keyboard instrument

keyboard instrument

▪ music
Introduction

      any musical instrument on which different notes can be sounded by pressing a series of keys, push buttons, or parallel levers. In nearly all cases in Western music the keys correspond to consecutive notes in the chromatic scale, and they run from the bass at the left to the treble at the right.

      This large group of instruments has assumed great importance because the keyboard enables a performer to play many notes at once as well as in close succession. This versatility enables the modern pianist or organist to play, in transcription, any work of Western music, whether it involves chordal harmonies, independent contrapuntal parts, or only a single melody. The capabilities of keyboard instruments have influenced the composition of music for other media, because virtually every major composer from William Byrd (c. 1543–1623) to Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and beyond has been at least an accomplished keyboard performer, if not a renowned virtuoso. The evolution of an idiomatic keyboard compositional style has been linked to technological and theoretical developments within Western urban culture; keyboard instruments are not normally associated with folk music, and only during the 20th century has their use spread widely outside the Western world.

 In its broadest sense, the term keyboard instrument may be applied to any instrument equipped with a keyboard and thus may be used to refer to accordions, percussion instruments such as the celesta and the carillon, and many electronic instruments—for example, the Moog synthesizer (see photograph—>) and the Ondes Martenot. In a narrower sense, such as is employed in this discussion, the term is restricted to instruments in which sound is produced from strings, whether by plucking, striking, or rubbing, or from pipes or reeds.

Development of the keyboard

Evolution from early forms
      Long before the appearance of the first stringed keyboard instruments in the 14th century, the keyboard was developed and applied to the organ. A keyboard of the kind familiar today—a series of parallel levers hinged or pivoted so that they can be pushed down by the fingers—first appeared on the hydraulus (hydraulis), an organ probably invented in Alexandria in the late 3rd century BC. This type of keyboard seems to have disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the organs of the early Middle Ages generally had sliders that were pulled out to sound different notes; some may have had keys that turned like the key for a lock. Keys of the last type were certainly used on the organistrum, a large medieval hurdy-gurdy operated by two players: one turned a crank rotating a wheel that rubbed against one or more strings to make them sound, while the other produced different notes by turning the key-shaped levers that stopped the strings at various points (much as guitar strings are stopped against the fingerboard).

      Some small portable organs had push buttons instead of keys as late as the 1440s, but a keyboard resembling the modern type existed in the 14th century, although the arrangement of naturals and sharps (corresponding to the white and black keys on the modern piano) was only gradually standardized. The arrangement of the keys depended in part on the music played and partly on the current state of musical theory. Thus, early keyboards are reported with only a single raised key in each octave (B♭), and there were organs that had both B and B♭ as “natural” keys, with C♯, D♯, F♯, and G♯ as raised keys. The colours of the keys—white for naturals and black for sharps—became standardized much later, about 1800, depending on fashion or on the relative cost of such materials as bone, ivory, or boxwood for the “white” keys and stained hardwood or ebony for the “black” keys. Flemish instruments had bone naturals and oak sharps by 1580; French and German instruments had ebony or fruitwood naturals and bone or ivory sharps until the 1790s.

Special key arrangements
The short octave
      Even after the present arrangement of five raised keys and seven natural keys per octave had become standard in the 15th century, two exceptions existed. The first of these—the “short octave”—concerned only the lowest octave at the bass end of the keyboard. In the short octave, not all keys actually sounded notes of the expected pitch; their respective strings were tuned to lower notes. In the earlier form, the keyboard apparently started on E, but the string for this key was tuned to the C below. The apparent F♯ was tuned to D and the G♯ to E, so that the notes of the entire octave from C to c were encompassed within an apparent key span of only E to c. With this arrangement C♯, E♭, F♯, and G♯ were not available in the bass octave, but these notes were rarely required in the bass in music of this period. When the missing F♯ and G♯ later became necessary, short-octave keyboards were made with these keys divided into two parts, the fronts sounding D and E and the back parts sounding F♯ and G♯. Later still, a second short octave was developed in which the keyboard apparently began on low B. This key actually sounded the G below, and the apparent C♯ and E♭ were tuned to A and B (or B♭). Eventually, as musical styles changed, the two retuned sharps were divided in this arrangement as well, providing C♯ (or sometimes B♭) and E♭ at the back of these keys while retaining A and B at the front.

Divided sharps
      The second type of exceptional keyboard arrangement was originally required by the so-called meantone (meantone temperament) tuning system generally used in the 16th–18th centuries. Meantone tuning provided significantly purer tuning for a relatively small number of tonalities than does equal temperament, the system now in use (in which all tonalities are somewhat out of tune; see tuning and temperament), but only at the expense of restricting the usefulness of the remaining tonalities. This characteristic arose because in meantone tuning each of the raised keys could be used in only one way: for example, if the key between D and E was tuned to E♭, it could not be used as D♯ without retuning. One solution was to build keyboards with the raised keys divided, the front half of the key sounding the appropriate sharp while the back half sounded the equivalent flat. The keys most commonly divided were A♭/G♯, E♭/D♯, and B♭/A♯. Instruments with up to three divided keys in each octave were commonly made in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in Italy. Since the 1590s still more complicated keyboards have been built, permitting even more refined tunings; some in the 19th century had more than 50 keys per octave. Instruments have also been made with the octave divided into 24 rather than 12 equal parts to permit playing music utilizing quarter-tone intervals.

Keyboard size and range
      Although some early organs had very wide keys that could be played only with the fists, stringed keyboard instruments seem always to have had natural keys no more than an inch wide, yielding an octave span of 7 inches (17.8 centimetres). The octave span on the modern piano is about 6 1/2 inches (16.5 centimetres), much the same as on Flemish and Italian harpsichords of the 16th–18th centuries, whereas that of English keyboards was generally 6 3/8 inches (16.2 centimetres). On most French and German instruments of the 18th century, the octave span was even narrower (6 1/4 inches [15.9 centimetres]), permitting the playing of tenths—such as C to the second E above—by a hand of average size.

      The range of the keyboard gradually expanded from a single octave for some early organs to 2 1/2 or 3 octaves in the 15th century and 4 or 4 1/2 octaves in the 16th century. By the early 18th century, except in Italy and Spain, a range of five octaves was common: from the F below low C to the F above high C (F′ to f‴). This range began to be expanded only at the very end of the century, usually upward toward c″″ (C above high C) but occasionally downward to C′ (C below low C). A few pianos with a range of six octaves (from C′ to c″″) were built before 1800, and Beethoven's Hammerclavier Sonata, Opus 106 (completed 1818), requires 6 1/2 octaves from C′ to f″″. A seven-octave range was reached before 1830, and the usual modern piano keyboard consisting of 88 keys provides the only slightly greater range of seven octaves and a third, from A″ to c″″′.

      The earliest known reference to a stringed keyboard instrument dates from 1360, when an instrument called the eschiquier was mentioned in account books of John II the Good, king of France. The eschiquier was described in 1388 as “resembling an organ that sounds by means of strings.” There exists no more complete description of the eschiquier, however, and it is not known whether the instrument was a variety of clavichord, in which the strings are struck by blades of metal that must remain in contact with them as long as they are to sound; a harpsichord, in which the strings are plucked; or a type of keyboard-equipped dulcimer, in which—as in the piano—the strings are struck by small hammers that immediately rebound from them. All three types of instruments were described and illustrated about 1440 by Henri Arnaut of Zwolle, personal physician of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy.

      Despite the uncertainty regarding the eschiquier, it seems probable that the clavichord was the earliest stringed instrument having keys that could be pushed down by the fingers. The term “clavichord” first appears in a German document from 1404, and the instrument is recognizable in a German altar carving from 1425. Its principle of operation resembles that of the medieval organistrum, and it is apparently closely related to the monochord, an instrument consisting of a shallow closed box over which one or two strings were stretched and supported by movable bridges. The monochord was in continuous use by theorists from ancient Greece onward as a device for explaining and measuring musical intervals. The kinship of the clavichord to the monochord was so close that, as late as the 16th century, clavichords were often called monocordia.

Principle of operation
      The clavichord is rectangular in shape, and its strings run from left to right across the keys, which are placed along one of the longer sides of the rectangle. The soundboard of the instrument is at the right-hand end of the case, and the vibrations of the strings are communicated to it by a bridge on which the strings rest. The soundboard amplifies the sound of the strings by permitting them to set a large mass of air into vibration rather than the very small mass of air that contacts the string itself. (This is the same principle that makes a tuning fork sound louder when its stem is pressed against a tabletop.)

      The clavichord's operation is extremely simple. A brass blade rather like the end of a screwdriver is driven into the top surface of each key near the back of the key; a smaller piece of wood, whalebone, or horn is driven into the back end of the key. (This piece fits into a fixed slot behind the key and prevents the key from moving from side to side as it moves up and down.) When the front end of the key is pushed down by the finger, the back end rises, and the brass blade, called a tangent, strikes the strings (which in most clavichords are arranged in pairs), causing them to vibrate. To the left of the tangent a strip of cloth is woven between the strings. When the key is struck, only the portion of the strings to the right of the tangent—i.e., between the tangent and the bridge—sounds; the cloth prevents the string section to the left of the tangent from sounding. As soon as the key is released, the tangent falls away from the strings, which are then entirely silenced by the cloth. Because the sounding portion of each string is the segment between tangent and bridge, the tangent serves not only to set the strings in vibration but also to determine their sounding length. Thus, a series of tangents striking a given pair of strings at different points will produce a series of different notes, and all the earliest clavichords were designed to take advantage of this fact. Arnaut of Zwolle's clavichord used only 9 or 10 pairs of strings to produce all the 37 notes of its 3-octave keyboard, and the clavichord represented in an Italian intarsia (picture in wood inlay) of about 1480 (Palazzo Ducale, Urbino) used only 17 pairs of strings to produce 47 notes in a 4-octave range.

      Making a single pair of strings serve several keys had two important disadvantages. Because each pair of strings can sound only one note at a time, it is impossible to play any two notes sounded from the same strings simultaneously, making it impossible to play certain chords. Furthermore, an unpleasant clanking sound is likely to result if the performer attempts legato playing of successive notes sounded from the same strings, making it necessary to play in a semidetached fashion.

      As early as the time of Arnaut of Zwolle, the first of these disadvantages was minimized by allowing no more than four keys to sound from the same pair of strings and by carefully choosing the points at which such groups of four keys were placed, so that only dissonant chords would be unplayable. The second problem could be solved only when a maximum of two keys were served by the same strings, so that each natural key shared its strings only with the sharp or flat next to it. G, for example, was paired with G♯, and in the music of the period the two notes were seldom needed at the same time or in immediate succession. Of course, if one wanted to use the G♯ key as an A♭, the problem would reassert itself; but, as long as meantone tuning was in use, the G♯ could not serve as A♭ in any case.

      Eventually, however, it was felt necessary to be able to play in all tonalities without restrictions either of style of playing or in the use of dissonant chords, and clavichords began to be built with one pair of strings for each key. Such clavichords are called “unfretted,” in contrast to those having several keys for each pair of strings, which are called “fretted.” Although the unfretted clavichord was known as early as 1693, the oldest extant example, built by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass of Hamburg (Ger.), dates from 1742. Fretted clavichords were being made well into the 1780s; they had fewer strings to go out of tune, and the smaller number of strings permitted all the keys to be shorter and more equal in length, giving the instrument a superior touch. In addition, the smaller number of strings imposed a smaller downward force on the soundboard, resulting in a brighter, clearer tone.

