Keyboard instrument, any musical instrument on which different notes can be sounded by pressing a series of keys, push buttons, or parallel levers. In nearly all cases in Western music the keys correspond to consecutive notes in the chromatic scale, and they run from the bass at the left to the treble at the right.
This large group of instruments has assumed great importance because the keyboard enables a performer to play many notes at once as well as in close succession. This versatility enables the modern pianist or organist to play, in transcription, any work of Western music, whether it involves chordal harmonies, independent contrapuntal parts, or only a single melody. The capabilities of keyboard instruments have influenced the composition of music for other media, because virtually every major composer from William Byrd (c. 1543–1623) to Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and beyond has been at least an accomplished keyboard performer, if not a renowned virtuoso. The evolution of an idiomatic keyboard compositional style has been linked to technological and theoretical developments within Western urban culture; keyboard instruments are not normally associated with folk music, and only during the 20th century has their use spread widely outside the Western world.
In its broadest sense, the term keyboard instrument may be applied to any instrument equipped with a keyboard and thus may be used to refer to accordions, percussion instruments such as the celesta and the carillon, and many electronic instruments—for example, the Moog synthesizer (see ) and the Ondes Martenot. In a narrower sense, such as is employed in this discussion, the term is restricted to instruments in which sound is produced from strings, whether by plucking, striking, or rubbing, or from pipes or reeds.
Since the 17th century, keyboard instruments have played an important role in orchestration. Those commonly available today are the harpsichord, celesta, organ (both pipe and electronic), and electric piano, in addition to the instrument for which most of the standard literature has been…
Development of the keyboard
Evolution from early forms
Long before the appearance of the first stringed keyboard instruments in the 14th century, the keyboard was developed and applied to the organ. A keyboard of the kind familiar today—a series of parallel levers hinged or pivoted so that they can be pushed down by the fingers—first appeared on the hydraulus, an organ probably invented in Alexandria in the late 3rd century bc. This type of keyboard seems to have disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the organs of the early Middle Ages generally had sliders that were pulled out to sound different notes; some may have had keys that turned like the key for a lock. Keys of the last type were certainly used on the organistrum, a large medieval hurdy-gurdy operated by two players: one turned a crank rotating a wheel that rubbed against one or more strings to make them sound, while the other produced different notes by turning the key-shaped levers that stopped the strings at various points (much as guitar strings are stopped against the fingerboard).
Some small portable organs had push buttons instead of keys as late as the 1440s, but a keyboard resembling the modern type existed in the 14th century, although the arrangement of naturals and sharps (corresponding to the white and black keys on the modern piano) was only gradually standardized. The arrangement of the keys depended in part on the music played and partly on the current state of musical theory. Thus, early keyboards are reported with only a single raised key in each octave (B♭), and there were organs that had both B and B♭ as “natural” keys, with C♯, D♯, F♯, and G♯ as raised keys. The colours of the keys—white for naturals and black for sharps—became standardized much later, about 1800, depending on fashion or on the relative cost of such materials as bone, ivory, or boxwood for the “white” keys and stained hardwood or ebony for the “black” keys. Flemish instruments had bone naturals and oak sharps by 1580; French and German instruments had ebony or fruitwood naturals and bone or ivory sharps until the 1790s.
Special key arrangements
The short octave
Even after the present arrangement of five raised keys and seven natural keys per octave had become standard in the 15th century, two exceptions existed. The first of these—the “short octave”—concerned only the lowest octave at the bass end of the keyboard. In the short octave, not all keys actually sounded notes of the expected pitch; their respective strings were tuned to lower notes. In the earlier form, the keyboard apparently started on E, but the string for this key was tuned to the C below. The apparent F♯ was tuned to D and the G♯ to E, so that the notes of the entire octave from C to c were encompassed within an apparent key span of only E to c. With this arrangement C♯, E♭, F♯, and G♯ were not available in the bass octave, but these notes were rarely required in the bass in music of this period. When the missing F♯ and G♯ later became necessary, short-octave keyboards were made with these keys divided into two parts, the fronts sounding D and E and the back parts sounding F♯ and G♯. Later still, a second short octave was developed in which the keyboard apparently began on low B. This key actually sounded the G below, and the apparent C♯ and E♭ were tuned to A and B (or B♭). Eventually, as musical styles changed, the two retuned sharps were divided in this arrangement as well, providing C♯ (or sometimes B♭) and E♭ at the back of these keys while retaining A and B at the front.
