It is well to remember that the clavecin (French), the clavicembalo or gravicembalo (sometimes cembalo alone) and harpsichordo (Italian), and Clavicymbel or Flügel, meaning wing, from its shape (German) are all names for the harpsichord. All of these, as we will see by looking at the picture facing page [182] of Scarlatti at the gravicembalo, and that facing page [296] from Peter Preller’s Modern Music Master (London), showing a gentleman at the harpsichord, have the form of our modern concert piano. On the other hand, the clavicordo, clavichord, and clavier, spinet and virginal, are of the square, oblong type, like the old square piano that has almost gone out of use.
In all the instruments of the piano family, the place of the plectrum of the psaltery is taken by the “jack,” which was usually made of pear-tree. It rested on the back end of the key-lever with a movable tongue of holly kept in place by a bristle spring. Projecting at the end of the tongue at right angles was a thorn, or a spike of crowquill. As the key was pushed down, the jack was forced upwards and the quill brought to the string, which it plucked. The string was “damped” (softened) by a piece of cloth above the tongue. When the finger left the key, the key sprang upward to its own level and the jack fell. The jack, is exactly the principle of the plectrum of the psaltery adjusted to a key.
The hammer of the pianoforte is only the old hammer of the dulcimer made into a part of the action, or mechanism, of the piano.
The spinet was a keyed instrument with jacks. According to Dr. Burney it was a small harpsichord, or virginal, with one string to each note. Though many writers persistently say that the name was derived from the spine, or thorn, that plucked the strings, an old Italian book, published in Bologna in 1608, says: “The Spinetta received its name from its inventor, Giovanni Spinetti, of Venice.” One of his instruments is dated 1503. Very beautiful cases were made for these old Italian spinets which were sometimes painted by great artists.
Annibal Rosso made a new kind of spinet without a case, showing the soundboard with the wires lying flat like a harp. In England this Spinetta traversa was called the Stuart, Jacobean, or Queen Anne, Spinet, and also the couched harp. The spinet made its way from Italy to France, the Netherlands, Germany, and England.
The largest spinets were called the virginals. The word “virginal” appears in a book by Virdung, published in Basle in 1511, which contains a picture showing an instrument of the same shape as the clavichord and with the same arrangement of the keyboard.
According to Prætorius, who wrote about a hundred years later, the word “virginal” was used for a quadrangular instrument. However, from the time of Henry the Seventh to the close of the Seventeenth Century the word was used to describe all quilled keyboard instruments,—the harpsichord and trapeze-shaped spinet as well as the regular virginal of Virdung and Prætorius. Henry the Eighth was a fine performer on the virginal and so was his daughter Queen Elizabeth.
Facing page [292] is a typical virginal of the Seventeenth Century; and we can see from the performer just how the hands were placed on the keyboard. This is taken from the title-page of Playford’s Banquet of Music, published in London in 1688.
Very often in literature we find “a pair of virginals” mentioned; for example Pepys, describing the Great Fire of London in 1666, writes: “I observed that hardly one lighter, or boat, in three that had the goods of a house in but there was a pair of virginals in it.”