balanced on a stool; hung from a strap like a guitar; or played with a short endpin (while sitting) or a long one (while standing). Sometimes a strap and an endpin were used in conjunction, as seen in paintings of itinerant musicians.
Unlike modern endpins, the early ones weren’t built in or retractable. They were separate pieces, plugged into a hole drilled into the bottom of the instrument. Because these endpins could be screwed on and off, they tended to get lost. One of few surviving specimens is a lathe-carved Baroque endpin in the Musical Instrument Museum in Leipzig, Germany.
In the 1700s, endpins seem to have been associated with beginners. A 1765 cello manual by Robert Crome in London recommended that an endpin be used by students, with the intention that it was later to be removed, a bit like training wheels.
But endpins must have been popular enough that a 1786 German handbook includes instructions on how to make one. This wooden endpin, it says, should be “six to twelve inches and thick like a finger.” (The endpin’s history is full of double entendres.) A common complaint among cellists appears to be the same as today: Endpins kept sliding on the floor. The solution to this was to affix a metal nail to the tip, which would “stick into the parlor’s floorboards.”
By the early 1800s, endpins were less commonly used. But Joseph Linke, the cellist in the Schuppanzigh Quartet that premiered works by Beethoven, most likely used an endpin because of a disabling childhood leg injury. Contemporaries praised Linke’s virtuosity even as they described his body as “lame” or “crooked.”
It’s interesting to think about the endpin as an assistive device, like a cane. It supported and supplemented the cello — and by extension the cellist — making it easier to play.
The cellist and composer Luigi Boccherini, who died in 1805, played without an endpin, even when doing so caused him permanent injury. When his corpse was exhumed in 1993, pathologists found that, among other conditions, his shins were misshapen from constantly grabbing the instrument between his legs.
This is far from the only case of cellists contorting their bodies. During the Victorian era, amateur female cellists, for modesty’s sake, adopted an uncomfortable sidesaddle position to play. Before that, women playing the cello were rare as it was considered unseemly for them to spread their legs. The sidesaddle position — legs crossed to the side underneath long skirts — solved the straddling problem but necessitated an endpin, as without the support of the legs, the cello would have had to float in midair.
The sidesaddle position proved a foot in the door for female cellists. The rise of professional female virtuosos like Lisa Cristiani and Guilhermina Suggia became a hallmark of the era. These players didn’t sit sidesaddle, because it was too technically limiting, not to mention hard on the back; instead, they sat astride but kept using endpins, which continued to have “womanish overtones” during the period.
Then, something surprising happened: Male cellists began using endpins, too.
Adrien-Francois Servais is often mistakenly credited with inventing the endpin in the mid-1800s. There are a few different versions of this myth: Servais started using an endpin because he was overweight. Or he started using it as he got older. Or that his large Stradivarius cello was too heavy to be held endpin-less. But Servais didn’t invent the endpin as much as repopularize it at a time when the device had fallen out of favor.
Simply put, endpins make it easier to play. They free up the legs and add stability, which can help with technique. That’s probably why male cellists like Servais finally began to embrace them. (It’s akin to what happened with the umbrella, which at first faced resistance because it was associated with the dainty parasol.) There were exceptions: Cello pedagogues like Alfredo Piatti and Friedrich Grützmacher refused to use endpins, playing in the “old style” until their deaths.
In the 20th century, endpins grew longer and longer. The extra-long bent endpin came into use in the 1960s, invented by Paul Tortelier and popularized by Mstislav Rostropovich. Does size matter? Some feel a long endpin allows the instrument to vibrate more freely, undampened by the legs, which might improve the sound.
But also in the 1960s, an anti-endpin coalition emerged: the early music movement. “At first, the early music movement had to have these clearly defined rules,” said the cellist Keiran Campbell, who plays with the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra based in Toronto: No endpins. Minimal vibrato. Strings made from sheep gut, like early tennis rackets, instead of metal.
Historical instruments opened up new possibilities of sound and expression. But, as Richard Taruskin wrote in The New York Times in 1990, the early music movement was, and is, in many ways a modern movement, with a present-tinged sense of the past. This brought with it certain overgeneralizations.
For instance, the idea that Baroque cellists should never use endpins. This is an opinion espoused sometimes quite vehemently, as in “Just Say ‘No’ to Endpins! The Baroque Cello Group” on Facebook. (Endpins existed in the 1700s, so there’s no hard and fast historical reason to forbid them completely.)
Though Campbell hasn’t experimented with historically informed wooden endpins, he has tried playing with his Baroque cello balancing on a stool or hanging from a strap. During a performance of Heinrich Biber’s “Battalia,” he found it liberating to use a strap and walk around the upper balcony of the auditorium while playing.
Mostly, modern players are expected to play with an endpin and Baroque players are expected to go without. To do otherwise is to go against the norm. One such nonconformist modern cellist is Andrew Yee, who has been playing almost exclusively without an endpin even in modern repertoire. She first tried going endpin-less for a Haydn recording with the Attacca Quartet, finding that the cello’s more vertical angle was easier on her arms, improving her tendinitis.
Now, she treats the endpin as an accessory, rather than something essential: “Playing without an endpin is like being barefoot,” she said. “It feels like the cello is more a part of my body versus a table that I’m sitting at.”
Today’s orchestras, whether modern or Baroque, encourage homogeneity and uniformity in appearance and sound. But perhaps when it comes to endpins there is value in heterogeneity. So picture an orchestra in which someday the cellists, with an awareness of the endpin’s complex and gendered history, feel empowered to play with or without one.
The post Does It Matter How a Cello Is Held? It’s a Centuries-Old Debate. appeared first on New York Times.