Divided sharps
The second type of exceptional keyboard arrangement was originally required by the so-called meantone tuning system generally used in the 16th–18th centuries. Meantone tuning provided significantly purer tuning for a relatively small number of tonalities than does equal temperament, the system now in use (in which all tonalities are somewhat out of tune; see tuning and temperament), but only at the expense of restricting the usefulness of the remaining tonalities. This characteristic arose because in meantone tuning each of the raised keys could be used in only one way: for example, if the key between D and E was tuned to E♭, it could not be used as D♯ without retuning. One solution was to build keyboards with the raised keys divided, the front half of the key sounding the appropriate sharp while the back half sounded the equivalent flat. The keys most commonly divided were A♭/G♯, E♭/D♯, and B♭/A♯. Instruments with up to three divided keys in each octave were commonly made in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in Italy. Since the 1590s still more complicated keyboards have been built, permitting even more refined tunings; some in the 19th century had more than 50 keys per octave. Instruments have also been made with the octave divided into 24 rather than 12 equal parts to permit playing music utilizing quarter-tone intervals.
Keyboard size and range
Although some early organs had very wide keys that could be played only with the fists, stringed keyboard instruments seem always to have had natural keys no more than an inch wide, yielding an octave span of 7 inches (17.8 centimetres). The octave span on the modern piano is about 6 1/2 inches (16.5 centimetres), much the same as on Flemish and Italian harpsichords of the 16th–18th centuries, whereas that of English keyboards was generally 6 3/8 inches (16.2 centimetres). On most French and German instruments of the 18th century, the octave span was even narrower (6 1/4 inches [15.9 centimetres]), permitting the playing of tenths—such as C to the second E above—by a hand of average size.
The range of the keyboard gradually expanded from a single octave for some early organs to 2 1/2 or 3 octaves in the 15th century and 4 or 4 1/2 octaves in the 16th century. By the early 18th century, except in Italy and Spain, a range of five octaves was common: from the F below low C to the F above high C (F′ to f‴). This range began to be expanded only at the very end of the century, usually upward toward c″″ (C above high C) but occasionally downward to C′ (C below low C). A few pianos with a range of six octaves (from C′ to c″″) were built before 1800, and Beethoven’s Hammerclavier Sonata, Opus 106 (completed 1818), requires 6 1/2 octaves from C′ to f″″. A seven-octave range was reached before 1830, and the usual modern piano keyboard consisting of 88 keys provides the only slightly greater range of seven octaves and a third, from A″ to c″″′.
The clavichord
The earliest known reference to a stringed keyboard instrument dates from 1360, when an instrument called the eschiquier was mentioned in account books of John II the Good, king of France. The eschiquier was described in 1388 as “resembling an organ that sounds by means of strings.” There exists no more complete description of the eschiquier, however, and it is not known whether the instrument was a variety of clavichord, in which the strings are struck by blades of metal that must remain in contact with them as long as they are to sound; a harpsichord, in which the strings are plucked; or a type of keyboard-equipped dulcimer, in which—as in the piano—the strings are struck by small hammers that immediately rebound from them. All three types of instruments were described and illustrated about 1440 by Henri Arnaut of Zwolle, personal physician of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy.
Despite the uncertainty regarding the eschiquier, it seems probable that the clavichord was the earliest stringed instrument having keys that could be pushed down by the fingers. The term “clavichord” first appears in a German document from 1404, and the instrument is recognizable in a German altar carving from 1425. Its principle of operation resembles that of the medieval organistrum, and it is apparently closely related to the monochord, an instrument consisting of a shallow closed box over which one or two strings were stretched and supported by movable bridges. The monochord was in continuous use by theorists from ancient Greece onward as a device for explaining and measuring musical intervals. The kinship of the clavichord to the monochord was so close that, as late as the 16th century, clavichords were often called monocordia.
Principle of operation
The clavichord is rectangular in shape, and its strings run from left to right across the keys, which are placed along one of the longer sides of the rectangle. The soundboard of the instrument is at the right-hand end of the case, and the vibrations of the strings are communicated to it by a bridge on which the strings rest. The soundboard amplifies the sound of the strings by permitting them to set a large mass of air into vibration rather than the very small mass of air that contacts the string itself. (This is the same principle that makes a tuning fork sound louder when its stem is pressed against a tabletop.)
