Harpsichord

• 1. Introduction

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  Press a key on a harpsichord as hard as you like, and the note comes out at exactly the same volume every time. This is the strange truth at the heart of an instrument that ruled European music for centuries. Inside the case, depressing a key raises its back end, which lifts a thin strip of wood called a jack. On that jack sits a small plectrum of quill or plastic, and it plucks a single string. There are no hammers and no way to play louder by pressing harder. Yet from this one limitation came an instrument of astonishing variety, with multiple keyboards, ranks of strings tuned octaves apart, and cases painted like fine furniture. How did a plucking machine become the backbone of Baroque music? Why did it vanish for most of the 19th century, only to return in the 20th? And how do builders coax richer tone from strings they cannot strike harder? The answers lie in wood, wire, and a few clever pieces of swiveling quill.

• 2. The Plucking Action

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  The jack is the part that does the real work, a thin rectangular piece of wood standing upright on the end of the keylever. When the front of a key is pressed, the back rises, the jack lifts, and a plectrum jutting out almost horizontally plucks the string. The keylever itself is a simple pivot, rocking on a balance pin that passes through a hole drilled through it. The registers, two long strips of wood with rectangular mortises, hold each jack in the precise location needed to meet its string.

  Releasing the key reveals the cleverest trick in the whole design. The jack falls back down under its own weight, and the plectrum must pass the string again without sounding it. This works because the plectrum sits in a tongue attached to the jack with a pivot and a spring. The bottom surface of the plectrum is cut at a slant, so when the descending plectrum touches the string from above, that angle pushes the tongue backward and lets it slip past.

  The upward motion of the jack has to be stopped too, or it would fly loose. A jackrail, covered with soft felt to muffle the impact, halts it at the top of its travel. When the jack arrives fully lowered, a felt damper touches the string and the note ceases. Historically the plectra were cut from bird quill or leather, while many modern instruments use plastics such as delrin or celcon.

• 3. Strings And Soundboard

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  Each string winds around a tuning pin, also called a wrest pin, held tightly in a hole drilled in the pinblock. A wrench or tuning hammer rotates the pin to adjust tension until the pitch is correct. From there the string passes over the nut, a sharp hardwood edge attached to the wrestplank. The length of string beyond the nut is the part that vibrates and makes the sound.

  The bridge marks the other end of that vibrating length, a second sharp hardwood edge with a vertical metal pin to fix the string's position. The bridge rests on the soundboard, a thin panel usually of spruce, fir, or in some Italian harpsichords cypress. Without that soundboard transmitting the vibrations into the air, the strings would produce only a very feeble sound. At its far end each string is looped over a hitchpin that secures it to the case.

  Tuning pitch is often taken as A4 equal to 415 hertz, roughly a semitone below the modern concert standard of 440. French baroque repertoire is often performed lower still, at about 392 hertz. The traditional range for a five-octave instrument runs from F1 to F6, and the harpsichord reads from the bass clef. Some modern keyboards even shift sideways to align with strings at either 415 or 440 hertz.

• 4. Choirs And Manuals

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  Many harpsichords carry more than one string per note, and these extra sets are called choirs. Multiple choirs give the player two powers at once: varying volume and varying tonal quality. Plucking a string closer to the nut emphasizes the higher harmonics and yields a nasal sound, so different choirs can be designed with distinct voices. The mechanism that selects between them is called a stop, borrowing the term from pipe organs.

  Pitch among the choirs is also described in organ language. Strings at eight-foot pitch sound at the normal expected pitch, four-foot strings sound an octave higher, a sixteen-foot choir sounds an octave lower, and a rare two-foot choir sounds two octaves up. A particularly vivid effect comes when two strings an octave apart are plucked together. The ear does not hear two pitches but one, the lower pitch enriched by the strength in the upper harmonics of the higher string. The full set of choirs in an instrument is called its disposition.

  A second keyboard multiplies the options, since each manual can control a different set of strings. The French shove coupler is the most flexible, sliding the lower manual forward and backward so that dogs on its upper surface engage the keys above. The English dogleg jack system needs no coupler at all, using jacks bent so either keyboard can play them. A stop handle can swap the dogleg row for a lute stop, which imitates the gentle sound of a plucked lute. Multiple manuals, it turns out, were not originally meant for choosing strings but for transposing the instrument into different keys.

• 5. Quirks Of The Keyboard

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  Some early harpsichords used a short octave in the lowest register, exploiting a quirk of early music. The low notes F and G are seldom needed there, because deep bass notes usually form the root of a chord and F and G chords were rare at the time. Low C and D, by contrast, are roots of very common chords and would be sorely missed. So builders tuned the lowest keys to sound those useful notes instead, a layout scholars write as C/E, meaning the lowest note is a C played on a key that would normally sound E. Another arrangement, G/B, tuned the apparent lowest key B down to G.