Tone quality
      The greatest disadvantage of the clavichord is its extremely soft tone. Because it arises directly from the way in which the sound of the instrument is produced, this disadvantage cannot readily be overcome. It is impossible to impart very much energy to a string by striking it at one end (it is for this reason that a guitarist makes less sound when he strikes the strings against the fingerboard with his left hand than when he plucks them with his right, even though the pitches produced are the same). In compensation, the clavichordist alone of all keyboard-instrument players has control over a note once it has been struck. As long as a note is sounding, he has contact with the string through the tangent and key, and by changing his pressure on the key he can vary the pitch of the note, produce a controlled vibrato, or even create the illusion of prolonging or swelling the tone. Although the maximum loudness of which a clavichord is capable is not great, its softest pianissimo is very soft indeed, and the clavichordist controls an infinite number of gradations in loudness between these two extremes. As a result of this touch sensitivity, the clavichord was highly valued as a teaching and practice instrument. In addition, its relative cheapness made it the normal domestic keyboard instrument in Germany, Iberia, and Scandinavia.

      The quiet tone of the clavichord made it impractical to use the instrument in ensemble music, except for providing a discreet accompaniment for a flutist or a singer. Although much of the solo keyboard music of the 16th–18th centuries can be played on the clavichord, it cannot be stated that much of it before the latter part of the 18th century was especially composed with the clavichord in mind. At that time, however, the clavichord experienced a great revival in Germany, and music composed with its singing tone and unique capabilities of dynamic shading and vibrato was written for it by such masters as Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714–88).

      Clavichords continued to be made in Germany and Scandinavia well into the 19th century, long after the piano was popular. Indeed, many instrument makers built both clavichords and pianos (and harpsichords as well). The continued demand for the older instruments may have been a consequence—among other things—of musicians' recognition of the three instruments' differing capabilities.

      The clavichord owes its modest modern revival in the United Kingdom and America largely to the efforts of Arnold Dolmetsch (Dolmetsch, Arnold), who began building clavichords and performing on them in public in the 1890s. Both his style of playing the clavichord and the design of his instruments were influential for a long period. Today, however, increasing numbers of clavichord makers and players are exploring earlier forms of the instrument.

Principle of operation
Plucking mechanism
      The sound of the wing-shaped harpsichord and its smaller rectangular, triangular, or polygonal relatives, the spinet and virginal, is produced by plucking their strings. The plucking mechanism, called a jack, rests on the key and consists of a narrow slip of wood with two slots cut into its top. The larger slot holds a pivoted tongue from which protrudes the quill, plastic, or leather plectrum that does the actual plucking; the smaller slot holds a piece of cloth that rests on the string and silences it when the key is not depressed. When the harpsichordist pushes down on a key, the back end rises, lifting the jack and forcing the plectrum past the string, plucking it. When he releases the key, the jack falls, and when the plectrum touches the string on the way down, it forces the pivoted tongue backward so that the plectrum can pass the string again without plucking it. Once the plectrum has passed beneath the string, a light spring made of bristle or metal pushes the tongue forward again. Finally, when the key is completely at rest, the cloth damper touches the string, silencing it. A wooden bar, padded on its underside, is placed over the jacks. The purpose of this bar is to prevent the jacks from flying out of the instrument and to limit the depth to which the keys can be depressed.

      Although slight variations in loudness and timbre, or tone colour, can be obtained by differences in the firmness with which the harpsichordist depresses the keys, no sustained crescendos are obtainable by the action of the fingers alone. For this reason, most harpsichords made since about 1550 have had at least two strings and two jacks for each key. Each can be engaged or disengaged at will by a slight shift of the uppermost of two slotted guides through which the jacks pass. Moving the guide in one direction brings its entire row of jacks close enough to the strings for the plectra to pluck them; moving the guide in the opposite direction takes the jacks far enough from the strings so that the plectra cannot reach them. Two rows of jacks can provide three different levels of loudness or three differing tone colours, depending on whether the performer uses each row separately or both together.

Two-manual instruments
      Even given two rows of jacks, it would not ordinarily be possible to produce the rapid changes in loudness required for pieces in echo style, for example, or to play loudly with one hand while providing a soft accompaniment with the other. To accomplish this, it is necessary to have two keyboards or “manuals,” one of which operates a single row of jacks while the other operates two or more. It then becomes possible to play loudly on one keyboard and softly on the other, either simultaneously or in rapid alternation. Two-manual harpsichords of this kind were invented at some point before 1620 in Flanders and gradually became known throughout the rest of Europe during the 17th century. These instruments commonly had three sets of strings, two unison sets at normal pitch (called eight-foot pitch because the low C at this pitch is produced by an organ pipe eight feet long) and a third set of shorter strings tuned an octave higher, or at four-foot pitch; this shorter set passed over its own bridge and was fastened to pins driven through the soundboard into a rail fixed to its underside. There were three rows of jacks. The front row plucked one set of unison strings and was made in such a way that it would be moved by the keys of both the upper and the lower keyboards. Both the middle and back rows operated from the lower manual only; the second row plucked the second set of unison strings, and the back row plucked the octave strings. For most purposes a one-manual harpsichord sufficed: each row of jacks provided a continuously changing tone colour from one end of the keyboard to the other, permitting individual lines in the music to be articulated clearly. For this reason, as well as because of their lower price, the old harpsichord makers built far more single-manual instruments than doubles, and many more singles survive today.

Couplers
      There is, however, one type of music that can only be played on a two-manual instrument. Called in French the pièce croisée, this kind of music involves separate lines that cross and recross in the same range, frequently employing the same note either simultaneously or in close succession. The parts in such pieces cannot be distinguished when played on a single manual, and they cannot even be played on two manuals if the manuals are not completely independent. (For example, if a note is already being held on the lower manual, it cannot be restruck on the upper manual when the lower manual lifts the upper-manual jacks.) The solution to this problem was found in France in the 1640s. Instead of providing the upper-manual jacks with an extension that reached down to the keys of the lower manual, they were made to rest entirely on the upper-manual keys; the lower-manual keys were then fitted with small upright pieces of wood called coupler dogs, which reached upward toward the underside of the upper-manual keys. The upper manual was constructed to slide forward and back by about 1/4 inch. When it was pushed into the instrument, the coupler dogs were positioned below the back ends of upper-manual keys. As a result, when any lower-manual key was pushed down and its back end rose, the coupler dog would push up on the underside of the corresponding upper-manual key, lifting its jack as well. When one wished to uncouple the two keyboards in order to play pièces croisées, one could do so by pulling the upper manual outward. The coupler dogs then passed slightly beyond the ends of the upper-manual keys, so that they were not lifted when the lower-manual keys were depressed.

      Two-manual harpsichords of this kind permit players to exploit the difference in the tone colours produced by the two rows, or “registers,” of unison jacks. This difference depends on the distance along the string at which it is plucked. The closer the plucking point is to the end of a string, the brighter is the sound; the farther away from the end that a string is plucked, the fuller and rounder the tone becomes, until one approaches the centre; plucking near the centre of a string produces a sweet, flutey, but somewhat hollow sound. In order to emphasize the difference in tone colours produced by the two rows of unison jacks, French harpsichord builders put the row of octave jacks between them, thereby increasing the distance between the two unison plucking points and the difference in tone of the two unison registers.

      A set of jacks plucking very close to the end of the string yields a very brassy, nasal sound. This type of register, called a lute stop, was first used in Germany in the 16th century and later spread to Flanders and to England, where it was added to the normal three registers on two-manual instruments. It did not have its own set of strings but, rather, plucked those of one of the existing unison registers. In England the lute stop plucked the same set of strings as the set of jacks operated by both keyboards; but, because the lute-stop jacks rested only on the upper-manual keys, they could also be used to provide a completely independent register on the upper manual. It was thus possible to play pièces croisées by taking off the unison register controlled by both manuals, using the lute stop for the upper manual and leaving the lower manual with its own unison register. Many harpsichords of all countries were also equipped with a buff stop (sometimes also called a lute stop), a device that presses pieces of soft leather against one of the sets of unison strings, producing a muted, pizzicato tone.

      In Germany in the 18th century, harpsichords were made with still more strings and jacks for each key. Some had three unison strings in addition to an octave string; some had two unisons, an octave, and a suboctave (or 16-foot) register; and some even had a 2-foot register, with very short strings tuned two octaves above the unisons. Harpsichords with three keyboards were apparently built throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, although only one authentic three-manual harpsichord is known today.

      It should be emphasized, however, that the harpsichord of the 16th–18th centuries normally had only one or two keyboards and only two or three sets of strings and jacks per note. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, one-manual instruments usually had only two registers (either two unisons or a unison and an octave) with or without a buff stop; in the second half of the 17th century a second unison register became common, increasing the number of jacks and strings to three per note. Two-manual instruments, likewise, had no more than three sets of strings (two unisons and an octave) and three sets of jacks throughout the 17th century. In the 18th century, a fourth row of jacks was sometimes added. In Britain and Flanders, this row was the close-plucking lute stop; in France, if a fourth row was added, it was placed behind the other three and equipped with plectra of soft buff leather that provided a gentle, flutey tone, which was highly prized in the rather decadent period of the harpsichord's decline. Until the last half of the 18th century, it was usually possible to change registers only by moving knobs at the side of the instrument or above the keyboards, which could be done only when one hand or the other was not playing. This fact and the surviving written evidence suggests that the harpsichordists of earlier times changed registers relatively infrequently, avoiding monotony of sound by relying on variations of touch and the changes of texture and pitch level written into the music.

History
      The harpsichord may have evolved from devices invented by medical astrologers for the purpose of investigating the effects of cosmic musical harmonies on the human body. The wing-shaped instrument was described by Arnaut of Zwolle in the mid-15th century and was apparently known throughout Europe by the end of the century, although no 15th-century examples have survived. The harpsichords depicted in sculptures, paintings, and miniatures of the period all appear to be shorter and to have thicker cases than the earliest surviving 16th-century examples, all of which are Italian and are constructed of very thin cypress.

      The thin-cased style of harpsichord construction appears to have been developed in Italy about 1500, and it rapidly influenced the design of harpsichords throughout the rest of Europe. The strings of the Italian harpsichords were rather short, with the strings for c″ (C above middle C) generally being about 10 inches (25 centimetres) long on instruments tuned to what is today considered normal pitch. On some Italian harpsichords, however, the strings for c″ are about 14 inches (36 centimetres) long; it is thought that these were tuned to a pitch a fourth below that of the shorter-strung ones, the key for C sounding what today would be the G below. The comparatively short strings imposed a relatively low tension on the case of the Italian harpsichord, allowing it to hold up with so light a structure.

      In general, Italian harpsichords had only one keyboard with two rows of jacks and two strings tuned in unison or unison and octave. The fragile Italian instruments were normally housed in thick outer cases of softwood, which were either painted or covered with stamped leather. The cases, in turn, rested on separate legs or elaborate stands. The tone of these lightly constructed instruments is surprisingly loud and penetrating, making them ideal as accompanying instruments in an orchestra and suiting them perfectly to the rattling scale passages typical of Italian harpsichord music.