The clavichord’s operation is extremely simple. A brass blade rather like the end of a screwdriver is driven into the top surface of each key near the back of the key; a smaller piece of wood, whalebone, or horn is driven into the back end of the key. (This piece fits into a fixed slot behind the key and prevents the key from moving from side to side as it moves up and down.) When the front end of the key is pushed down by the finger, the back end rises, and the brass blade, called a tangent, strikes the strings (which in most clavichords are arranged in pairs), causing them to vibrate. To the left of the tangent a strip of cloth is woven between the strings. When the key is struck, only the portion of the strings to the right of the tangent—i.e., between the tangent and the bridge—sounds; the cloth prevents the string section to the left of the tangent from sounding. As soon as the key is released, the tangent falls away from the strings, which are then entirely silenced by the cloth. Because the sounding portion of each string is the segment between tangent and bridge, the tangent serves not only to set the strings in vibration but also to determine their sounding length. Thus, a series of tangents striking a given pair of strings at different points will produce a series of different notes, and all the earliest clavichords were designed to take advantage of this fact. Arnaut of Zwolle’s clavichord used only 9 or 10 pairs of strings to produce all the 37 notes of its 3-octave keyboard, and the clavichord represented in an Italian intarsia (picture in wood inlay) of about 1480 (Palazzo Ducale, Urbino) used only 17 pairs of strings to produce 47 notes in a 4-octave range.
Making a single pair of strings serve several keys had two important disadvantages. Because each pair of strings can sound only one note at a time, it is impossible to play any two notes sounded from the same strings simultaneously, making it impossible to play certain chords. Furthermore, an unpleasant clanking sound is likely to result if the performer attempts legato playing of successive notes sounded from the same strings, making it necessary to play in a semidetached fashion.
As early as the time of Arnaut of Zwolle, the first of these disadvantages was minimized by allowing no more than four keys to sound from the same pair of strings and by carefully choosing the points at which such groups of four keys were placed, so that only dissonant chords would be unplayable. The second problem could be solved only when a maximum of two keys were served by the same strings, so that each natural key shared its strings only with the sharp or flat next to it. G, for example, was paired with G♯, and in the music of the period the two notes were seldom needed at the same time or in immediate succession. Of course, if one wanted to use the G♯ key as an A♭, the problem would reassert itself; but, as long as meantone tuning was in use, the G♯ could not serve as A♭ in any case.
Eventually, however, it was felt necessary to be able to play in all tonalities without restrictions either of style of playing or in the use of dissonant chords, and clavichords began to be built with one pair of strings for each key. Such clavichords are called “unfretted,” in contrast to those having several keys for each pair of strings, which are called “fretted.” Although the unfretted clavichord was known as early as 1693, the oldest extant example, built by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass of Hamburg (Ger.), dates from 1742. Fretted clavichords were being made well into the 1780s; they had fewer strings to go out of tune, and the smaller number of strings permitted all the keys to be shorter and more equal in length, giving the instrument a superior touch. In addition, the smaller number of strings imposed a smaller downward force on the soundboard, resulting in a brighter, clearer tone.
Tone quality
The greatest disadvantage of the clavichord is its extremely soft tone. Because it arises directly from the way in which the sound of the instrument is produced, this disadvantage cannot readily be overcome. It is impossible to impart very much energy to a string by striking it at one end (it is for this reason that a guitarist makes less sound when he strikes the strings against the fingerboard with his left hand than when he plucks them with his right, even though the pitches produced are the same). In compensation, the clavichordist alone of all keyboard-instrument players has control over a note once it has been struck. As long as a note is sounding, he has contact with the string through the tangent and key, and by changing his pressure on the key he can vary the pitch of the note, produce a controlled vibrato, or even create the illusion of prolonging or swelling the tone. Although the maximum loudness of which a clavichord is capable is not great, its softest pianissimo is very soft indeed, and the clavichordist controls an infinite number of gradations in loudness between these two extremes. As a result of this touch sensitivity, the clavichord was highly valued as a teaching and practice instrument. In addition, its relative cheapness made it the normal domestic keyboard instrument in Germany, Iberia, and Scandinavia.
The quiet tone of the clavichord made it impractical to use the instrument in ensemble music, except for providing a discreet accompaniment for a flutist or a singer. Although much of the solo keyboard music of the 16th–18th centuries can be played on the clavichord, it cannot be stated that much of it before the latter part of the 18th century was especially composed with the clavichord in mind. At that time, however, the clavichord experienced a great revival in Germany, and music composed with its singing tone and unique capabilities of dynamic shading and vibrato was written for it by such masters as Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714–88).
