How Music Developed / A Critical and Explanatory Account of the Growth of Modern Music

by W. J. Henderson

The reader will understand that, as the clavichord string ceased sounding as soon as the tangent was permitted to drop by lifting the finger from the key, the method of playing it was different from that employed for the piano. A hard blow was of no use; it only twanged the string disagreeably. Pressure, with its direct communication of the finger-touch to the string, was the secret of clavichord playing, and it was this which made the instrument so beautifully responsive to the thought of the performer. By forcing the pressure a little a sort of portamento effect could be obtained, and by causing the finger to shake up and down on the pressed key one could get a faint and pathetic tremolo from the vibrating string. This effect the Germans called "bebung," and it was one of the most familiar graces of clavichord playing. No one who has played upon a clavichord can fail to see how thoroughly the instrument works its way into the confidence and love of an artist, and there is no room for wonder that it was the intimate friend of the great Bach.

It is difficult to arrive at satisfactory conclusions from the statements of early writers in regard to instruments of the harpsichord family. Scaliger, born in 1484, says that Simius, who lived in the last period of Greek music, invented the Simicon. In this the tone was produced by tangents, which were subsequently armed with crow quills to pluck the strings. Adriano Banchieri, in his "Conclusioni nel suono dell' organo" (Boulogne, 1608), said that the spinet, one form of harpsichord, was invented by Giovanni Spinetti, and took its name from him. Banchieri had seen such an instrument with the inscription, "Joannes Spinetus Venetus fecit, A. D. 1503." But the fact that De Muris enumerated the instruments of his time without naming the harpsichord or any of its kindred, while Cersne distinctly mentioned it in 1404, shows that it was certainly much older than either Spinetti or Scaliger. Ottomarus Luscinius, a Benedictine monk, in his "Musurgia" (Strasburg, 1536), describes the virginal, a square instrument, of which the strings were plucked by plectra. Marin Mersenne, born at Oise, in 1588, in his "De Instrumentis Harmonicis," describes the clavicymbalum, which, according to his figure, is the same instrument as the spinet of Banchieri and the virginal of Luscinius.

There were, indeed, several varieties of shapes and many names for what were essentially the same instrument. Some were square, some were trapezoid, like our grand piano, and some were upright, but they all had the same plectral action and produced the same kind of tone. It will be readily understood that these instruments were incapable of gradations of power. No matter how forcibly or how gently the key was pressed, the elasticity of the plucking quill remained constant, and so produced just the same amount of twang from the string. Wooden uprights, called jacks, were placed at the inner ends of the key levers, where the tangents were in clavichords, and the quills ran through them. In some instruments pieces of hard leather were used instead of quills. Bach was acquainted with the harpsichord, though he always preferred the clavichord. Handel, Scarlatti, and Mozart were all great harpsichord performers. The instrument held its favor among musicians for a considerable time after the introduction of the piano, to which it finally had to yield the supremacy.

The first famous harpsichord builder was Johannes Baffo, Venice, 1574, but the most celebrated makers were: Hans Ruckers, Antwerp, 1575; Andreas Ruckers, his son, 1614, Tschudi and Kirkman, the English builders of Handel's day. Kirkman built harpsichords with two banks of keys and several sets of strings, which were controlled by stops similar to those of an organ. This was an attempt to overcome the dynamic monotony of the instrument, but I can testify from careful trial of the fine Kirkman harpsichords in the Steinert collection that the attempt was not a brilliant success. You can get an approximate idea of the sound of a harpsichord by plucking the strings of a modern piano with the plectrum of a mandolin, or with a common quill toothpick.

The invention which overthrew the clavichord and the harpsichord and brought into existence the piano was the hammer action. For years the problem of applying the keyboard to the principle of the dulcimer, already explained, had occupied the minds of instrument builders. The solution was the work of Bartolomeo Cristofori, born at Padua, May 4, 1653, and it was made public in 1711. Two others claimed the honor: Gottfried Silbermann and Christopher G. Schröter. In 1726 Silbermann made two pianos and showed them to Bach, who condemned them because of their heavy touch and the weakness of their trebles. Silbermann was discouraged, but according to Agricola, a contemporary writer, he worked at improvements upon his instruments, and sold one of them to Frederick the Great, in whose music room it stood till 1880. It was then examined by Bechstein, the leading German piano maker of today, who found that it contained the Cristofori action. The priority of Cristofori's claims is established by an article written by Scipione Maffei and printed in the "Giornale dei Litterati d'Italia," in 1711, with a diagram of the inventor's hammer action. A translation of Maffei's article will be found in Rimbault's "The Pianoforte." (London, 1860.) It was also published in German in Matheson's "Musikalische Kritik," in Hamburg, 1725, so that the contemporaries of Silbermann and Schröter ought to have known of Cristofori's work. Indeed, Schröter's claim was made by himself in a letter written in 1738, which appears to have been evoked by irritation at Cristofori's glory.

