Chapter XII
Innovations in the Fingering and Use of Keyed and Stringed Instruments.
At Weimar Bach had devoted a considerable part of his energies to the clavier, as his official duties demanded. The harpsichord, being deficient in expression and in duration of sound, required rapidity of movement and polyphonic writing to produce its due effects. Bach did what was possible, however, to use the legato style on it, and on the other hand introduced on the organ, as far as it would bear it, the rapid execution peculiar to the harpsichord.
The fingering of keyed instruments
Before his period the fingering of keyed instruments had not been reduced to any systematic method. Michael Prætorius in his Syntagma Musicum thinks the matter of no importance, and that if a note was produced clearly and distinctly it was a matter of indifference how it was done.[77]
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the necessity of some method seems to have dawned on musicians; up to that time the thumb and little finger had hardly been used, owing to their shortness. In order to play legato on the organ, the middle fingers were made to go under and over each other. Daniel Speer, in 1697, gives the following fingering for the scale of C (for convenience we alter it to English numbering):—