Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/75

Rh PIANOFOR T E 10th century the &quot; organum &quot; arose, an elementary system of accompaniment to the voice, consisting o* fourths and octaves below the melody and moving with it; and the organ, the earliest keyed instrument, was, in the first instance, the rude embodiment of this idea and convenient means for its expression. There was as yet no keyboard of balanced key levers; batons were drawn out like modern draw-stops, to admit the compressed air necessary to make the pipes sound. About the same time arose a large stringed instrument, the organistrum, the parent of the now vulgar hurdy-gurdy; as the organ needed a blower as well as an organist, so the player of the organistrum required a handle-turner, by whose aid the three strings of the instrument were made to sound simultaneously upon a wheel, and, according to the well-known sculptured relief of St George de Boscherville, one string was manipulated by means of a row of stoppers or tangents pressed inwards to produce the notes. The other strings were drones, analogous to the drones of the bagpipes, and differing in effect from the changing &quot; organum &quot; of the organ. In the llth century, the epoch of Guido d Arezzo, to whom the beginning of musical notation is attributed, the Pythagorean monochord, with its shifting bridge, was used in the singing schools to teach the intervals of the plain-song of the church. The practical necessity, not merely to demonstrate the proportionate relations of the intervals, but also to initiate pupils into the different grada tions of the church tones, had soon after Guido s time brought into use quadni] ilex-fashioned monochords, which were constructed with scales, analogous to the modern practice with thermometers which are made to show both Reaumur and Centigrade, so that four lines indicated as many authentic and as many plagal tones. This arrange ment found great acceptance, for Aribo, writing about fifty years after Guido, says that few monochords were to be found without it. Had the clavichord then been known, this make -shift contrivance would not have been used. Aribo strenuously endeavoured to im prove it, and &quot; by the grace t f God &quot; invented a monochoi d measure which, on account of the rapidity of the leaps he could make with it, he named a wild-goat (caprea). Jean de Muris (Musica Speculativa, 1323) teaches how true relations may be found by a single- string monochord, but recom mends a four-stringed one, pro perly a tetrachord, to gain a knowledge of unfamiliar inter vals. He describes the musical instruments known in his time, but does not mention the clavi chord or monochord with keys, which could not have been then FIG. I. Earliest existing represen- im-pnrprl PprVmi^ nnp of flip fatlon of a Keyed Stringed Instru- ea. remaps One the m ent from St Mary s, Shrewsbury earliest forms Of SUcll an illStrU- (primitive Clavichord). Before , ., . , 1460. Drawn by Miss Edith Lloyd. ment, in which stoppers or tan gents had been adopted from the organistrum, is shown in fig. 1, from a wood carving of a vicar choral or organist, preserved in St Mary s Church, Shrewsbury. The latest date to which this interesting figure may be attributed is 1460, but the conventional representation shows that the instrument was then already of a past fashion, although perhaps still retained in use and familiar to the carver. A keyboard of balanced keys may have been first intro duced in the little portable organ known as the regal so often represented in old carvings, paintings, and stained windows. It derived its name regal from the rule (reyula] or graduated scale of keys, and its use was to give the singers in religious processions the note or pitch. The only instrument of this kind known to exist in the United Kingdom is at Blair Athole, and it bears the very- late date of 1630. The Brussels regal may be as modern. These are instances of how long a some-time admired musical instrument may remain in use after its first inten tion is forgotten. We attribute the adaptation of the narrow regal keyboard to what was still called the mono- chord, but was now a complex of monochords over one resonance board, to the latter half of the 14th century; it was accomplished by the substitution of tangents fixed in the further ends of the balanced keys for the movable bridges of the monochord or such stoppers as are shown in the Shrewsbury carving. Thus the monochordium or &quot; payre of monochordis &quot; became the clavichordium or &quot; payre of clavichordis &quot; pair being applied, in the old sense of a &quot; pair of steps,&quot; to a series of degrees. This use of the word to imply gradation was common in England to all keyed instruments; thus we read, in the Tudor period and later, of a pair of regals, organs, or virginals. The earliest known record of the clavichord occurs in some rules of the minnesingers, dated 1404, preserved at Vienna, The monochord is named with it, showing a differentiation of these instruments, and of them from the clavicymbalum, the keyed cymbal, cembalo (Italian), or psaltery. From this we learn that a keyboard had been thus early adapted to that favourite mediaeval stringed instrument, the &quot; cembalo &quot; of Boccaccio, the &quot; sautrie &quot; of Chaucer. There were two forms of the psaltery: (l)the trapeze, one of the oldest representations of which is to be found in Orcagna s famous Trionfo della Morte in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and another by the same painter in the National Gallery, London; and (2) the contemporary &quot; testa di porco,&quot; the pig s head, which was of triangular shape as the name suggests. The trapeze psaltery was strung horizontally, the &quot; istromento di porco &quot; either hori zontally or vertically, the notes, as in the common dul cimer, being in groups of three or four unisons. In these differences of form and stringing we see the cause of the ultimate differentiation of the spinet and harpsichord. The compass of the psalteries was nearly that of Guido s scale; but, according to Mersenne, the lowest interval was a fourth, G to C, which is worthy of notice as anticipating the later &quot; short measure &quot; of the spinet and organ. The simplicity of the clavichord inclines us to place it, in order of time, before the clavicymbalum or clavicembalo : but we do not know how the sounds of the latter were at first excited. There is an indication as to its early form to be seen in the church of the Certosa near Pavia, which compares in probable date with the Shrewsbury example. We quote the reference to it from Dr Ambros s History of Music. He says a carving represents King David as hold ing an &quot; istromento di porco &quot; which has eight strings and as many keys lying parallel to them; he touches the keys with the right hand and damps the strings with the left. The attribution of archaism applies with equal force to this carving as to the Shrewsbury one, for when the monastery of Certosa was built chromatic keyboards, which imply a considerable advance, were already in use. There is an authentic representation of a chromatic keyboard, painted not later than 1426, in the St Cecilia panel (now at Berlin) of the famous Adoration of the Lamb by the Van Eycks. The instrument depicted is a positive organ, and it is interesting to notice in this realistic painting that the keys are evidently boxwood as in the Italian spinets of later date, and that the angel plays a common chord A with the right hand, F and C with the left. But diatonic organs XIX. 9