Clavichords continued to be made in Germany and Scandinavia well into the 19th century, long after the piano was popular. Indeed, many instrument makers built both clavichords and pianos (and harpsichords as well). The continued demand for the older instruments may have been a consequence—among other things—of musicians’ recognition of the three instruments’ differing capabilities.
The clavichord owes its modest modern revival in the United Kingdom and America largely to the efforts of Arnold Dolmetsch, who began building clavichords and performing on them in public in the 1890s. Both his style of playing the clavichord and the design of his instruments were influential for a long period. Today, however, increasing numbers of clavichord makers and players are exploring earlier forms of the instrument.
The harpsichord
Principle of operation
Plucking mechanism
The sound of the wing-shaped harpsichord and its smaller rectangular, triangular, or polygonal relatives, the spinet and virginal, is produced by plucking their strings. The plucking mechanism, called a jack, rests on the key and consists of a narrow slip of wood with two slots cut into its top. The larger slot holds a pivoted tongue from which protrudes the quill, plastic, or leather plectrum that does the actual plucking; the smaller slot holds a piece of cloth that rests on the string and silences it when the key is not depressed. When the harpsichordist pushes down on a key, the back end rises, lifting the jack and forcing the plectrum past the string, plucking it. When he releases the key, the jack falls, and when the plectrum touches the string on the way down, it forces the pivoted tongue backward so that the plectrum can pass the string again without plucking it. Once the plectrum has passed beneath the string, a light spring made of bristle or metal pushes the tongue forward again. Finally, when the key is completely at rest, the cloth damper touches the string, silencing it. A wooden bar, padded on its underside, is placed over the jacks. The purpose of this bar is to prevent the jacks from flying out of the instrument and to limit the depth to which the keys can be depressed.
Although slight variations in loudness and timbre, or tone colour, can be obtained by differences in the firmness with which the harpsichordist depresses the keys, no sustained crescendos are obtainable by the action of the fingers alone. For this reason, most harpsichords made since about 1550 have had at least two strings and two jacks for each key. Each can be engaged or disengaged at will by a slight shift of the uppermost of two slotted guides through which the jacks pass. Moving the guide in one direction brings its entire row of jacks close enough to the strings for the plectra to pluck them; moving the guide in the opposite direction takes the jacks far enough from the strings so that the plectra cannot reach them. Two rows of jacks can provide three different levels of loudness or three differing tone colours, depending on whether the performer uses each row separately or both together.
Two-manual instruments
Even given two rows of jacks, it would not ordinarily be possible to produce the rapid changes in loudness required for pieces in echo style, for example, or to play loudly with one hand while providing a soft accompaniment with the other. To accomplish this, it is necessary to have two keyboards or “manuals,” one of which operates a single row of jacks while the other operates two or more. It then becomes possible to play loudly on one keyboard and softly on the other, either simultaneously or in rapid alternation. Two-manual harpsichords of this kind were invented at some point before 1620 in Flanders and gradually became known throughout the rest of Europe during the 17th century. These instruments commonly had three sets of strings, two unison sets at normal pitch (called eight-foot pitch because the low C at this pitch is produced by an organ pipe eight feet long) and a third set of shorter strings tuned an octave higher, or at four-foot pitch; this shorter set passed over its own bridge and was fastened to pins driven through the soundboard into a rail fixed to its underside. There were three rows of jacks. The front row plucked one set of unison strings and was made in such a way that it would be moved by the keys of both the upper and the lower keyboards. Both the middle and back rows operated from the lower manual only; the second row plucked the second set of unison strings, and the back row plucked the octave strings. For most purposes a one-manual harpsichord sufficed: each row of jacks provided a continuously changing tone colour from one end of the keyboard to the other, permitting individual lines in the music to be articulated clearly. For this reason, as well as because of their lower price, the old harpsichord makers built far more single-manual instruments than doubles, and many more singles survive today.