      As the new Italian design spread northward, first into Germany and then to Flanders, France, and England, it was modified to the extent that the 16th- and 17th-century northern European instruments had somewhat longer strings (11 1/2 to 12 1/2 inches [29 to 32 centimetres] for c″) and thicker cases (3/16 to 1/4 inch [5 to 6 millimetres] in contrast to the 1/8 inch [3 millimetres] found on Italian instruments). In the 1560s in Flanders, however, this type of instrument was replaced by still another design, which ultimately dominated all northern European harpsichord making. These instruments had long strings (about 14 inches for c″ at normal pitch) and thick cases with substantial internal bracing to withstand the greater tension imposed by the greater string length. Because the longer strings made it unfeasible to double the string length for each octave below middle C, harpsichords of the newer Flemish design have less gracefully curved bentsides and wider tails than either Italian harpsichords or the intermediate instruments built elsewhere north of the Alps.

      The name most often associated with Flemish harpsichord building is that of the Ruckers (Ruckers, Hans, The Elder) family, which for four generations (from about 1580 to 1680) dominated Flemish harpsichord making and whose instruments were exported to all parts of Europe—one was even shipped as far as Peru. At first sight, Ruckers harpsichords appear crude compared to their Italian counterparts, and their thick softwood cases give the impression of being clumsily cobbled together on the inside. Nonetheless, the tone of unaltered or properly restored examples is extraordinarily good, and it is easy to see why Ruckers instruments were so highly prized that a lively business in making forgeries of them flourished in the 18th century.

      In addition to a wide variety of virginals (discussed below under The virginal, spinet, and clavicytherium (keyboard instrument)), the Ruckers family made several different harpsichord models. The most popular was apparently six feet long, having a four-octave keyboard from C to c‴, with a short octave in the bass; one unison and one octave register; and, occasionally, a buff stop on the unison. They were typically painted in imitation of marble on the outside and decorated on the inside with block-printed paper on which a Latin motto was painted. The soundboard was usually decorated with paintings of flowers, leaves, and birds. (This decoration should be contrasted with that of Italian harpsichords, which, except for their finely profiled moldings and lavish outer cases, were generally unadorned.) Flemish harpsichords were set directly on fairly massive stands, examples of which may be seen in the numerous Dutch paintings of musical groups of the period. Similar harpsichords were made in smaller sizes tuned a fifth or an octave above normal pitch (the key c′ sounding either g′ or c″). By the mid-17th century, some single-manual instruments had a range of 4 1/2 octaves from F′ or G′ to c‴.

      The Ruckers family appears to have been the first to make two-manual harpsichords. These were of two types: in one (which may have been the earlier type and was not built after about 1650), both keyboards were served by a single set of unison and octave strings and were not meant to be played at the same time. Instead, the keyboards were so arranged that c‴ on the upper keyboard was placed over f‴ on the lower keyboard, which meant that playing a piece on the lower keyboard automatically transposed it to a pitch a fourth below that of the upper keyboard. Whether this arrangement was used to facilitate routine transpositions or whether it was intended to provide in a single instrument the same resources as those available from both an Italian instrument with a 10-inch c″ and one with a 14-inch c″ is still a subject for controversy. The second type of two-manual harpsichord built by the Ruckers family was basically the type one finds today, with keyboards aligned over one another and intended to provide contrasts in loudness. Because the only set of upper-manual jacks was also played directly from the lower manual, it was not possible to play pièces croisées.

      During the 17th century, instruments of the Ruckers type gradually influenced those being built throughout northern Europe; and by the early 18th century France, England, and Germany all had developed their own national variations on the thick-cased Ruckers design, replacing the thinner-cased and shorter-strung instruments of their earlier native schools. The sound of a typical 18th-century French harpsichord is delicate and sweet compared to the more astringent sound of a Ruckers. Those examples by the Blanchet family and their heir Pascal Taskin (1723–93) are noted for their extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship and the lightness and evenness of their touch. Eighteenth-century French harpsichords were almost always painted and rest on elaborate carved and gilded cabriole (curved-leg) stands. As with Flemish harpsichords, the French soundboards are decorated with painted flowers and birds, and the maker's mark appears in the form of a cast ornament in the sound hole. In the 1760s, Taskin added a fourth row of jacks with soft plectra of buff leather as a special solo stop and also devised a highly ingenious system of knee levers that permitted the harpsichordist to play crescendos and decrescendos and to change registers without taking his hands from the keyboard. By the time of these inventions, however, the great Baroque composers of harpsichord music, such as François Couperin, J.S. Bach, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Domenico Scarlatti, were dead, and these devices have no relevance to the historically accurate performance of harpsichord music of the Baroque era or earlier.

      In Britain the making of harpsichords in the 18th century was dominated by two London families, the Kirkmans (Kirkman, Jacob) and the Shudis. Both families made instruments for several generations and eventually moved on from harpsichord building to piano building. Their harpsichords are very similar, and the two-manual instruments all have a close-plucking lute stop in addition to the usual two unisons and octave. They are invariably veneered in walnut or mahogany and rest on simple stands, usually with straight or tapered legs. The tone of a Kirkman or Shudi harpsichord is both more robust and more brilliant than that of a French or Flemish instrument, making it a superb instrument for filling in the harmonies in orchestral music as well as for the performance of the solo harpsichord literature.

      Two German schools appear to have existed in the 18th century. One in the southern part of the country has left very few surviving instruments, which is unfortunate because these are the kind probably played by J.S. Bach. As far as is known, the southern German instruments were fairly plain, veneered ones, having only three registers and a rather darker tone than either French or Flemish instruments. The second German school was centred in the city of Hamburg and is best represented by the work of the Hass family. The Hass instruments are among the most elaborate ever made, in both decoration and complexity. They are the only 18th-century harpsichords with 16-foot and 2-foot registers, and some have lute stops as well. Their tone does not, unfortunately, live up to the quality of their craftsmanship or the ingenuity of their design, seeming overly brilliant and too thick in all the surviving examples that have been restored to playing condition.

Decline of the harpsichord
      Although many of the finest surviving harpsichords date from after 1750, few composers of the first rank were writing for the instrument by that time. Furthermore, the emergence of a newer, lighter style of music and an increased interest in crescendo and decrescendo effects led to the addition of various new devices foreign to the essential nature of the instrument. These include the knee- and foot-operated contrivances for the rapid changing of registers or for producing crescendos and decrescendos. Such devices represent the harpsichord builders' response to the same musical needs that eventually caused the harpsichord's replacement by the piano; but they were created before the real rise in the piano's popularity and must not be thought of as attempts to stave off the competition of the newer instrument.

      As with the clavichord, builders continued to make harpsichords side by side with pianos. In England, Shudi's son-in-law, John Broadwood (Broadwood, John) (see below The piano: History: The English action (keyboard instrument)), continued to make harpsichords until after 1800 (although in decreasing quantity), producing at the same time an ever-increasing number of pianos. There is even a small but interesting group of compositions by British, German, and French composers calling for both instruments.

Modern revival
      The harpsichord had all but vanished except as a curiosity or in rare historical concerts when the modern revival began in the 1890s with the building of new harpsichords by the piano firms of Érard and Pleyel in Paris. Almost immediately, the full brunt of 19th-century piano technology was applied to the manufacture of the revived instruments, and they became increasingly massively strung and framed as time passed. Pedals for changing registers were included from the beginning, and Pleyel first added the 16-foot stop in 1911. The Pleyel's sound, as preserved in the recordings of the Polish virtuoso Wanda Landowska (Landowska, Wanda) and her numerous pupils, typified the harpsichord for most music lovers until the 1950s, and it is for a heavy, metal-framed instrument of this type, with pedals for changing registers and a 16-foot stop, that most 20th-century harpsichord music has been composed.

      In 1905 modern harpsichord building was begun in Germany, initially taking the new Pleyel and Érard instruments as inspiration. Subsequent German building produced a highly characteristic instrument somewhat reminiscent of the harpsichords of the 18th-century Hamburg school in sound. Taking as their model an improperly restored instrument falsely said to have belonged to Bach, these instruments generally had the unhistorical stop arrangement of one 8-foot and the 4-foot on the upper manual, with the second 8-foot and a 16-foot on the lower manual.

      Arnold Dolmetsch (Dolmetsch, Arnold), who began the modern revival of the clavichord, also built harpsichords, working in Paris and Boston as well as in England. He deserves to be considered the “godfather” not only of the present British school of harpsichord making but also of the flourishing American school, most of whose members are, however, building a very different and far more historically based instrument than any that Dolmetsch made after about 1910.

      The virginal, spinet, and clavicytherium are all varieties of harpsichord that differ from it primarily in size, shape, and musical resources. Virginals and spinets usually have only a single set of strings and a single row of jacks. The clavicytherium is basically a harpsichord set upright so that its soundboard is vertical. The earliest known mention of the clavicytherium dates from about 1460; the oldest extant example (Royal College of Music, London) was probably made in Ulm, Ger., about 1480. Instruments of this form were made from the 15th through the 18th centuries. In general, their mechanism has to be fairly complicated because the jacks must move horizontally rather than vertically and cannot therefore return to their rest position solely by the action of gravity. As a consequence of this complexity of its mechanism, the touch of the clavicytherium tends to be heavy, although the instrument takes up less floor space, and the vertical soundboard projects sound outward far more effectively than the horizontal soundboard of the conventional harpsichord.

      The virginal and spinet are small varieties of harpsichord, but the precise usage of the terms differs. Some writers reserve the term virginal for rectangular instruments and call all small triangular or polygonal instruments spinets. Others apply the term virginal to all plucked stringed keyboard instruments whose strings run more or less from left to right across the keys (a usage followed in this article), reserving the term spinet for instruments in which the strings run obliquely away from the player. The terminological question is complicated by the fact that the word virginal in 16th- and 17th-century England referred to all plucked stringed keyboard instruments, including harpsichords and spinets as well as those today termed virginals. The term épinette (“spinet”) had a similarly broad usage in France.

      Italian builders of the 16th and 17th centuries made virginals and spinets employing a thin-cased construction similar to that of their harpsichords, and, like Italian harpsichords, these smaller instruments were kept in stout outer cases. The typical Italian virginal was either rectangular or polygonal in shape, with its keyboard projecting from the front of the case, and many of the surviving examples are sumptuously decorated with inlay or intarsia. Most Italian spinets are constructed as an irregular quadrilateral, but in the 17th century a new form was developed that more closely resembles a small harpsichord in having a bentside at the player's right and a long straight back slanting away from him. The new form was copied throughout Europe and became the standard domestic keyboard instrument in England in the late 17th century.

      In Flanders, early virginals were polygonal and resembled Italian ones except that their keyboards were inset rather than projecting. In the 1560s, at the same time as the thick-cased harpsichord is believed to have emerged, thick-cased rectangular virginals made their appearance. By the end of the 16th century, two distinct types existed. They can readily be distinguished by the position of their keyboards: off-centre either to the left or to the right in one of the long sides of the rectangular case. Virginals with the keyboard at the right were far more common. They produce a characteristic flutey tone because the placement of the keyboard causes the strings to be plucked near their centre for most of the instrument's range. In virginals with the keyboard at the left, the strings are plucked off-centre except in the extreme treble, and the tone changes gradually from reedy in the bass, through full in the middle register, to flutey in the treble, much as on a harpsichord. Flemish builders produced virginals of both types in several sizes, the smaller ones being tuned to higher than normal pitches. They also made “double” virginals, consisting of a large virginal at normal pitch and a smaller one tuned an octave higher, which could be stored in a recess next to the keyboard of the larger instrument. The two virginals could be coupled together by placing the smaller instrument on top of the larger one.

