History of the pianoforte and pianoforte players

by Oskar Bie

The pieces in these collections are of three kinds. First, free fantasias,[18] such as were also composed for organ and lute under the name of prelude, preamble, or even toccata (here denoting simply piece). In their essence fugal they are broken and intersected by florid passages. In the second class, a canto fermo was taken from a church melody, and developed after the approved fashion in fugal or figured style. Or, finally—and this is the most usual case, and the style most appropriate to the clavier—a number of variations, or even groups of variations, if the theme has several sections, are formed into a series. The theme itself is a popular song or dance. Popular songs, as they swept uncounted through England and Scotland, are inexhaustible. Even to-day they retain their freshness. To the whole piece they impart their tense and melodious rhythm. The dances—in common time called Pavans, in triple, Galliards—are frequently named after noblemen,[19] and are in their variations adorned with the same encomiastic flourishes as the songs.

The clavier, for which these English musicians wrote their pieces, was of the kind called a virginal. The virginal was a peculiarly handy kind of spinet. It is not to be assumed that, after the quibbling and flattering fashion of the time, it was so called in compliment to the Maiden Queen. The name is older. Possibly it is due to the fact that the small size of the instrument made it specially suitable for young girls. We find scarcely any pictures of men sitting at the clavier. In Italy the same name was in vogue; but we are not here concerned with the whole history of the nomenclature of old keyed instruments. We are only so far interested in the history of the instrument as it forms the basis for the rise of the literature, i.e. style of composition, which concerns us in its human aspect. The histories of the clavier, those of Rimbault, Oskar Paul, and others, place the history of the instrument in the foreground. Even Weitzmann has appended to the last edition of his “History of Clavier-Playing and Clavier-Literature,” a comprehensive chapter on this subject. But the history of the clavier is a very complicated matter if we are tedious on it, and a very simple matter if, without becoming inexact, we are brief upon it.

It is a union of the harp with the mechanism of key-action. Harps, in which the strings are plucked with the plectrum, are in some form or other as old as music itself, and appear in the most various shapes in the first dawn of civilisation. The mechanism of the keyboard, which by means of an easy leverage adapted to the human fingers, gives the player control over the sounds of pipes or strings, is not quite so ancient, since it presumes a certain inventive capacity; but it is old enough to be equally beyond our chronological powers. In Europe we find keyed organs as early as the first centuries after Christ. The application of this action to stringed instruments was completed in the monochord. The monochord, an instrument well-known to the earliest theoretical musicians, was a board with a string stretched across it on which the intervals could be clearly marked and sounded by mathematical division: the half marking the octave above the pitch of the whole length of the string; the third part of it giving a fifth above that octave; the quarter part giving a fourth above that fifth, namely a note two octaves above the pitch of the whole string; the fifth part sounding a major third above the last named note, viz., a seventeenth above the pitch of the whole length; and so on.

The simple monochord developed itself after the tenth century in two directions, the musical and the technical. Its development was musical, inasmuch as three or four strings took the place of the one in order to produce a chord instead of a simple arpeggio; an aim which the church music attained by the multiplication of instruments sounding only one note each at a time. It was technical, inasmuch as, in place of the constant alteration of the “bridge” which divided the string, keys were introduced, which not only divided the string at the desired spot, by a flat metal pin (called “tangent” from its action in simply “touching” against the wire), but also caused it to sound. With twenty keys and only a few strings, of course it was necessary for several keys to divide the same string, and to sound it at different points in its length; whereby the simultaneous sounding of several notes was brought into the proper limits. Though thus really many-stringed, the instrument still retained its name of monochord. Gradually the number of keys increased, and in increasing proportion the number of strings, which still remained of equal length. About the year 1450, probably, the clavier attained this, its earliest form of the monochord. It served an educational purpose. Virdung, Abbot of Amberg, who in 1511 published his German “Music with Illustrations,” is our authority for the development of the monochord up to the first true clavier-form—that of the clavichord—which is nothing more nor less than the many-stringed many-keyed “monochord” which we have just described. The self-contradictory “mono” was rejected, and ‘clavi’ substituted (Lat. clavis, a key). The clavis is the key which in the organ admits the wind to the pipes, in the clavier sets the strings in motion.

From the Weimar “Wunderbuch,” a Clavichord of about 1440.
One of the oldest representations.

From the Weimar “Wunderbuch,” Primitive Spinet, of about 1440.
One of the oldest representations.