Couplers
There is, however, one type of music that can only be played on a two-manual instrument. Called in French the pièce croisée, this kind of music involves separate lines that cross and recross in the same range, frequently employing the same note either simultaneously or in close succession. The parts in such pieces cannot be distinguished when played on a single manual, and they cannot even be played on two manuals if the manuals are not completely independent. (For example, if a note is already being held on the lower manual, it cannot be restruck on the upper manual when the lower manual lifts the upper-manual jacks.) The solution to this problem was found in France in the 1640s. Instead of providing the upper-manual jacks with an extension that reached down to the keys of the lower manual, they were made to rest entirely on the upper-manual keys; the lower-manual keys were then fitted with small upright pieces of wood called coupler dogs, which reached upward toward the underside of the upper-manual keys. The upper manual was constructed to slide forward and back by about 1/4 inch. When it was pushed into the instrument, the coupler dogs were positioned below the back ends of upper-manual keys. As a result, when any lower-manual key was pushed down and its back end rose, the coupler dog would push up on the underside of the corresponding upper-manual key, lifting its jack as well. When one wished to uncouple the two keyboards in order to play pièces croisées, one could do so by pulling the upper manual outward. The coupler dogs then passed slightly beyond the ends of the upper-manual keys, so that they were not lifted when the lower-manual keys were depressed.
Two-manual harpsichords of this kind permit players to exploit the difference in the tone colours produced by the two rows, or “registers,” of unison jacks. This difference depends on the distance along the string at which it is plucked. The closer the plucking point is to the end of a string, the brighter is the sound; the farther away from the end that a string is plucked, the fuller and rounder the tone becomes, until one approaches the centre; plucking near the centre of a string produces a sweet, flutey, but somewhat hollow sound. In order to emphasize the difference in tone colours produced by the two rows of unison jacks, French harpsichord builders put the row of octave jacks between them, thereby increasing the distance between the two unison plucking points and the difference in tone of the two unison registers.
Special effects
A set of jacks plucking very close to the end of the string yields a very brassy, nasal sound. This type of register, called a lute stop, was first used in Germany in the 16th century and later spread to Flanders and to England, where it was added to the normal three registers on two-manual instruments. It did not have its own set of strings but, rather, plucked those of one of the existing unison registers. In England the lute stop plucked the same set of strings as the set of jacks operated by both keyboards; but, because the lute-stop jacks rested only on the upper-manual keys, they could also be used to provide a completely independent register on the upper manual. It was thus possible to play pièces croisées by taking off the unison register controlled by both manuals, using the lute stop for the upper manual and leaving the lower manual with its own unison register. Many harpsichords of all countries were also equipped with a buff stop (sometimes also called a lute stop), a device that presses pieces of soft leather against one of the sets of unison strings, producing a muted, pizzicato tone.
In Germany in the 18th century, harpsichords were made with still more strings and jacks for each key. Some had three unison strings in addition to an octave string; some had two unisons, an octave, and a suboctave (or 16-foot) register; and some even had a 2-foot register, with very short strings tuned two octaves above the unisons. Harpsichords with three keyboards were apparently built throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, although only one authentic three-manual harpsichord is known today.
It should be emphasized, however, that the harpsichord of the 16th–18th centuries normally had only one or two keyboards and only two or three sets of strings and jacks per note. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, one-manual instruments usually had only two registers (either two unisons or a unison and an octave) with or without a buff stop; in the second half of the 17th century a second unison register became common, increasing the number of jacks and strings to three per note. Two-manual instruments, likewise, had no more than three sets of strings (two unisons and an octave) and three sets of jacks throughout the 17th century. In the 18th century, a fourth row of jacks was sometimes added. In Britain and Flanders, this row was the close-plucking lute stop; in France, if a fourth row was added, it was placed behind the other three and equipped with plectra of soft buff leather that provided a gentle, flutey tone, which was highly prized in the rather decadent period of the harpsichord’s decline. Until the last half of the 18th century, it was usually possible to change registers only by moving knobs at the side of the instrument or above the keyboards, which could be done only when one hand or the other was not playing. This fact and the surviving written evidence suggests that the harpsichordists of earlier times changed registers relatively infrequently, avoiding monotony of sound by relying on variations of touch and the changes of texture and pitch level written into the music.
History
The harpsichord may have evolved from devices invented by medical astrologers for the purpose of investigating the effects of cosmic musical harmonies on the human body. The wing-shaped instrument was described by Arnaut of Zwolle in the mid-15th century and was apparently known throughout Europe by the end of the century, although no 15th-century examples have survived. The harpsichords depicted in sculptures, paintings, and miniatures of the period all appear to be shorter and to have thicker cases than the earliest surviving 16th-century examples, all of which are Italian and are constructed of very thin cypress.