      The virginals made in England were of the left-keyboard type. Those made elsewhere in Europe (some having the keyboard centred) were also built with strings plucking off-centre.

The piano

Principle of operation
      Although the basic principles of the piano's operation are simple, the refinements required in developing the powerful yet sensitive modern piano make it also the most complex of all mechanical instruments except the organ. The strings of the piano are struck by a felt-covered hammer that must rebound from the strings instantaneously or it will dampen their vibrations in the very act of initiating them. The hammer must thus be allowed to fly freely toward the strings. For the pianist to retain maximum control of loudness, the distance of the hammer's free flight must be as small as possible; but, if the distance is too small, the hammer will bounce back and forth between the strings and the part of the mechanism that pushed it, producing a stuttering sound whenever the keys are struck firmly. As a consequence, all truly simple piano mechanisms—those in which, say, a rigid rod at the back of the key simply pushes the hammer upward until the key is stopped by a rail and the hammer flies free—must be adjusted to provide a large distance for free flight and can therefore give the pianist only limited dynamic range and control.

History
      Piano mechanisms as unsophisticated as that described above continued to be devised and built throughout the 18th century. Nevertheless, the first successful piano—made in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori (Cristofori, Bartolomeo)—solved the problems inherent in such simple mechanisms, as well as nearly every other problem facing piano builders until well into the 19th century. Cristofori reportedly experimented with a “harpsichord with hammers” in 1698. By 1700 one of these instruments, together with six of his harpsichords and spinets, was included in an inventory of instruments belonging to the Medici family in Florence. In 1711 the instrument was described in detail in the Venetian Giornale de' letterati d'Italia by Scipione Maffei (Maffei, Francesco Scipione, Marchese di), who called Cristofori's invention gravicembalo col piano e forte (“harpsichord with soft and loud”)—whence the present names pianoforte and piano.

      In the three surviving examples of Cristofori's pianos, which date from the 1720s, the mechanism, or “action,” differs somewhat from that described and pictured by Maffei; however, rather than merely representing an earlier phase of Cristofori's work, Maffei's diagram may be in error. In the surviving instruments a pivoted piece of wood is set into the key. The pivoted piece (which in a modern piano would be called a jack and should not be confused with the jack in a harpsichord) lifts an intermediate lever when the key is depressed. The lever, in turn, pushes upward on the hammer shaft near its pivot in a rail fixed above the keys. When the key is pressed completely down, the jack tilts and disengages itself from the intermediate lever, which then falls back, permitting the hammer to fall most of the way back to its rest position, even while the key is still depressed. This feature, called an escapement, is the heart of Cristofori's invention; it makes possible a short free flight for the hammer, after which the hammer falls so far away from the string that it cannot rebound against it, even when the keys are struck firmly. Cristofori provided a check (a pad rising from the back of the key) to catch and hold the falling hammer. At the end of the key he included a separate slip of wood, resembling a harpsichord jack, to carry the dampers that silence the string when the key is at rest.

      Utilizing an intermediate lever to act on the hammer near one end of its shaft provides an enormous velocity advantage, and the hammer flies upward toward the string much faster than the front end of the key descends under the pianist's finger, adding to the crispness and sensitivity of Cristofori's action. In addition to his innovative mechanism, Cristofori also introduced a unique double-wall case construction that isolated the soundboard from the pull of the strings. The sound of his instruments is strongly reminiscent of the harpsichord. The dynamic range is surprisingly wide, but it should be emphasized that the instrument's loudest sounds are softer than those of a firmly quilled Italian harpsichord and do not begin to approach the loudness of a modern piano.

German and Austrian pianos
      As a piano builder Cristofori had few immediate successors in Italy, but word of his invention became known in Germany through a translation of Maffei's account published in 1725. Before 1720 there had been independent attempts in France as well as in Germany to devise hammer mechanisms, although none was comparable to Cristofori's in sophistication or practicality. In the 1730s Gottfried Silbermann (Silbermann, Gottfried), of Freiberg in eastern Germany, a builder of organs, harpsichords, and clavichords, began constructing pianos patterned on Cristofori's. The surviving ones, probably from the 1740s, appear to have been directly copied from an instrument imported into Germany rather than derived from Maffei's description, but the ones he made earlier (and of which Bach is said to have disapproved in 1736) may have owed their failure to an attempt to follow Maffei's diagram exactly. By 1747 Silbermann had sold several of his pianos to King Frederick II the Great of Prussia, and one of these is reported to have met with Bach's approval in 1747.

      Subsequent German piano building did not follow the path charted by Silbermann. Instead, various German builders attempted to devise actions that were simpler than Cristofori's, generally adapting them to the clavichord-shaped instruments now called “square” pianos (square piano). In the most characteristic German actions, the hammers point toward, rather than away from, the player, and, instead of being hinged to a rail passing over all the keys, they are attached individually to their respective keys. As the front of the key is depressed, the back rises, carrying the hammer with it. A projecting beak at the rear of the hammer shank catches on a fixed rail above the back of the keys, so that the hammers are flipped upward as the keys are stopped by a second rail set just above them. This action had no escapement, and (on the evidence of a letter of 1777 from Mozart to his father) many German instruments of the 1770s still lacked this highly important feature.

      Johann Andreas Stein (Stein, Johann Andreas) of Augsburg in southern Germany is generally credited with devising the first German action to include an escapement. As a replacement for the fixed rail that caught the projecting beaks at the rear of the hammer shanks, Stein provided an individually hinged and sprung catch for each key. As the back of the key reaches its highest point, this catch (the escapement) tilts backward on its hinge and releases the beak at the back of the hammer shank. The hammer is then free to fall back to rest position even when the key is still depressed. This action is often called “Viennese,” because it was used by all the important 18th- and early 19th-century piano makers in Vienna, including Stein's daughter and son-in-law, Nannette and Johann Andreas Streicher; Anton Walter, Mozart's favourite piano builder; and Conrad Graf, maker of Beethoven's last piano. It was used in German-speaking countries until the late 19th century, when it was replaced by mechanisms derived from a Cristofori-based action developed in England.

      Although the tone of a piano by Stein or Walter is not loud, it is very sweet, with a singing treble and a clear tenor and bass that blend superbly with the sound of stringed instruments. The touch is extremely light and shallow: the force required to depress a key is only one-fourth that required on a modern piano, and the key need only be depressed half as far. In their sensitivity to the finest differences in touch and their singing tone, the Viennese pianos suggest the responsiveness of a clavichord, although producing a louder sound.

      Austrian and German pianos of the early 19th century often feature an array of pedals. Only one of Cristofori's surviving pianos has any special effects: levers on the underside of the instrument permit the player to shift the action sideways so that the hammers strike only one of the two strings provided for each note. By the time Silbermann built his pianos for Frederick the Great, a second special effect had been introduced—a mechanism to lift the dampers from the strings so that they could vibrate freely whether or not the keys were depressed. (These two effects, the sideways sliding of the action—to produce a softer sound and different tone colour—and the lifting of the dampers—to produce a louder, more sustained sound and another variation in tone colour—are the only ones found on all modern grand pianos.) Silbermann's pianos had hand levers for raising the treble and bass dampers separately and an additional hand lever for muting the strings. Stein's pianos normally had two knee levers for raising the treble and bass dampers and a third knee lever that interposed a strip of cloth between the hammers and the strings to produce a velvety pianissimo. Later instruments might have five or more pedals that, for example, pressed a roll of parchment against the bass strings to produce a buzzing sound or rang small bells and banged on the underside of the soundboard in imitation of the cymbals and drums of the then-fashionable “Turkish” music.

The English action
      In the late 1750s a number of German piano builders emigrated to Britain, and one, Johann Christoph Zumpe (Zumpe, Johann Christoph), invented an extremely simple action for the square pianos he began building in the mid-1760s. Zumpe's action goes back to the Cristofori-Silbermann system in which the hammers point away from the player and are hinged to a rail over the keys. A metal rod tipped with a padded button is driven into the back of the key. When the key is depressed, the rod pushes the hammer upward; the key is stopped by a padded rail over its back end, and the hammer then flies freely. Despite the lack of an escapement, Zumpe's square pianos were an enormous commercial success and were copied in France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia.

      Zumpe had worked for the harpsichord builder Burkat Shudi when he first came to England, and around 1770 three other workmen in Shudi's shop, John Broadwood, Robert Stodart, and Americus Backers, devised for grand pianos an adaptation of Zumpe's action that included an escapement. This important development made London a major centre of piano building and created a characteristic English piano of fuller and louder sound than the Viennese piano but with a heavier, deeper touch and a consequent inability to play repeated notes as rapidly. In the English grand-piano action, the fixed rod of Zumpe's square-piano action was replaced by a pivoted jack, similar to that in Cristofori's action. The upper end of the jack fits into a notch at the base of the hammer shank, slipping out of the notch as the back of the key reaches its highest point; the hammer then flies free, strikes the string, and falls back to be caught by a hammer check even when the front of the key is still held down. The tone of a typical 18th-century English grand piano is surprisingly reminiscent of the tone of an English harpsichord, suggesting that the English piano makers were, like Cristofori, seeking to make an expressive harpsichord, unlike the German builders who, in effect, appear to have been trying to build a louder clavichord.

      Unlike their Austrian and German counterparts, English pianos had two or, at most, three pedals. One of the two ordinary pedals shifted the keyboard sideways so that the hammers struck two or only one of the three strings provided for each note. The second pedal raised all the dampers. It was sometimes replaced by two pedals—one for the treble dampers, the other for the bass dampers—or, occasionally, by a single damper pedal divided into two parts that could be depressed separately or together with one foot, as on the piano presented by Broadwood to Beethoven in 1817.

      Although the pianos of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were perfected instruments ideally suited to the music of their period, the increasing popularity of public concerts in large halls and concerti with large orchestras stimulated attempts by piano builders to produce an instrument of greater brilliance and loudness. Their efforts gradually created today's vastly different piano. In recent years, the special merits of the earlier instruments (sometimes called “fortepianos” to distinguish them from modern pianos) have come to be appreciated, and several builders have begun to make replicas of them.

Other early forms
      As previously mentioned, many 18th-century pianos were “squares,” built in a form resembling the clavichord. More compact and less expensive than wing-shaped grands, the square piano continued through much of the 19th century to be the most common form of piano in the home. But as square pianos became larger and larger, these advantages diminished, and the square piano was eventually replaced by the upright. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, upright pianos (upright piano) (i.e., pianos with vertical strings and soundboard) took three different forms. In the “pyramid piano” the strings slanted upward from left to right, and the case above the keyboard took the form of a tall isosceles triangle. Or a grand piano was essentially set on end with its pointed tail in the air, producing the asymmetrical “giraffe piano.” Placing shelves in the upper part of the case to the right of the strings yielded the tall rectangular “cabinet piano.” Because the lower end of the strings, which ran nearly vertically, was about at the level of the keyboard, all such instruments were very tall. Although there were attempts to construct lower instruments by, in effect, positioning a square piano on its side, the American builder John Isaac Hawkins made the first truly successful low uprights in 1800 by placing the lower end of the strings near floor level. Robert Wornum in England built similar small uprights in 1811, and in 1842 he devised for them his “tape check” action, the direct forerunner of the modern upright action.