It should be noted here that in the letters of an instrument maker named Paliarino, written in 1598, the instrument "piano e forte" is twice mentioned. It has been conjectured, and probably rightly, that this was a harpsichord with contrivances for loud and soft effects, for it is unlikely that even a rude hammer action could have been in existence more than a century before Cristofori's invention. It is, however, probable that some attempts were made before his, for his was altogether too satisfactory to have been anything but the result of a development. Nevertheless it was the first hammer action of permanent value, and its essential principles are employed in the finest actions of today. Therefore Cristofori fairly deserves the honor of inventing the piano. The instrument, however, did not gain great favor in Italy, owing to the inability of the harpsichord players to acquire the right touch, and it soon fell into disuse. Silbermann, however, following the details of Maffei's letter before-mentioned, built pianos, and other German makers, notably Friederici of Gera, who is said to have made the first square piano, followed his lead. At least as early as 1766 Johannes Zumpe built square pianos in England.

It would fill a volume to narrate the history of the successive steps in the development of the piano since the days of Zumpe. It is possible, however, to point out a few of the important steps. The famous maker, John Andrew Stein, Augsburg, was a pupil of Silbermann, and was born in 1728. He left a son, Andrew, also a maker, and a daughter, Nanette, who became Mrs. Streicher, and was the head of a great piano house in Vienna. The elder Stein's pianos were admired by Mozart, while Nanette Streicher's pianos were used by Beethoven. Before the time of the elder Stein the forte and piano effects, which gave the instrument its name, and which were then as now, produced by the action of the dampers, were obtained by operating "two iron springs, ornamented with copper knobs, in that part of the chest nearest the bass. In order to move these springs it was necessary that the player should use his left hand, and consequently he was obliged for a moment to quit the keyboard. Stein improved these springs by making them act by means of knobs placed against the knees." The modern pedals are first found in John Broadwood's patent of 1783. The pedals have been much improved since that time, and have played a very conspicuous part in the development of piano playing and of piano music. The "loud" pedal, as it is commonly called, is less used by pianists to gain force than to prolong sound, which before its invention could only be done by keeping the keys pressed down. With the dampers raised by the "loud" pedal, the strings struck continue to vibrate, while the fingers are free to go on striking other keys. This enables pianists to do far more than they could in early times in the way of producing sustained tones and modulations of harmony, and hence composers for the instrument are able to write passages which would formerly have been impossible.

Double, and even triple, stringing had been introduced in clavichords, and was continued in pianos. The elder Stein invented the shifting of the keyboard which causes the hammer to strike only one string instead of three. This contrivance is used by some of the best makers of the present day. Stein also improved the "escapement," the arrangement by which the hammer falls back the instant it has struck the string, and this, with other features of the action, was further developed by Streicher, so that the Viennese pianos became famous for the extreme lightness of their touch, and music written by composers in that part of the world was designed to meet this quality. The English pianos, meanwhile, were built with heavier strings and a deeper fall of the hammer, so that greater sonority was attainable, and composers wrote for them bold passages in successions of heavy chords, which would have gone for nothing on a Viennese piano. At the very outset Cristofori had to shift the pins to which the wires were attached, from the soundboard, which would not stand the strain, to a separate rail. It became necessary to brace the whole interior with steel arches, of whose inventor there is no record, but Broadwood was the first to introduce the method now employed. Sebastien Érard, a celebrated French maker, introduced many improvements in the action and devised what was called then the "celeste" pedal, by which the hammers struck a strip of leather interposed between them and the strings. The leather is now replaced by felt. The iron frame, now replaced by steel and found in all fine pianos, was invented by Alpheus Babcock of Boston in 1825. Frederick W. C. Bechstein, of Berlin, in 1855 combined iron frames and the powerful English action in his instruments, and took a commanding position. The upright piano was patented Feb. 12, 1800, by John Isaac Hawkins of Philadelphia. Subsequent developments in the piano have been of too wide a range to be mentioned in the space at my command, and at any rate have all been in the nature of improvements,—highly important, indeed, but without radical departure from the fundamental features of the instruments.

A few words, however, must be said on the subject of equal temperament. Previous to the time of Bach and Jean Philippe Rameau, the scale of the piano was arranged according to the laws of acoustics. It is impossible to enter into this fully, but the result was that a piano could not be tuned to play in all the twenty-four keys. This is difficult to explain, but I shall endeavor to make it clear. The pitch of a tone is determined by the number of vibrations it makes in a second, and it follows that there must be a regular ratio of increase in the number of vibrations of the notes of a scale as we proceed upward. This establishes the scientific basis of the scale. Now, any one who is at all acquainted with the piano knows that the same black key is struck to produce either C sharp or D flat. But this has been true only since Bach's day. Previous to that time instruments were timed according to the scientific laws, and by these we find that the C of the third octave has 256 vibrations, the C sharp 266.66, and the D flat 276.48. Thus D flat is a higher note than C sharp, and scientifically requires a differently tuned string and a separate key. The same trouble confronts us with most other notes, so that "theory requires no less than seventy-two keys to the octave in order that the musician may have complete command over all the keys employed in modern music."

In order to reduce the octave to twelve semitones with twelve keys and to make the sharps and flats agree, as they do now, the system of equal temperament deliberately puts out of tune every interval except the octave. By slightly lowering some and raising others, the present scale was obtained. Its advantage is that it makes it practicable to play in all twenty-four keys, and because of the identity of the sharps and flats it becomes easy to modulate from one key to another. For instance, C sharp, which is the distinguishing note of the scale of D major, is also D flat, and thus it becomes easy to modulate from D to D flat, which leads to G flat, a very remote key. This gives the modern composer immense freedom of style, and adds greatly to the key complexity of music, whereas, before the adoption of the system of equal temperament, composers had to confine themselves to a few closely related keys.