Italy
The thin-cased style of harpsichord construction appears to have been developed in Italy about 1500, and it rapidly influenced the design of harpsichords throughout the rest of Europe. The strings of the Italian harpsichords were rather short, with the strings for c″ (C above middle C) generally being about 10 inches (25 centimetres) long on instruments tuned to what is today considered normal pitch. On some Italian harpsichords, however, the strings for c″ are about 14 inches (36 centimetres) long; it is thought that these were tuned to a pitch a fourth below that of the shorter-strung ones, the key for C sounding what today would be the G below. The comparatively short strings imposed a relatively low tension on the case of the Italian harpsichord, allowing it to hold up with so light a structure.
In general, Italian harpsichords had only one keyboard with two rows of jacks and two strings tuned in unison or unison and octave. The fragile Italian instruments were normally housed in thick outer cases of softwood, which were either painted or covered with stamped leather. The cases, in turn, rested on separate legs or elaborate stands. The tone of these lightly constructed instruments is surprisingly loud and penetrating, making them ideal as accompanying instruments in an orchestra and suiting them perfectly to the rattling scale passages typical of Italian harpsichord music.
Flanders
As the new Italian design spread northward, first into Germany and then to Flanders, France, and England, it was modified to the extent that the 16th- and 17th-century northern European instruments had somewhat longer strings (11 1/2 to 12 1/2 inches [29 to 32 centimetres] for c″) and thicker cases (3/16 to 1/4 inch [5 to 6 millimetres] in contrast to the 1/8 inch [3 millimetres] found on Italian instruments). In the 1560s in Flanders, however, this type of instrument was replaced by still another design, which ultimately dominated all northern European harpsichord making. These instruments had long strings (about 14 inches for c″ at normal pitch) and thick cases with substantial internal bracing to withstand the greater tension imposed by the greater string length. Because the longer strings made it unfeasible to double the string length for each octave below middle C, harpsichords of the newer Flemish design have less gracefully curved bentsides and wider tails than either Italian harpsichords or the intermediate instruments built elsewhere north of the Alps.
The name most often associated with Flemish harpsichord building is that of the Ruckers family, which for four generations (from about 1580 to 1680) dominated Flemish harpsichord making and whose instruments were exported to all parts of Europe—one was even shipped as far as Peru. At first sight, Ruckers harpsichords appear crude compared to their Italian counterparts, and their thick softwood cases give the impression of being clumsily cobbled together on the inside. Nonetheless, the tone of unaltered or properly restored examples is extraordinarily good, and it is easy to see why Ruckers instruments were so highly prized that a lively business in making forgeries of them flourished in the 18th century.
In addition to a wide variety of virginals (discussed below under The virginal, spinet, and clavicytherium), the Ruckers family made several different harpsichord models. The most popular was apparently six feet long, having a four-octave keyboard from C to c‴, with a short octave in the bass; one unison and one octave register; and, occasionally, a buff stop on the unison. They were typically painted in imitation of marble on the outside and decorated on the inside with block-printed paper on which a Latin motto was painted. The soundboard was usually decorated with paintings of flowers, leaves, and birds. (This decoration should be contrasted with that of Italian harpsichords, which, except for their finely profiled moldings and lavish outer cases, were generally unadorned.) Flemish harpsichords were set directly on fairly massive stands, examples of which may be seen in the numerous Dutch paintings of musical groups of the period. Similar harpsichords were made in smaller sizes tuned a fifth or an octave above normal pitch (the key c′ sounding either g′ or c″). By the mid-17th century, some single-manual instruments had a range of 4 1/2 octaves from F′ or G′ to c‴.
The Ruckers family appears to have been the first to make two-manual harpsichords. These were of two types: in one (which may have been the earlier type and was not built after about 1650), both keyboards were served by a single set of unison and octave strings and were not meant to be played at the same time. Instead, the keyboards were so arranged that c‴ on the upper keyboard was placed over f‴ on the lower keyboard, which meant that playing a piece on the lower keyboard automatically transposed it to a pitch a fourth below that of the upper keyboard. Whether this arrangement was used to facilitate routine transpositions or whether it was intended to provide in a single instrument the same resources as those available from both an Italian instrument with a 10-inch c″ and one with a 14-inch c″ is still a subject for controversy. The second type of two-manual harpsichord built by the Ruckers family was basically the type one finds today, with keyboards aligned over one another and intended to provide contrasts in loudness. Because the only set of upper-manual jacks was also played directly from the lower manual, it was not possible to play pièces croisées.