Development of the modern piano
      In the early 19th century, piano makers were principally concerned with two problems whose solutions led to the modern piano. These were the relatively small volume of sound that could be produced from the thin strings then in use and the difficulty of producing a structure that could withstand the tension even of such light strings once the range of the instrument exceeded 5 1/2 octaves.

Bracing and frame
      Like 18th-century harpsichords, the pianos of the 18th and early 19th centuries were constructed entirely of wood, with the case (supported by a structure of internal wooden braces) sustaining the entire stress exerted by the strings. The only metal bracing in such instruments appears in the form of flat or arched pieces bridging the gap through which the hammers rise to strike the strings. These braces eventually proved insufficient when the walls of the case itself and the pinblock (the long piece of wood into which all the tuning pins were driven) were incapable of withstanding the increasing tensions placed upon them. For this reason, ever-increasing quantities of metal bracing came into use, first in the form of individual bars running parallel to the strings from the side of the case to the pinblock but finally in the form of a single massive casting that took the entire tension of the strings upon itself. The one-piece cast-iron frame was first applied to square pianos by Alpheus Babcock of Boston in 1825, and in 1843 another Bostonian, Jonas Chickering, patented a one-piece frame for grands. With the adoption of such frames, the tension exerted by each string (about 24 pounds [11 kilograms] for an English piano of 1800) rose to an average of approximately 170 pounds (77 kilograms) in modern instruments, the frame bearing a total tension of 18 tons.

Overstringing
      The strings in early pianos, like those in harpsichords or clavichords, ran parallel to one another, causing the grand pianos of the 18th and early 19th centuries to retain much of the graceful shape of the harpsichord. In the 1830s it was realized that the bass strings could be made longer and their tone improved if they were made to fan out over the treble strings. This idea was first applied to square pianos, but in 1855 Steinway & Sons built a grand piano with a complete cast-iron frame embodying this “overstrung” plan, in which the strings of the treble and the middle registers fan out over most of the soundboard and the bass strings cross over them, forming a separate fan at a higher level. Because the bass strings fan out, the tail of the modern grand piano is far wider than that of the earlier “straight-strung” instruments.

Modifications in the action
      The gradual strengthening of the piano's structure to permit the use of heavier strings eventually gave rise to hitherto unforeseen problems. The thicker strings could yield the louder sound of which they were capable only if they were struck by heavier hammers; any increase in the weight of the hammer, however, required a manyfold increase in the force required to depress the keys. This difficulty was present to a minor extent even in the 18th-century English grand-piano action, and the touch on these instruments was both deeper and heavier than on Viennese pianos. Moreover, the deeper touch meant that it took longer for a key to return to rest position so that a note could be restruck. Consequently, English pianos were not capable of the rapid repetition of Viennese instruments. This problem became quite severe as the hammers grew heavier and as musicians wished increasingly to use tremolo effects in imitation of orchestral music.

      What was necessary was an action that would permit a note to be restruck before the key returned to rest position. The first successful action of this type was devised by the Frenchman Sébastien Érard (Érard, Sébastien), who as a young man had built a harpsichord with a particularly elaborate system of pedals and knee levers and in 1810 devised the system of pedals still in use on the harp. Érard's first “repetition” or “double-escapement” action was patented in 1808, and an improved version that is the basis of the modern action was patented in 1821.

      A further consequence of the use of thicker strings was that, if the sound of the instrument were not to become unduly harsh, the hammers had to be softer than those used on 18th-century instruments—light slips of wood covered with a few layers of thin leather. Felt-covered hammers were patented in 1826 by the Parisian builder Jean-Henri Pape, who also contributed a number of other ingenious and important improvements, but the use of felt instead of leather did not become universal until after 1855.

      With the adoption of the one-piece cast-iron frame, overstringing, and felt hammers, the piano achieved its modern form in all but a few details. One was the invention in 1862 by Claude Montal of Paris of a pedal that kept the dampers off the strings only for notes already held down. Individual notes could thus be sustained without the overall blurring caused by raising all the dampers by the ordinary damper pedal. On three-pedal pianos, this device is included as the middle pedal, with the damper (“loud”) pedal at the right and the action-shifting (una corda, or “soft”) pedal at the left.

Types of modern piano
      Since the abandonment of the square piano, only upright and grand pianos are regularly manufactured. The grands range in length from a minimum of about 5 feet (150 centimetres) for a “baby” grand to a maximum of about 9 feet (270 centimetres) for a “concert” grand, although both shorter and longer instruments have been constructed. Among upright pianos, the models over 4 feet (120 centimetres) tall—which frequently had an excellent tone because of their relatively long bass strings—have largely been superseded by the lower models, the “console” (about 40 inches [100 centimetres] high) and the “spinet” (about 36 inches [90 centimetres] high). Because the spinet's case rises such a small distance above the keyboard, it usually has “drop” action, most of which lies below the level of the keys.

Modern piano actions
      In 1636 Marin Mersenne, the author of the treatise Harmonie universelle, quoted a remark that the harpsichord of his time contained 1,500 different parts. The modern piano contains 12,000, most of which are found in the action. The modern grand piano action is a simplified version of Érard's double-escapement action of 1821, and, although different manufacturers' actions differ in detail, they all work in much the same way. When the key is depressed, its back end rises, lifting the wippen. The wippen raises a pivoted L-shaped jack that pushes the hammer upward by means of a small roller attached to the underside of the hammer shank. The hammer flies free when the back of the L-shaped jack touches the adjustable regulating button. At the same time, the upper end of the repetition lever—through which the upright arm of the jack passes—rises until it is stopped by the drop screw. When the hammer rebounds from the string, the roller falls back until it is stopped by the intermediate lever, enabling the tip of the jack to return to position beneath the roller, even if the key is still partially depressed. The jack is then ready to raise the hammer again should the player restrike the key before it returns to rest position. In the meantime, the hammer is prevented from bouncing back up toward the strings by the padded hammer check, and the damper is raised above the strings by a separate lever lifted by the extreme end of the key.

Player pianos (player piano)
      The history of automatically playing stringed keyboard instruments dates at least to the 16th century. The inventory of musical instruments owned by King Henry VIII at his death in 1547 included “an instrument that goethe with a whele without playing upon,” and three spinets equipped with a pinned barrel like that of a music box or barrel organ survive from the workshop of the Augsburg builder Samuel Bidermann (1540–1622). The most common type of player piano operates by means of a roll of punched paper that controls a pneumatic system for depressing the keys. Its heyday was the 1930s, and it was largely rendered obsolete by the increasing popularity of the phonograph and the radio. In the 1980s, electromagnetic (electronic instrument) player-piano actions equipped with laser sensors and computer controls were developed, allowing a pianist to record and immediately play back or edit his performance. Such sophisticated player pianos are especially useful in recording and teaching studios.

Related stringed keyboard instruments
      Stringed keyboard instruments have sometimes been altered slightly for various reasons. For example, as early as the 16th century harpsichords were occasionally strung with gut rather than with metal wire in order to imitate the sound of a lute. Such gut-strung harpsichords, one of which was owned by J.S. Bach, were called in German Lautenwerck. The 18th-century tangent piano dispensed with pivoted hammers and instead had loose slips of wood or metal supported vertically in a rack above the backs of the keys; as a bar abruptly halted the motion of a key, its slip, or tangent, continued to rise to strike the strings and rebound. While inexpensive to make and easy to maintain, this simple mechanism allowed the player relatively little control of loudness and articulation.

      Stringed keyboard instruments have as their principal defects an inability, first, to sustain a tone indefinitely and, secondly, to alter the tone's loudness once a key has been depressed. Various attempts have been made to build stringed instruments sounded by other means than plucking or striking—including vibrating the strings by blowing a current of air past them, as in the piano éolien of 1837. The most successful of these other instruments adopted the principle of the hurdy-gurdy—i.e., vibrating the strings by friction.

      An instrument of this kind appears in several diagrams in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Some apparently highly successful ones (none of which, unfortunately, has survived) were made by the Nürnberg builder Hans Haiden, who described them at length in pamphlets published in 1605 and 1610. These instruments had a series of rosined wheels that rubbed the strings when they were drawn against them by the action of the keys. According to Haiden, the instrument, which he called a Geigenwerck, was capable of recreating the sound of an ensemble of viols and produced sounds of different loudness, depending on the force with which the keys were depressed.

      In 1772 a device called a celestina was patented by Adam Walker of London; it employed a continuous horsehair ribbon (kept in motion by a treadle) to rub the strings of a harpsichord. Thomas Jefferson, who ordered a harpsichord equipped with a celestina in 1786, commented that it was suitable for use in slow movements and as an accompaniment to the voice. Similar devices, some using rosined rollers, were applied to pianos by various ingenious inventors throughout the 19th century.

Edwin M. Ripin Laurence Elliot Libin

The organ
      An organ is a keyboard instrument in which sound (musical sound) is produced by pipes or reeds to which wind is supplied through a mechanism under the control of the organist. Pipe organs of the kind commonly encountered in Christian churches since the late Middle Ages are among the largest, most complicated, and most expensive musical instruments; they are products of sophisticated craftsmanship blended with artistry.

      Reed organs (reed organ) such as the foot-pumped harmonium and melodeon, types developed and mass-produced during the 19th century, are simpler and cheaper to construct than pipe organs. They were widely used domestically and in small churches before becoming virtually obsolete by the mid-20th century, when electronic substitutes became commercially available. These electronic substitutes are versatile and relatively compact, though not necessarily inexpensive, and are chiefly useful in situations where tonal beauty, sensitivity, and imposing visual presence are not essential—for example, in popular music ensembles or homes. For more demanding purposes, electronic organs have given way in the late 20th century to even more versatile and portable synthesizers (see electronic instrument).

      The enormous and varied pipe organ repertoire is especially rich in solo music intended for performance in churches, either during the liturgy or before and after services. The organ's most familiar ensemble role is accompanying choral and congregational singing, a function in which the organist may also conduct the singers. Organ recitals, a favourite form of public entertainment before the advent of radio and recordings, most often take place in churches but also occur in municipal auditoriums, concert halls, and other secular buildings where organs have been installed.

      Perhaps most important among such venues in the early 20th century were theatres where organs were used to accompany silent films. Theatre organs, while not generally very large, were highly innovative in tonal and mechanical design and made use of technological improvements that were slow to find their way into more conservative church organs. Among the special effects produced by theatre organs are colourful sounds made by percussion devices that act independently from the pipes.

Parts, mechanism, and production of sound
      Conventional pipe organs consist of four main parts: (1) the keyboard or keyboards and other controls that collectively are called the console, (2) the pipes that produce the tone, (3) the mechanism, or action, and (4) the wind generator. Ideally, the pipes, action, and supporting framework are encased in a free-standing structure, or case, that protects the delicate interior parts and blends and projects the sound through generous openings into the surrounding space. Traditionally, rows of dummy or real pipes and carved woodwork in attractive arrangements partially screen the openings in the case. Because organ pipes are not uncommonly up to 32 feet long, organ cases can be very large and form a significant architectural component of the space.

