Nevertheless, much of the early history of classical music is without question tedious and boring, so let’s leave it there for a moment and explore another aspect of the genre, one without which, with one exception, classical music would not even exist, certainly not in the form we know it today and have done down through recent history.
Tools of the Composer’s Trade: The Musical Instruments that made Classical Music
That’s right: a composer could be the most accomplished in the world, able to write the most beautiful symphonies, concertos or operas, but if there were no musical instruments he would have been extremely restricted in how that music was to be disseminated to the world at large. While many composers wrote for an orchestra, the principle is the same. Without musical instruments to interpret his compositions, all we would have had would have been oral renditions, and they can get a bit tiresome.
So this section will celebrate, explain and relate the history of the major instruments that featured, and still do, in classical music. The violin. The cello. The organ. The oboe. The French horn. And of course, the piano. There’s a lot more than those few of course, but right now I’d like to start off with a distant relation of that last one, the piano. Its breathless, more impatient, hurried cousin, in fact; beloved of genteel ladies in the drawing rooms and parlours of the seventeenth, eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, it puts the rock in baroque, it’s
The Harpsichord
I’m not very musically inclined. When I tried to learn to play the keyboard I found it a challenge I really was not up to. So I’m not all that concerned really on the specifics, the workings of these instruments, how they operate or even how they’re played necessarily. I’m more interested in their history, their use in classical music, and how theyve helped to drive the advances (at the time) of the different ages of classical.
However, for those of you who are interested, leaving it to those much better suited to such explanations than I am, here’s an extract from the book
The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord, edited by Mark Kroll:
The keyboard or manual, of which harpsichords often have two, consists of a set of levers to be pressed down in front so that the far end rises. Sound is produced by plucking the string with a plectrum traditionally cut from bird quill but occasionally of leather or metal (or plastic in most modern instruments), protruding from a small wooden tongue held by an axle in an upright slip of wood called a jack, which rests on the far end of the key lever. When the key is depressed, the jack is raised and the plectrum plucks the string. When the key is released, the falling tongue swivels to pass around the string and is returned to its resting position by a spring. A small cloth flag held in a slot at the top of the jack comes to rest on the string to damp it. A jackrail over the jacks limits their upward motion.
Harpsichords have the familiar wing shape from which the form of the modern grand piano was derived (see Figures 1.1, 1.3, 1.4, 1.7, 1.9, and 1.10). They may have only one choir (set of strings) but most often two or three, occasionally more. In terminology derived from organs, an 8-foot choir is at “normal” pitch, which historically could range from about a tone lower than modern a1 = 440 Hz to three-quarters of a tone above (i.e., with a1 sounding from about 385 to 475 Hz). A 4-foot choir sounds an octave higher than an 8-foot; a 16-foot sounds an octave lower (the designation “foot” will occasionally be omitted, and only the number used, in some references to registration). Each choir is plucked by one set of jacks, or occasionally two with different plucking points. Strings plucked closer to their midpoints sound rounder or flutier, while those plucked closer to one end sound brighter or more nasal.
A harpsichord’s major structural components are the walls (spine, tail, bentside, and cheekpiece); the bottom closing the entire underside of the instrument; the wrestplank; the nameboard; the guides to hold the jacks; the belly rail; the soundboard and often a soundhole in which a decorative rose is placed; and reinforcing inner supporting ribs under the soundboard and internal bracing of the walls.2
A “stop” or “register” consisting of a set of jacks can be turned off by moving its guide slightly to the right or left so that the plectra miss the strings as they rise. In many instruments, when a stop is off, dampers do not touch their strings, which are free to resonate sympathetically. Guides can be moved directly by hand, by stop levers on the wrestplank or protruding through the nameboard, or, exceptionally in historical instruments, by pedals or knee levers. In two-manual or “double” harpsichords, there is usually a provision to combine the two keyboards or their stops. This can be done by a shove coupler, in which the entire upper-manual keyboard (or occasionally, the lower manual) can be shoved back or pulled forward about 7 mm. In the shoved-back position, the back ends of the upper key levers are pushed up by upright “dogs” fixed to the lower-manual key levers. Another method of coupling is the dogleg jack, the front portion of which rests on the upper-manual key while a leg extends down from the jack to rest on the lower-manual key. When a dogleg stop is engaged, it can be played from both keyboards. A choir of strings may be provided with a buff (“lute” or “harp”) stop, usually consisting of pads of soft leather that can be moved to touch the strings, thus eliciting a pizzicato tone.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s go back in time and see first of all how this instrument came to be. We’re told the earliest
reference to a harpsichord goes back to 1397 (whether the first model was built much before that or not I don’t know) and was of course based on the much older organ, both of which would later give birth to the modern piano. However one thing I did not know is that the design of the harpsichord derived from something called the psaltery (I’m assuming the “p” is silent, as in psalm, so it would be pronounced “salt-ery”?) which flourished in the Middle ages.