France
During the 17th century, instruments of the Ruckers type gradually influenced those being built throughout northern Europe; and by the early 18th century France, England, and Germany all had developed their own national variations on the thick-cased Ruckers design, replacing the thinner-cased and shorter-strung instruments of their earlier native schools. The sound of a typical 18th-century French harpsichord is delicate and sweet compared to the more astringent sound of a Ruckers. Those examples by the Blanchet family and their heir Pascal Taskin (1723–93) are noted for their extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship and the lightness and evenness of their touch. Eighteenth-century French harpsichords were almost always painted and rest on elaborate carved and gilded cabriole (curved-leg) stands. As with Flemish harpsichords, the French soundboards are decorated with painted flowers and birds, and the maker’s mark appears in the form of a cast ornament in the sound hole. In the 1760s, Taskin added a fourth row of jacks with soft plectra of buff leather as a special solo stop and also devised a highly ingenious system of knee levers that permitted the harpsichordist to play crescendos and decrescendos and to change registers without taking his hands from the keyboard. By the time of these inventions, however, the great Baroque composers of harpsichord music, such as François Couperin, J.S. Bach, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Domenico Scarlatti, were dead, and these devices have no relevance to the historically accurate performance of harpsichord music of the Baroque era or earlier.
Great Britain
In Britain the making of harpsichords in the 18th century was dominated by two London families, the Kirkmans and the Shudis. Both families made instruments for several generations and eventually moved on from harpsichord building to piano building. Their harpsichords are very similar, and the two-manual instruments all have a close-plucking lute stop in addition to the usual two unisons and octave. They are invariably veneered in walnut or mahogany and rest on simple stands, usually with straight or tapered legs. The tone of a Kirkman or Shudi harpsichord is both more robust and more brilliant than that of a French or Flemish instrument, making it a superb instrument for filling in the harmonies in orchestral music as well as for the performance of the solo harpsichord literature.
Germany
Two German schools appear to have existed in the 18th century. One in the southern part of the country has left very few surviving instruments, which is unfortunate because these are the kind probably played by J.S. Bach. As far as is known, the southern German instruments were fairly plain, veneered ones, having only three registers and a rather darker tone than either French or Flemish instruments. The second German school was centred in the city of Hamburg and is best represented by the work of the Hass family. The Hass instruments are among the most elaborate ever made, in both decoration and complexity. They are the only 18th-century harpsichords with 16-foot and 2-foot registers, and some have lute stops as well. Their tone does not, unfortunately, live up to the quality of their craftsmanship or the ingenuity of their design, seeming overly brilliant and too thick in all the surviving examples that have been restored to playing condition.
Decline of the harpsichord
Although many of the finest surviving harpsichords date from after 1750, few composers of the first rank were writing for the instrument by that time. Furthermore, the emergence of a newer, lighter style of music and an increased interest in crescendo and decrescendo effects led to the addition of various new devices foreign to the essential nature of the instrument. These include the knee- and foot-operated contrivances for the rapid changing of registers or for producing crescendos and decrescendos. Such devices represent the harpsichord builders’ response to the same musical needs that eventually caused the harpsichord’s replacement by the piano; but they were created before the real rise in the piano’s popularity and must not be thought of as attempts to stave off the competition of the newer instrument.
As with the clavichord, builders continued to make harpsichords side by side with pianos. In England, Shudi’s son-in-law, John Broadwood (see below The piano: History: The English action), continued to make harpsichords until after 1800 (although in decreasing quantity), producing at the same time an ever-increasing number of pianos. There is even a small but interesting group of compositions by British, German, and French composers calling for both instruments.
Modern revival
The harpsichord had all but vanished except as a curiosity or in rare historical concerts when the modern revival began in the 1890s with the building of new harpsichords by the piano firms of Érard and Pleyel in Paris. Almost immediately, the full brunt of 19th-century piano technology was applied to the manufacture of the revived instruments, and they became increasingly massively strung and framed as time passed. Pedals for changing registers were included from the beginning, and Pleyel first added the 16-foot stop in 1911. The Pleyel’s sound, as preserved in the recordings of the Polish virtuoso Wanda Landowska and her numerous pupils, typified the harpsichord for most music lovers until the 1950s, and it is for a heavy, metal-framed instrument of this type, with pedals for changing registers and a 16-foot stop, that most 20th-century harpsichord music has been composed.