      The proper placement of an organ is acoustically crucial, and for most organ music a resonant room with three seconds or more of reverberation time is desirable. Organs having pipes that are installed in deep chambers adjoining the room occupied by the listeners, or placed in an acoustically “dead” environment, are likely to lack musical vitality. Fully exposed pipes without encasement, seen in many mid-20th-century organs, may produce a raw, unfocused sound.

      The simplest type of organ has one keyboard, or manual, and one pipe to each key. The pipes, supported vertically by a rack, stand in a row, or rank, on an airtight chest that is supplied with wind from bellows or a rotary blower. While rotary blowers driven by electric motors are highly efficient and tireless, the turbulence and inflexible pressure of their air flow can adversely affect the tone of the pipes. Many organ builders and players, especially of smaller instruments, therefore prefer hand-pumped bellows, which are responsive to musical demands if close coordination exists between the player and the pumper.

      Under each pipe is a valve, or pallet, connected by a system of cranks and levers to its respective key. A reservoir, loaded by weights or springs to maintain sufficient wind pressure, is ordinarily interposed between the wind generator and the wind-chest. This reservoir has a safety valve that operates to relieve excessive pressure when the reservoir becomes full.

      The pitch of each note is determined by the length of its pipe; the longest pipe emits the deepest note, the shortest pipe the highest note. If two comparable pipes sound an octave apart, the effective length of the higher-pitched pipe is exactly half that of the lower-pitched.

      Since the tone of a pipe sounding on a constant pressure of wind is immutable, both as to quality and loudness, the expressive potential of an organ with only one pipe to each key is limited. All but the smallest portable organs, therefore, have at least three ranks, or sets, of pipes, and large church and auditorium organs may have 100 or more ranks. The pallet controlled from each key admits wind to all the pipes belonging to that key; but, in order that the organist may be able to use any of the ranks of pipes, alone or in combination, an intermediate mechanism is provided by which he may stop off any rank or ranks. From this function the control by whose operation the ranks are stopped off has come to be known in English as a stop, a term also used loosely for each rank of pipes.

Stop and key mechanisms
      The operative part of the stop mechanism lies between the pallet and the foot holes of the pipes. It normally consists of a strip of wood or plastic running the full length of each rank of pipes. In it is drilled a series of holes, one of which registers exactly with the foot hole of each pipe. The perforated strip, or slider, is placed in a close-fitting guide in which it may be moved longitudinally. When it is moved a short distance, so that its holes no longer register with the pipes, wind is cut off to that rank, even when the organist opens the pallets by means of the keys. Wind-chests in which the stops operate in this way are called slider chests. Other ways of working the stops will be referred to later; but the simple, reliable slider chest was in almost universal use before the 20th century. The slider is connected to the console by a system of levers and cranks, and it terminates in a knob that the organist pulls outward to bring the stop into play or pushes in to silence it. The name of the particular rank governed by the stop is usually engraved on the knob or appears on a label next to it. An organ's tonal specifications are customarily defined by a list of the names of its ranks and their respective pitches.

      Often the organist needs to play two or more interweaving, contrasted melodic lines, to give prominence to a melody against a quieter accompaniment (polyphony), or to play loud and soft passages in rapid succession. None of these effects can be achieved on an organ with one manual, as so far described. For this reason, organs of more than about seven or eight stops usually have two manuals, each controlling its separate wind-chest and stops. Each manual department is self-contained, so that the organ is really a composite instrument. By prearranging the stops on the manuals, the organist may perform in any of the three ways mentioned above. The organist, therefore, may vary the sounds produced in one or both of two ways: by changing the stops on the manuals being played or by leaving the stops as they are and changing from one manual to another.

      Since the 18th century organists have had yet a third way of controlling the volume of sound. The pipes of one or more manuals may be enclosed in a box, one side of which consists of hinged and movable shutters (similar to Venetian blinds) that are connected to a pedal at the console. By opening and closing the shutters, the sound from the stops of the manual concerned is made louder or softer. Such enclosures are called swell boxes. In pursuit of still greater expressivity, organists since the 16th century have often employed an accessory called a tremulant, which by repeatedly interrupting the flow of wind to the wind-chest creates a pulsation in the tone of the pipes.

      Since the 14th century, one department of the organ has commonly been played from a keyboard controlled by the organist's feet. The pedal department is basically like the manual departments but controls predominantly longer pipes. Modern organs normally have pedal keyboards of up to 32 notes.

      The organist sometimes wishes to combine the stops of two different manuals or to couple one or more of the manuals to the pedals. This is effected by a simple mechanism, called a coupler, that is controlled at the console.

      Certain combinations of stops on each manual are more commonly needed than others; in order that these combinations can be readily available, the console may be provided with several short pedals disposed above the pedal keyboard, or pedalboard. Each of these short pedals, called combination (or composition) pedals, is connected to one commonly needed combination of stops. When a combination pedal is depressed, the stops connected to it are drawn on, and any others that are already drawn are pushed off.

      In the simplest mechanical action, the connection from key to pallet is by a series of cranks, rollers, and levers that transmit motion horizontally and vertically from keyboard to wind-chest. The overall distance may be considerable, and the main distance is bridged by trackers, slender strips of wood, metal, or plastic, which are kept in constant tension. Adjustment screws are employed to take up slack occasioned by wear and changes of humidity.

      The mechanism of the organ as described so far is entirely mechanical, and such organs, including the great majority of those built before the late 19th century, are said to have tracker action. Tracker action is also used in many modern organs, especially those built according to historical principles. Many organists prefer tracker action to all other forms because it affords superior sensitivity of touch. Organs may, however, have pneumatic, direct electric, or electropneumatic action, although these actions result in a loss of sensitivity and responsiveness. In very large organs with tracker action, considerable strength may be necessary to depress the keys. Also, where the layout of the building is inconvenient and the departments of the organ have to be widely separated, tracker action is not practicable. To overcome these difficulties, especially with the object of lightening the touch, other forms of action were devised.

      The first effective system was developed in the 1830s by Charles Spackman Barker, an Englishman. It consisted of a series of small, high-pressure pneumatic bellows or motors, one attached to each key of the main manual at the console. When a key was depressed, compressed air was admitted to the motor, which, in turn, operated the tracker action. Lacking encouragement at home, Barker went to France, where the great French builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll employed the Barker lever almost exclusively from 1840 on.

      Later, the trackers were supplanted by lead tubes, and the connection from key to pallet was solely by compressed air traveling through these tubes. This system was called tubular pneumatic action. At its best, it was remarkably effective, being reliable, long-lived, reasonably silent in action, and perfectly prompt in operation. At anything but its best, it was none of these things, and its worst fault usually lay in sluggish operation. Tubular pneumatic action is almost never used in modern times.

      As early as 1860, electric action was used experimentally, and it came into wide use at the end of the 19th century. Direct electric action, in which an electromagnet pulls the pallet open, is sometimes used, but a combination of electric and pneumatic mechanism is more general. In this system the depression of a key completes an electrical circuit, which energizes an electromagnet, allowing wind to enter a pneumatic motor attached to the wind-chest, and this motor opens the pallet. The stops may be operated in exactly the same way, but, where they are operated electrically, the sliders are often replaced by a series of valves, one to each pipe. The organ is then said to have a sliderless chest, and the most usual type is the pitman chest, so called because it contains a type of floating valve called a pitman. This action is commonly known as electropneumatic.

      The combination pedals can also be operated electropneumatically. They are usually supplemented by a series of buttons, or pistons, placed below each manual, where they are conveniently operated by the organist's thumbs. The pistons may easily be made adjustable so that the organist can quickly alter the combination of stops controlled by each one.

      A compromise has been used successfully with tracker action for each department, with the coupler action operated electrically. This arrangement has considerable merit, since the coupling together of three or four manuals with tracker action results in a very heavy touch. Electric stop action may also be combined with tracker key action, enabling the use of electric (including solid-state) combinations—an invaluable aid in quickly changing groups of stops, especially in larger instruments.

Flue pipes
 There are two main categories of organ pipes: flue pipes and reed pipes. Flue pipes (made either of wood or metal; their construction is basically similar in principle) account for about four-fifths of the stops of an average organ. Figure 1—> shows a front view and a vertical section of the most typical sort of metal flue pipe. The pipe consists of three main parts: the foot, the mouth, and the speaking length.

      The pipe stands vertically on the wind-chest, and wind enters at the foot hole. The foot is divided from the speaking length by the languid, a flat plate; the only airway connection between the foot and the speaking length is a narrow slit called the flue. The wind emerges through the flue and strikes the upper lip, producing an audible frequency, the pitch of which is determined by and amplified in resonance by the speaking length of the pipe. A pipe of this kind is, in fact, identical in principle with a recorder or a tin whistle; but, whereas they have holes along the speaking length, which the player covers and uncovers with his fingers to secure the notes of the musical scale, in an organ there is a separate pipe for each note.

      The tone of a pipe is determined by many factors, including the pressure of the wind supply, the size of the foot hole, the width of the flue, the height and width of the mouth, and the scale, or the diameter of the pipe relative to its speaking length. The material of which the pipe is made also exerts an influence; it may be an alloy of lead and tin, wood, or, more rarely, pure tin or copper, and for the bass pipes zinc. The pipes may also vary in shape, a common variant being an upward taper in which the pipe is smaller in diameter at the top than at the mouth. Or, the top of the pipe may be completely closed by a stopper. Such a pipe is said to be stopped; a stopped pipe sounds an octave (overtone) lower in pitch than an open pipe of the same speaking length.

      Open pipes of large diameter are said to be of “large scale,” and open pipes of small diameter are said to be of “small scale.” Large-scale pipes produce a fluty or foundational quality of tone that is free from the higher harmonics (the numbered series of partials, or component tones). Small-scale pipes produce a bright quality of tone that is rich in harmonics, recalling bowed strings. Stopped pipes can be particularly foundational in tone, and they favour the odd-numbered at the expense of the even-numbered partials. Tapered pipes are somewhere between stopped and open pipes in tone quality.

      Flue pipes are tuned by increasing or decreasing the speaking length. In the past, several methods of tuning (tuning and temperament) were employed, but in modern times this is often done by fitting a cylindrical slide over the free end of the speaking length and sliding it up and down, lengthening or shortening the pipe as required. In stopped pipes the stopper is pushed farther down to sharpen the pitch or is pulled upward to lower it.

      The pipe maker thus broadly fixes the type of tone that a pipe will produce; but this is further controlled within fairly wide limits by the wind pressure and, finally, by the voicer, who adjusts the tone of each pipe by manipulating the foot hole, flue, and upper and lower lips. The attack of the note may also be greatly influenced by cutting a series of small nicks in the edge of the languid. Heavy nicking, commonly practiced in the early 20th century, produces a smooth and sluggish attack. Light nicking or no nicking, as used up to the 18th century and in some more advanced modern organs, produces a vigorous attack, or chiff, somewhat like tonguing in a woodwind instrument. If not excessive, this chiff enhances the vitality and clarity of an organ. The voicer is the artist upon whom the ultimate success of any organ depends. The tonal designer or architect is hardly less important, however; it is he who decides upon the choice of stops, their disposition in the organ, and the scales to be followed by the pipe maker. A completely successful organ depends upon the effective cooperation of designer and voicer.

