The first record we find of a dulcimer is a stone picture near Nineveh, of an Assyrian king in 667 B.C., celebrating a triumphal procession. This dulcimer, suspended from the neck of the player, is being struck with a stick in his right hand, while his left palm on the string checks the tone. Here we have the first stringed instrument which was hammered and muffled, two important elements in the piano.
In Persia the dulcimer was called the santir and is still used under different names in the Orient and other places. In Greece and other countries it was called the psalterion, and in Italy, the dolcimelo. Later, the Germans had a sort of dulcimer called the Hackbrett, probably because it was “hacked” as the butcher hacks meat! We see the dulcimer in many shapes according to the fancy of the people who use it. The word comes from dulce—the Latin for “sweet” and melos—the Greek for “melody.”
As people grew wiser and more musical, they padded their hammers or mallets; this gave the idea for the padded hammer of the piano for checking the tone as our Ninevehan did with his left palm.
Should you ever listen to a gypsy band, you will hear the dulcimer or cembalo.
The Keyboard
The third element in the making of the piano is the keyboard.
It is evident that the piano keyboard and the organ keyboard are practically the same. The water organs of the Greeks and Romans had keyboards, but as the Christian Church forbade the use of organs as sacrilegious, keyboards were lost for almost a thousand years.
The keyboard seems to have developed from the Greek monochord used in the Middle Ages to give the pitch in convent singing. It was tuned with a movable bridge or fret pushed back and forth under the strings and fingers. First it was stretched with weights hung at one end. It was a simple matter to add strings to produce more tones, later tuning pins were added and finally a keyboard. This was the whole principle of the clavichord. (We might say that the monochord and dulcimer are the Adam and Eve of the pianoforte family.)
The Clavichord
In the clavichord, each key drove a metal tangent against a string and was held there as was the bridge of the monochord. The tone was dependent on the place where the tangent struck. The string vibrated on one side of the tangent, but the other part of the string was deadened by a strip of cloth. The strings were about the same length and often two or three keys operated the same string so that it was possible to make a very small instrument. In the 16th century, it usually had twenty keys; in the 18th century, four octaves or fifty keys, but of course there were less than fifty strings! Later, every key had its own string and these were called bundfrei or unfretted clavichords, while the others were called gebunden or fretted. The clavichord was usually small enough to carry under the arm, although sometimes it was made with legs. Should you be in New York you must see the collection of beautifully ornamented clavichords and harpsichords at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Crosby Brown Collection.