harpsichord family

harpsichord family (virginals, spinet, harpsichord). The harpsichord is a wing-shaped kbd. instr. in which the str. are plucked mechanically. It was developed during the 15th cent., the earliest surviving example (in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London) having been made in Bologna in 1521, but there are illustrated representations of the instr. dating from nearly a century earlier, and a reference in a Ger. poem of 1404 to the clavicimbalum, the earliest recorded use of the name from which the It. word clavicembalo is derived. The hpd. is fundamentally a mechanized psaltery. Each key operates a mechanical device known as the ‘jack’, equipped with a small leather or quill plectrum attached to a pivoted tongue. When the key is released the jack descends and, by positioning of a spring, the tongue pivots back, allowing the plectrum to pass the str. silently on its return. When the jack is back in its orig. position, a felt damper silences the vibration of the str. Very few contrasts of tone or dynamics are possible, variation in finger touch having little effect.

Italy was the home of the first important sch. of hpd. makers; at the end of the 16th cent., however, Antwerp became the centre of activity, particularly for the family of Ruckers. Their aim was to give the players some tonal contrast, a typical Ruckers single-manual instr. having a compass of four octaves from C and two sets of strings, one 8′ and one 4′. Hand stops in the right-hand side of the case brought one or both sets of jacks into contact with the strings. Ruckers also prod. a 2-manual hpd., the lower manual a 4th below the upper. From the 17th cent. to the end of the 18th, the hpd. was the indispensable supporting basis for continuo in almost every instr. combination, as well as being a popular domestic instr. With the development of the pf., the hpd. fell into semi-oblivion during the 19th cent., but in the 20th it has been revived both by modern composers, several of whom—e.g. Falla and McCabe—have written concs. for it, and in the authentic perf. of baroque mus. The Dolmetsch family played a major part in the revival, and there are several distinguished modern hpd. manufacturers. 20th-cent. virtuosi have incl. Wanda Landowska and Ralph Kirkpatrick.

virginal or virginals. This plucked kbd. instr. was first mentioned c.1460. The origin of the name is not, as is generally supposed, Eng. nor has it anything to do with Elizabeth I, but it is widely accepted that the name derives from the fact that young ladies were regularly depicted playing the instr. The main differences from the hpd. are in the oblong shape of the soundbox, the placing of the str. parallel to the kbd. instead of at right-angles, and the existence of 2 bridges. Sometimes one sees references to ‘double virginals’ or ‘a pair of virginals’. The origins of these terms are obscure, since a double-manual virginal was extremely rare; a likely explanation is that they referred to the instr.'s compass. Eng. virginal mus. of the 17th cent. is of major importance; colls. of it incl. the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Mye Ladye Nevells Booke, and Benjamin Cosyns Virginal Book. The earliest pubd. coll. was Parthenia (1611).

spinet. This resembles the virginals in having one str. to a note, but differs from it in being not rectangular but wing-shaped in an uneven 6 sides with the longest containing the kbd. It has a 4-octave compass. The str. either run roughly parallel to the kbd. as with the virginals, or diagonally in front of the player. (In the clavicytherium, however, a rarer form than that described above, the str. ran perpendicularly like those of an upright pf.) The spinet was in use from the later 15th cent. to the end of the 18th.