Reed pipes
      Organ reeds were probably originally copied from instrumental prototypes. A reed stop may have a beating reed like that of a clarinet or a free reed (a type discussed below in connection with reed organs).

      The shallot of a beating reed pipe is roughly cylindrical in shape, with its lower end closed and the upper end open. A section of the wall of the cylinder is cut away and finished off to a flat surface. The slit, or shallot opening, thus formed is covered by a thin brass tongue that is fixed to the upper end of the shallot. The tongue is curved and normally only partially covers the shallot opening. But, when wind enters the boot, the pressure of the wind momentarily forces the tongue against the shallot, completely closing the opening. Immediately, the elasticity of the brass asserts itself, and the tongue reverts to its curved shape, thus uncovering the opening. This process is repeated rapidly. The frequency of the pulsations of air that enter the shallot is determined by the effective length of the reed and, in turn, determines the pitch of the note. Thence, the pulsations pass out into the tube, or resonator, which further stabilizes the pitch and decides the quality of the note. Most reed resonators (resonator) have a flared shape. As in flue pipes, a wide scale favours a fundamental tone, and a narrow scale favours a bright tone. Cylindrical resonators produce an effect similar to that of stopped flue pipes, the note being an octave lower than the equivalent flared pipe and the tone favouring the odd partials. Some reed pipes, such as the vox humana, have very short resonators of quarter or eighth length. Pipes the resonators of which have no mathematical relationship to the pitch are known as regals; regal stops were popular in the 17th century, particularly with the North German school, and their use has been revived in modern times. Their short resonators have varying and peculiar shapes, which produce a highly characteristic snarling tone; they can be difficult to keep in tune.

      Reed pipes are tuned by moving the tuning wire, thus shortening or lengthening the tongue. As in flue pipes, the scale and shape of the resonator largely determine the quality of tone to be produced; but the wind pressure, the shape and size of the shallot, and the thickness and curvature of the tongue also have important influence. The tongues may also be weighted with brass or felt; this weighting produces a smoother quality of tone, especially in the bass notes.

Organ stops (stop)
      It has already been explained that the pitch of any pipe is proportional to its length. Most modern organs have a manual compass of five octaves, from the second C below middle C to the third C above; an open pipe sounding the low C is about 8 feet (2.5 metres) in speaking length (64 vibrations per second). The shortest pipe in the same rank, or stop, is thus about 3 inches (8 centimetres) long (2,048 vibrations per second). While large- and small-scale ranks often imitate the tones of flutes and bowed strings respectively, and are named accordingly, the most characteristic tone of the organ is produced by its diapason, or principal, stops. These are of medium scale (usually about 6 inches diameter at the 8-foot open pipe) and moderate harmonic development—i.e., neither particularly dull nor bright. Such a tone quality becomes boring if heard for a long time. Also, when greater power is required, there is a distinct limit to what can be done by adding more stops of unison pitch. From the earliest times, stops, especially the principals, were arranged in choruses, and the principal chorus is the very backbone of any organ.

      A chorus consists of stops of roughly similar quality and power but at a variety of pitches. A unison principal is known as principal 8 foot because of its longest (8-foot) pipe, and the figure 8 appears on the stop knob or tablet (rocking tablets are often used in place of knobs with electric action) at the console to give an indication of its pitch. The first step toward a chorus is to add a stop sounding an octave above 8-foot ranks (i.e., at octave pitch), the largest pipe of which is therefore 4 feet long. Next comes a 2-foot stop, while the suboctave pitch is represented by a 16-foot stop. The top pipe of a 2-foot stop has a speaking length of only three-quarters of an inch, and this is about the practical upper limit. Nevertheless, an organ with nothing higher in pitch than a 2-foot stop would be lacking in brilliance, especially in the lower parts of the compass.

      From the earliest times, organs have, therefore, been supplied with what are known generically as mixture stops, which have several high-pitched pipes to each note. But, since, for example, a 1-foot rank could not be carried right up to the top note, it breaks back an octave at some convenient point in the compass. Ranks pitched even higher will break back more than once. Thus, in the bass, a mixture adds definition to the slow-speaking, low-pitched pipes; in the treble, where the small pipes tend to be lacking in power, it duplicates the unison and octave ranks. A mixture, therefore, helps to maintain a balance of power between bass and treble, while adding harmonious power of a kind that is completely peculiar to the organ and can be produced in no other way.

      Mixture stops also contain ranks sounding at pitches other than in octaves with the 8-foot principal. In chorus mixtures these sound at a fifth above the unison (e.g., G above C), although ranks sounding at a third above and even at a flat seventh (e.g., E and B♭ above C) and their respective octaves are also found; but these are best restricted to mixtures intended for somewhat special effects. The theoretical justification for these quint- (fifth) and third-sounding ranks is that they reinforce the natural upper partials of the harmonic series, but they were included in organs long before this was understood. The fact is that they were found to sound well, and large organs without mixtures and off-unison ranks have been generally unsuccessful. The colourfulness and vitality of organ music depend largely upon copious, artistically voiced mixtures.

      Off-unison ranks are also available as separate stops, mostly sounding at an interval of a 12th (an octave and a fifth; 2 2/3 feet), 17th (two octaves and a third; 1 3/5 feet), or 19th (two octaves and a fifth; 1 1/3 feet) above the unison. These are used melodically to colour the unison and octave stops, and they may be wide or narrow in scale. Such stops are known as mutation stops, as opposed to the mixtures, or chorus stops. Their use is essential for the historically (and therefore artistically) correct performance of organ music written before 1800 and of much modern music as well. After a period of disuse throughout the 19th century, they are again included in all but the smallest modern organs.

History of the organ to 1800
      The earliest history of the organ is so buried in antiquity as to be mere speculation. The earliest surviving record is of the Greek engineer Ctesibius (Ctesibius Of Alexandria), who lived in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. He is credited with the invention of an organ (hydraulis) very much on the lines of the single-manual, slider-chest organ already described, except for its wind supply, which made use of a principle that was most ingenious, though applicable only to a very small instrument. A piston pump operated by a lever supplied air to a reservoir; at its upper end, this reservoir communicated directly with the wind-chest. The reservoir, cylindrical in shape and with no bottom, was placed in a large drum-shaped container that was partly filled with water. As the reservoir became filled with air, the air would escape around its lower edge. In this way a more or less equal pressure of air was maintained inside the reservoir. This type of organ, called a hydraulus, may have served chiefly as a noisemaker or an engineering marvel. Little is known of any music that might have been played on it. A clay model of a hydraulus was discovered in 1885 in the ruins of Carthage (near modern Tunis, Tun.), and the remains of an actual instrument were found in 1931 at Aquincum, near Budapest.

      The development of the organ during the early Middle Ages is obscure, but by the 8th or 9th century it was being used in Christian churches, perhaps as a signal to call congregations to worship or in other nonliturgical roles. About 990 a famous organ in the cathedral at Winchester, Eng., was constructed, of which the monk Wulfstan left a famous but much garbled description. Literary accounts of early organs are often hyperbolic or metaphorical, but it appears from descriptions such as Wulfstan's that organs like that at Winchester were loud, somewhat clumsy to operate by modern standards, and probably unsuitable for all but the simplest music.

      The artistic history of the organ begins with the development of the chromatic keyboard (i.e., having 12 keys per octave). By 1361 the cathedral organ at Halberstadt, Ger., had three chromatic keyboards and pedals; the keys, however, were much wider than those of the modern keyboard. The modern size of keys was fairly generally established by the end of the 15th century. Although the Halberstadt organ had three manuals, it had no stop mechanism. The main keyboard controlled a huge mixture stop, and the other keyboards controlled reduced groups of stops.

      Ctesibius' slider arrangement was probably rediscovered some time in the early 15th century, and it became common soon after 1450. Reed stops began to appear at the same time, and by 1500 the organ had reached a stage in northern Germany in which all the important features of the modern organ were present. In the 16th century the organ began to develop an idiomatic repertoire distinct in style from that of instrumental ensembles, although written organ music of the Renaissance gives no clues as to how the different stops and keyboards were employed.

      During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, three diminutive forms of the organ were widely used. These were, first, the positive (positive organ) (in which category are included most chamber organs of the period), a small organ capable of being moved, usually by two men, either on carrying poles or on a cart. The second type, the portative (portative organ), was smaller still, with only one set of pipes and a manual of very short compass. It was carried by the player, who worked the bellows with one hand and played the keys with the other. Such instruments were used in processions and possibly in concerted instrumental ensembles. Between the last two in size was the third type, the regal, which usually had only one reed stop, a regal, as previously described.

      Since national styles of organ building vary widely and it is necessary to know something about them before the music of each nation can be performed intelligently, the more important styles must next be considered briefly. Of the basic medieval organ, prior to the development of national styles, little if any material survives, except in the old cathedral at Sion in Switzerland, where a large proportion of the seven-stop organ appears to date from about 1400. Although voiced on low wind pressure, the tone of the chorus is brilliant, colourful, and powerful.

      Italy is mentioned first because its organs developed to their maturity soon after 1500 and remained relatively unaltered until about 1800. The Italian organ had one manual and usually only an octave of pedal keys, which had no pipes of its own (except an occasional independent 16-foot contrabasso) but was coupled permanently to the manual. The manual chorus (ripieno) had the peculiarity that there was no collective mixture; all the ranks were drawn by separate stops. Each rank broke back an octave as it reached the 1 1/2-inch pipe. In addition, there were flute stops of 4-foot, 2 2/3-foot, and 2-foot pitch and a register called the fiffaro or voce umana (not to be confused with the French voix humaine or German vox humana, which are regals), a principal rank found only in the treble and tuned sharp so that when it is played together with the principale one hears an audible beat. It was the forerunner of the similarly constructed voix céleste stop popular in the 19th-century romantic organ. The scale of the classic Italian principale was not much different from its counterpart in the north, but its mouth was narrower, its voicing more delicate, and there was a notable lack of chiff. Reeds were not found until late in the 16th century and were never considered essential.

      The Iberian organ followed the Italian tradition, but, later, many reeds were added, most notably the trompetas reales (“royal trumpets”) and other horizontal (en chamada) reeds arrayed in fanlike projections from highly ornamental cases. These reeds were on extremely low wind pressure and achieved amazingly full sounds that filled the huge edifices.

      Like their Italian (Italy) counterparts, Spanish and Portuguese organs had only a few rudimentary pedals. The manuals, however, were divided, with keys up to middle C controlled by a draw knob to the left and keys up from C♯ by a draw knob to the right. This enabled the playing of a solo voice against an accompaniment on the same manual. A unique feature of Iberian churches was the presence of several separate and distinct instruments in one building, enabling interesting uses of antiphony, or contrasting masses of sound.

      From 1500 to 1800 Germany led the world in organ building and the composition of organ music. The organ builders reached the peak of their achievement about 1700 in the work of Arp Schnitger (Schnitger, Arp). Schnitger made organs with four manuals, pedals, and as many as 60 speaking stops, but he made some instruments with fewer than 30 speaking stops that are capable of dealing with the whole pre-Romantic repertoire. His was the organ of the high Baroque; but his countrymen Andreas and Gottfried Silbermann were equally the masters of the slightly later, more sophisticated style of the mid-18th century.

