Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/77

Rh PIANOFORTE 07 stopped vibration. Too much cloth would diminish the tone of this already feeble instrument, which gained the name of &quot; dumb spinet &quot; from its use. The cloth is accurately painted in the clavichord Rubens s St Cecilia (Dresden Gallery) plays upon, interesting as perhaps representing that painter s own instrument. The number of keys there shown is three octaves and a third, F to A, the same extent as in Handel s clavichord now in the museum at Maidstone (an Italian instrument dated 1726, and not fretted), but with a combined chromatic and short octave peculiarity in the lowest notes we shall have to refer to when we arrive at the spinet ; we pass it by as the only instance in the clavichord we have met with. The clavichord must have gone out of favour in Great Britain and the Netherlands early in the 16th century, before its expressive power, which is of the most tender and intimate quality, could have been, from the nature of the music played, observed, the more brilliant and elegant spinet being preferred to it. Like the other key board instruments it had no German name, and can hardly have been of German origin. Holbein, in his drawing of the family of Sir Thomas More, 1528, now at Basel, indi cates the place for &quot; Klavikordi und ander Seytinspill. &quot; But it remained longest in use in Germany until even the beginning of the present century. It was the favourite &quot; Klavier&quot; of the Bachs. Besides that of Handel already noticed, there are in existence clavichords the former possession of which is attributed to Mozart and Beethoven. The clavichord was obedient to a peculiarity of touch possible on no other keyboard instrument. This is described by C. P. Emmanuel Bach in his famous essay on playing and accompaniment, entitled Versuch uber die wahre Art das Klavier zu spielen (An Essay on the True Way to play Keyboard Instruments). It is the &quot; Bebung &quot; (trembling), a vibration in a melody note : the same nature as that frequently employed by violin players to heighten the expressive effect ; it was gained by a repeated move ment of the fleshy end of the finger while the key was still held down. The &quot; Bebung &quot; was indicated in the notation by dots over the note to be affected by it, perhaps showing how many times the note should be repeated. According to the practice of the Bachs, as handed down to us in the above mentioned essay, great smoothness of touch was required to play the clavichord in tune. As with the monochord, the means taken to produce the sound disturbed the accuracy of the string measurement by increasing tension, so that a key touched too firmly in the clavichord, by unduly raising the string, sharpened the pitch, an error in playing deprecated by C. P. Emmanuel Bach. This answers the assertion which has been made that J. S. Bach could not have been nice about tuning when he played from preference on an instrument of un certain intonation. The next instrument described by Virdung is the virginal (virginalis, proper for a girl), a parallelogram in shape, with a projecting keyboard and compass of keys the same as the clavichordium. Here we can trace deriva- ! tion from the psaltery in the sound-board covering the entire inner surface of the instrument and in the triangular ! disposition of the strings. The latter in Virdung s drawing has an impossible position with reference to the keyboard, which renders its reproduction as an illustration useless. But in the next drawing, the clavicimbalum, this is rectified, and the drawing, reversed on account of the key-board, can be accepted as roughly representing the instrument so called (fig. 6). There would be no difference between it and the : virginal were it not for a peculiarity of keyboard compass, ! which emphatically refers itself to the Italian &quot; spinetta, &quot; a name unnoticed by Virdung or by his countryman Arnold Schlick, who, in the same year 1511, published his Spiegel der Orgdmacher (&quot; Organ-builders Mirror&quot;), and Fio. 6. Virdung s Clavicimbalum (Spinet), 1511; reversed facsimile. named the clavichordium and clavicimbalum as familiar instruments. In the first place, the keyboard, beginning apparently with B natural, instead of F, makes the clavicimbalum smaller than the virginal, the strings in this arrangement being shorter ; in the next place it is almost certain that the Italian spinet compass, beginning appar-
 * ently upon a semitone, is identical with a &quot; short measure &quot;

or &quot; short octave &quot; organ compass, a very old keyboard arrangement, by which the lowest note, representing B, really sounded G, and C sharp in like manner A. The origin of this may be deduced from the psaltery and many representations of the regal, and its object appears to have been to obtain dominant basses for cadences, harmonious closes haying early been sought for as giving pleasure to the ear. We have found a hitherto unnoticed authority for this practice in Mersenne, who, in 1636, expressly describes it as occurring in his own spinet (espinette). He says the keyboards of the spinet and organ are the same. Now, in his Latin edition of the same work he renders espinette by clavicimbalum. We read (Harmonic Uni- verselle, Paris, 1636, liv. 3, p. 107) &quot; Its longest string [his spinet s] is little more than a foot in length between the two bridges. It has only thirty-one steps [&quot; marches &quot;] in its keyboard, and as many strings over its sound-board [he now refers to the illustration], so that there are five keys hidden on account of the perspective, that is to say, three naturals and two sharps [&quot;frintes,&quot; same as the Latin .flVfi], of which the first is cut into two (a divided sharp form ing two keys) ; but these sharps serve to go down to the third and fourth below the first step, C sol [tenor clef C], in order to go as far as the third octave, for the eighteen principal steps make but an eighteenth, that is to say, a fourth more than two octaves.&quot; The note we call F he, on his engraving, letters as C, indicating the pitch of a spinet of the second size, which the one described is not. The third and fourth, reached by his cut sharp, are conse quently the lower E and D ; or, to complete, as he says, the third octave, the lowest note might be F, but for that he would want the diatonic semitone B, which his spinet, according to his description, did not possess. 1 Mersenne s statement sufficiently proves, first, the use in spinets as well as in organs of what we now call &quot; short measure,&quot; and, secondly, the intention of cut sharps at the lower end of the keyboard to gain lower notes. He speaks of one string only to each note ; unlike the double and triple strung clavichord, those instruments, clavicimbalum, spinet, or virginal, derived from the psaltery, could only present one string to the mechanical plectrum which twanged it. As regards the kind of plectra earliest used we have no evidence. The little crow-quill points, Scaliger, who was born in 1484, ex- .ir A. J. Ellis (History of Musical Pitch, p. 318) sees the B in Mersenne s outline dir.gram.