A psaltery was more of a harp than an organ, with metal strings and as opposed to a normal harp, often more than one string per tone, whatever that means. It dates all the way back to ancient Greece, so can surely be said to be one of the oldest musical instruments in existence, and seem often to be favoured by artists as the preferred instrument of angels. Because of the strings being made of metal (rather than catgut, as harp strings are) they were usually played with a plectrum, something all guitar players will be familiar with, rather than the fingers. Well, it would lend new meaning to the song “While My Guitar Gently Bleeds”, wouldn’t it? The psaltery gave birth in its turn to the likes of the dulcimer, and later the autoharp and zither, but overall, apart from some places like Mexico where it is still played, the psaltery died out in common usage around the early nineteenth century.
As we’ve come to learn by now, for the first say five hundred years of modern music, religion, worship and the Church were the ones making the music - and really, the only ones - so it’s no surprise to find that the first representation of a harpsichord is found on the altar of a church, in Germany, a place called Midden. It was originally called a clavicembalum (
clavi being the Greek for key, hence the later clavier) and would go on to have various types, such as virginals, spinets and clavicytherium. It’s generally accepted that the inventor of what would become the traditional harpsichord was an Austrian physician called Hermann Poll (1370 - 1401), born in Vienna (appropriate, considering what a locus of music that city was to become), and while our proof, such as it is, for this honour comes from one solitary reference in a letter, given that up to then the chances of being able to name anyone as the inventor of a musical instrument were about zero, it’s the first real evidence we have of anyone being credited with the invention of one.
On a visit to Padua in Italy, and on his way to study medicine at the University of Pavia, Poll happened to run into a man called Lodovico Lambertacci. We don’t know if there was any connection between the two - there probably wasn’t - but Lambertacci asked Poll to deliver a cup to his son, who was also a student at the college. Lambertacci wrote to his son that Poll was a “young man of good conversation and good manners, a very ingenious man and inventor of a musical instrument he calls the clavicembalum.” Now surely this could ordinarily be discounted as Lambertacci had, as far as we know, no direct knowledge nor evidence of this instrument; he had not seen it with his own eyes, probably did not even know what it was. But here’s the thing.
Hermann Poll was not just a doctor, he was an astrologer, and forced to build his own mechanical devices in order to follow the movements of the heavens for the horoscopes on which so much of his profession depended. This is because there was no expertise in making these machines, leading to Poll and his ilk being likened to the innovators of their day, all but engineers and craftsmen as well as men of learning. So Poll would definitely have known how to build a harpsichord. His being chosen as the personal physician to King Rupert, Holy Roman Emperor from 1400 - 1410, shows he was at the very least a leading figure in his profession, and had the respect both of his colleagues and the nobility.
There’s no happy ending to Poll’s story though, in fact it’s very gruesome. After becoming involved in a plot to kill his benefactor (why, we have no information) he was caught and sentenced to die by breaking on the wheel. If you’ve read my journal on serial killers you’ll know what this was, if not, then let me just tell you, it was not an easy, a pretty or a quick death. Poll was a mere thirty-two years old when he died, cutting short what would surely have been a glittering career.