In 1905 modern harpsichord building was begun in Germany, initially taking the new Pleyel and Érard instruments as inspiration. Subsequent German building produced a highly characteristic instrument somewhat reminiscent of the harpsichords of the 18th-century Hamburg school in sound. Taking as their model an improperly restored instrument falsely said to have belonged to Bach, these instruments generally had the unhistorical stop arrangement of one 8-foot and the 4-foot on the upper manual, with the second 8-foot and a 16-foot on the lower manual.
Arnold Dolmetsch, who began the modern revival of the clavichord, also built harpsichords, working in Paris and Boston as well as in England. He deserves to be considered the “godfather” not only of the present British school of harpsichord making but also of the flourishing American school, most of whose members are, however, building a very different and far more historically based instrument than any that Dolmetsch made after about 1910.
The virginal, spinet, and clavicytherium
The virginal, spinet, and clavicytherium are all varieties of harpsichord that differ from it primarily in size, shape, and musical resources. Virginals and spinets usually have only a single set of strings and a single row of jacks. The clavicytherium is basically a harpsichord set upright so that its soundboard is vertical. The earliest known mention of the clavicytherium dates from about 1460; the oldest extant example (Royal College of Music, London) was probably made in Ulm, Ger., about 1480. Instruments of this form were made from the 15th through the 18th centuries. In general, their mechanism has to be fairly complicated because the jacks must move horizontally rather than vertically and cannot therefore return to their rest position solely by the action of gravity. As a consequence of this complexity of its mechanism, the touch of the clavicytherium tends to be heavy, although the instrument takes up less floor space, and the vertical soundboard projects sound outward far more effectively than the horizontal soundboard of the conventional harpsichord.
The virginal and spinet are small varieties of harpsichord, but the precise usage of the terms differs. Some writers reserve the term virginal for rectangular instruments and call all small triangular or polygonal instruments spinets. Others apply the term virginal to all plucked stringed keyboard instruments whose strings run more or less from left to right across the keys (a usage followed in this article), reserving the term spinet for instruments in which the strings run obliquely away from the player. The terminological question is complicated by the fact that the word virginal in 16th- and 17th-century England referred to all plucked stringed keyboard instruments, including harpsichords and spinets as well as those today termed virginals. The term épinette (“spinet”) had a similarly broad usage in France.
Italian builders of the 16th and 17th centuries made virginals and spinets employing a thin-cased construction similar to that of their harpsichords, and, like Italian harpsichords, these smaller instruments were kept in stout outer cases. The typical Italian virginal was either rectangular or polygonal in shape, with its keyboard projecting from the front of the case, and many of the surviving examples are sumptuously decorated with inlay or intarsia. Most Italian spinets are constructed as an irregular quadrilateral, but in the 17th century a new form was developed that more closely resembles a small harpsichord in having a bentside at the player’s right and a long straight back slanting away from him. The new form was copied throughout Europe and became the standard domestic keyboard instrument in England in the late 17th century.
In Flanders, early virginals were polygonal and resembled Italian ones except that their keyboards were inset rather than projecting. In the 1560s, at the same time as the thick-cased harpsichord is believed to have emerged, thick-cased rectangular virginals made their appearance. By the end of the 16th century, two distinct types existed. They can readily be distinguished by the position of their keyboards: off-centre either to the left or to the right in one of the long sides of the rectangular case. Virginals with the keyboard at the right were far more common. They produce a characteristic flutey tone because the placement of the keyboard causes the strings to be plucked near their centre for most of the instrument’s range. In virginals with the keyboard at the left, the strings are plucked off-centre except in the extreme treble, and the tone changes gradually from reedy in the bass, through full in the middle register, to flutey in the treble, much as on a harpsichord. Flemish builders produced virginals of both types in several sizes, the smaller ones being tuned to higher than normal pitches. They also made “double” virginals, consisting of a large virginal at normal pitch and a smaller one tuned an octave higher, which could be stored in a recess next to the keyboard of the larger instrument. The two virginals could be coupled together by placing the smaller instrument on top of the larger one.
The virginals made in England were of the left-keyboard type. Those made elsewhere in Europe (some having the keyboard centred) were also built with strings plucking off-centre.