  The buff stop offered another way to reshape the tone. It brings a strip of buff leather or other material into contact with the strings, muting them to suggest a plucked lute, and is usually worked by an independent lever. Keyboards themselves could surprise the eye as well as the ear. Builders often reversed the modern pattern, fitting white sharps and black naturals rather than the white naturals and black sharps of today's piano.

  A few instruments pushed the keyboard into outright experiment. The archicembalo, built in the 16th century, had an unusual layout designed for variant tuning systems demanded by theory and composition. More common were instruments with split sharps, also meant to accommodate the tunings of the time. If a tuning other than equal temperament is used, a shifting keyboard must be retuned each time it moves.

• 6. The Case As Furniture

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  The wooden case holds every important structural member in place: pinblock, soundboard, hitchpins, keyboard, and the jack action. It carries a solid bottom and internal bracing so it will not warp under the tension of the strings. Italian instruments were often light in construction, while heavier building marks the later Flemish instruments and those derived from them. A large harpsichord standing alone on legs is, in a sense, a piece of furniture, styled to match the cabinetry of its place and period.

  Early Italian instruments were treated more like a violin. So light that they were kept in a protective outer case, they were taken out and set on a table to play, and until the late 18th century people usually played standing up. An intermediate stage even existed called the false inner-outer, built for purely aesthetic reasons to look as though an outer case held an inner one in the old style.

  Decoration ran from plain to lavish. Cases were painted in bright colors, especially in 18th-century France, or covered with elaborate wood veneer in England, or adorned with sculptural moldings and knobs in Italy. Soundboards bore paintings of flowers and animals, and in expensive instruments, full-scale paintings of the kind usually done on canvas. The scholar Sheridan Germann grew so expert that she could pin down the particular anonymous artists who worked with particular builders.

• 7. Smaller Cousins

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  The term harpsichord covers a whole family of plucked-keyboard instruments, and the virginal is the simplest. It is a smaller rectangular form with only one string per note, its strings running parallel to a keyboard set on the long side of the case. The spinet sets its strings at an angle, usually about 30 degrees, with the jacks fitted into the larger gaps between paired strings and facing in opposite directions. The English diarist Samuel Pepys mentions his tryangle several times; this was not the percussion instrument we call a triangle but a name for octave-pitched spinets, which were triangular in shape.

  The clavicytherium stands its soundboard and strings vertically facing the player, the same space-saving idea as an upright piano. Because its jacks move horizontally without the help of gravity, its action is more complex than that of other harpsichords. The ottavino, a small spinet or virginal at four-foot pitch, stayed popular as a domestic instrument in Italy until the 19th century. In the Low Countries an ottavino was tucked in a cubby under the soundboard of an eight-foot virginal, then lifted onto the larger instrument to form a mother-and-child or double virginal.

  A few variants pushed at the edges of practicality. The pedal harpsichord added a foot-operated keyboard triggering the lowest strings, and though no example survives from the 18th century or before, the writer Adlung described one in 1758. Before Keith Hill introduced his design in 1980, most were built on 19th-century pedal-piano patterns and served mainly as practice instruments for organists. The musician E. Power Biggs demonstrated the pedal harpsichord on several albums. The folding harpsichord, meanwhile, simply folded up to make travel easier.

• 8. Fall And Revival

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  Around the year 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori built the first piano, and the harpsichord's days were numbered. In the piano the strings are struck with hammers rather than plucked, which lets the player control the volume of each note. As compositional style changed, those expressive nuances came to be valued more and more. By the late 18th century the piano, then often called the fortepiano, had largely supplanted the older instrument. The harpsichord, now considered obsolete, almost disappeared for most of the 19th century, surviving mainly in opera to accompany recitative, though even there the piano sometimes displaced it.

  The 20th century brought it back. Early revival instruments leaned on piano technology, with heavy strings and metal frames. Under the influence of Arnold Dolmetsch, the harpsichordists Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, who lived from 1872 to 1951, and in France Wanda Landowska, who lived from 1879 to 1959, stood at the forefront of the instrument's renaissance. Composers returned to it as well: Francis Poulenc wrote his Concert champetre between 1927 and 1928, Manuel de Falla composed a concerto, and Elliott Carter scored his Double Concerto for harpsichord, piano, and two chamber orchestras.

  A deeper change in building arrived in the middle of the century. Builders such as Frank Hubbard, William Dowd, and Martin Skowroneck set out to re-establish the building traditions of the Baroque period rather than borrow from the piano. The great bulk of the standard repertoire was, after all, written during the instrument's first flowering. Domenico Scarlatti, who lived from 1685 to 1757, left a series of 555 harpsichord sonatas waiting for instruments built the old way to play them.