      Seventeenth- and 18th-century German organs were usually constructed on Werk-principle lines: each department of the instrument, or Werk, was separately cased, the Hauptwerk (main manual) in front of and above the player, with the pedals at each side and the Rückpositiv (auxiliary manual) behind on the gallery railing. Each department, including the pedal, had its own principal chorus, complete up to at least one mixture. All departments were roughly equal in power but varied in pitch, having, respectively, a 16-foot, 8-foot, and 4-foot preponderance (and 32-foot and 2-foot as well in larger instruments). Each manual department had a set of flutes and mutations that could be combined in a variety of ways to provide accompaniment and melody or the balanced but contrasting tone qualities essential for duet and trio passages. Although the pedal department consisted mainly of its principal chorus, it could be coloured for solo and obbligato passages by 2-foot flute and reed stops. The reeds were not much louder (loudness) than the flue stops, and the pedal 16-foot and 8-foot reeds were frequently drawn with the principal chorus for improved definition. When used in this way, they by no means caused the pedal to overwhelm the Hauptwerk. Such an instrument could deal with the requirements of all 15th- through 18th-century organ music, although its limited supply of manual reeds placed it at some disadvantage in French music of the period.

      As far as the manual departments are concerned, French organs differed little from the German type, but the principal choruses were generally larger in scale. The separate, large-scaled Tierce (1 3/5-foot) was also universal, and there were many cornet stops. These mixture stops consisted of five pipes to each note: a stopped unison (8-foot) and large-scale open 4-foot, 2 2/3-foot, 3-foot, and 1 3/5-foot. They extended only from middle C upward and were largely melodic in use. They were never drawn with the principal chorus (Plein Jeu) but generally were used with the reed chorus (Grand Jeu). Apart from this, the Plein Jeu, Grand Jeu, and Jeux de Mutation were seldom or never intermixed in French music.

      The pedal department of the French organ prior to 1700 was regarded largely as a sort of solo section that consisted usually of only 8- and 4-foot flutes and 8- and 4-foot trumpets. Only in the largest 18th-century French organs were 16-foot stops included, although there were often as many as three on the Grand Orgue (the manual analogous to the German Hauptwerk and the English Great Organ). When French organs had more than two manuals (Grand Orgue and Positif), the others (Récit and Écho) were usually of short compass; but if, as sometimes, there was a fifth manual, it was a Clavier de Bombardes, consisting of 16-, 8-, and 4-foot trumpets and a cornet. Unlike its German counterpart, the main case housed all divisions except the Positif, which was in its usual location on the gallery railing.

      French (France) organs were notable for their reeds, and the highly stylized French music of the 17th and 18th centuries calls for their frequent use. Surviving specimens in good order are rare; but unaltered, late 18th-century, four-manual organs survive at Poitiers cathedral (by the noted builder François-Henri Clicquot) and at Saint-Maximin, Provence (by Jean-Esprit Isnard).

      Few British organs before the Commonwealth (1649–60) had two manuals, and none had pedals. Mixtures and reeds seem to have been unknown, and mutations were restricted to a single 12th.

      After 1660 a new school rapidly grew up, and, although the two principal builders had both been abroad during the Commonwealth (Bernard Smith in Germany or Holland and Renatus Harris in France), their British work owed little to foreign influence. Only the Great Organ had a complete diapason chorus, and the Choir, or Chayre, organ usually extended upward only to a single two-foot. Almost every organ had a cornet, and the reeds in common use were trumpet, vox humana, and cremona, or krummhorn, with half-length, cylindrical resonators. There were no pedals, but the manual compass almost invariably extended to the third G below middle C. If there was a third manual, it consisted of a short-compass echo department in which all the pipes were shut up in a box to produce the echo effect. In 1712 the builder Abraham Jordan first fitted the echo box with shutters that were controlled by a pedal at the console; this arrangement produced what Jordan described as the swelling organ, but it was not to reach its full development until 150 years later; no 18th-century organ music demands a swell box. There are hardly any surviving examples of British (United Kingdom) instruments of this period in original condition.

Developments after 1800
      Because of the increasing interest in orchestral and operatic music, the organ fell out of favour during the 18th century, and by 1800 it survived only as an ecclesiastical drudge. From the middle of the 19th century, however, a revival took place under the leadership of two great builders, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (Cavaillé-Coll, Aristide) of France and Henry (“Father”) Willis (Willis, Henry) of England. In Britain during the first half of the 19th century, the introduction of pedals made it possible for the first time to play the organ music of J.S. Bach and his German contemporaries and predecessors. While retaining respectable vestiges of the classical chorus, Cavaillé-Coll and Willis developed the solo stops, especially reeds, and Willis, in particular, provided new aids to registration.

      Organists found that they could play effective arrangements of orchestral music on the new romantic (Romanticism)-style organ. Since orchestral music was popular and respectable orchestras very rare and other forms of public entertainment even more so, the organ suddenly regained an immense popularity hardly rivaled by that of the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was the acknowledged “king of instruments.” Organ builders naturally responded by making their instruments increasingly orchestral in character, culminating at the end of the 19th century in the work of the English builder Robert Hope-Jones (Hope-Jones, Robert), who entirely abandoned the chorus and mutation stops and relied instead upon diapasons of vast scale on high-pressure wind, with reeds to match, backed up by huge-scaled flutes, tiny-scaled string stops (with keen-sounding flue pipes), and powerful stops of his own invention called diaphones. Hope-Jones emigrated to the United States, and, although a semblance of classical design returned to Britain soon after 1900, his influence continued to be felt throughout the first half of the 20th century. This trend toward orchestral imitation discredited the organ as a musical instrument in the eyes of serious musicians and composers.

      The first organs in Britain's American (United States) colonies had been imported from England beginning about 1700. This was the period of the English Commonwealth, and the Puritan view of the “unsuitability” of an organ in church was inherited by the colonies. Only parishes of the Church of England (later known as the Protestant Episcopal Church) and Lutheran and Moravian churches in Pennsylvania would admit instruments. Another century elapsed before the New England Puritans did likewise. The only 18th-century builder of note was the German-American David Tannenberg (Tannenberg, David). Prominent American builders of the 1800s included Henry Erben, Elias and George Hook, George Jardine, William A. Johnson, J.H. and C.S. Odell, and Hilborne and Frank Roosevelt. Perhaps the inevitable end of the U.S. “romantic” era was reached in Ernest M. Skinner, who lived until the middle of the 20th century. In Canada, Joseph Casavant built his first organ in Quebec province in 1837. Two of his sons visited France in 1878–79 and brought back to North America the Cavaillé-Coll tradition.

      Albert Schweitzer (Schweitzer, Albert), organist, philosopher, and later medical missionary, wrote a booklet, Deutsche und französische Orgelbaukunst und Orgelkunst (“The Art of German and French Organ Builders and Players”), in 1906 outlining the inadequacies of the 19th-century organ for the performance of the music of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries. It was not until 1926, however, with Karl Straube, that the revival of 18th-century and earlier styles of organ building began. Straube, organist at Bach's Tomas Church in Leipzig, noted editor of Baroque organ works, and leading exponent of the Romantic works of Max Reger, renounced the Romantic approach to the organ and called for a return to Baroque principles. Certain historically minded organ builders in Germany, soon followed in other European countries and in North America, heeded Straube's call by constructing instruments based tonally and structurally upon Baroque models and by restoring old but altered tracker-action organs to their original specifications. While even the best of such specialized organs may not accommodate large-scale works by Romantic and later composers, their musical qualities and sensitivity to the player's touch render them artistically superior to unwieldy all-purpose organs, some of which have more than 150 ranks.

      The late 20th century has seen a decline in production of pipe organs, with several large manufacturers going out of business in the United States. However, small firms building highly refined tracker-action instruments have proliferated. Increasingly, their organs adopt tuning systems other than equal temperament, pitches higher or lower than usual, short-octave keyboards, and other retrospective features that allow performers to re-create organ music of the 16th through 18th centuries in ways that would have been familiar to composers of those times.

      The term reed organ normally refers to a keyboard instrument in which sound is produced by free reeds. Accordions and concertinas are examples of small, hand-held reed organs. Free reeds are thin, flexible strips of metal, usually brass, that are secured at one end over or under close-fitting openings in plates that are mounted over a wind-chest. Suction or wind pressure causes the free end of the reed to vibrate in and out of its aperture when its key is depressed to open a valve, or pallet, in the wind-chest. The pitch of each reed is determined by its length, though tuning can be accomplished by thinning or weighting the reed. No resonator is required to modify the tone quality, which is affected chiefly by the shape, thickness, resilience, and curvature of the reed.

      It is not known when the free reed was first introduced to Europe from Asia, where as early as 1100 BC free reeds were incorporated into mouth organs such as the Chinese sheng. The sheng itself was known in Europe by 1777, by which time free reeds had already appeared in experimental organs. The tuning stability, small size, and low cost of free reeds were quickly recognized as virtues, and by the early 19th century small organs using free reeds in place of or in addition to pipes and with bellows pumped by the player's feet were being manufactured in Europe and the United States. Occasionally free reed stops appeared as an adjunct to pianos and in mechanical instruments such as Johann Nepomuk Maelzel's panharmonicon, first exhibited in Vienna in 1804.

      Because of their simplicity, portability, and ease of maintenance, by the mid-19th century reed organs had become popular domestic instruments, rivaling the piano in numbers though not in quality or quantity of repertoire. In churches and other institutions, especially less affluent ones in rural areas, reed organs with up to three manuals, a pedal keyboard, and five or more sets of reeds often served in place of costlier pipe organs. The versatile and expressive harmonium (a compact reed organ patented in 1842 by the Frenchman Alexandre-François Debain and later developed by others) attracted the efforts of major composers such as Antonín Dvořák and Cesar Franck.

      While European reed organs generally operated with wind under pressure (supplied by feeder-bellows), a type that employed suction to sound the reeds was developed in the United States, notably in New England, where seraphines, lap organs, and melodeons (as some varieties were called) were patented and manufactured in great numbers after about 1830. In 1847, Emmons Hamlin, an employee of the George A. Prince melodeon factory in Buffalo, N.Y., greatly improved the tonal quality of free reeds by bending them in various ways; the Boston firm that Hamlin founded with Henry Mason in 1854 became an international leader in producing “cabinet organs” of modest size.

      Although reed organs continued to be manufactured into the 20th century and were occasionally employed in ensemble music by serious composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, they suffered from defects such as sluggish response, cloying tone, and limited expressive capability. In the face of unrelenting competition from cheap upright pianos (which they often resembled in appearance) and, later, from electronic instruments, reed organ production declined in the second quarter of the century, though fine old examples in playable condition remain numerous. Production of small reed organs has continued in India, where they provide drone accompaniments for, for example, sitar music.

Cecil Clutton Laurence Elliot Libin

Additional Reading

Development of the keyboard, the clavichord, and the harpsichord
Frank Hubbard, Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (1965, reissued 1976), clarifies the history of the instrument and the techniques of earlier harpsichord makers; Raymond Russell, The Harpsichord and Clavichord, 2nd ed. (1973), offers a general history, less technical than Hubbard's, illustrated with excellent photographs; Donald H. Boalch, Makers of the Harpsichord and Clavichord, 1440–1840, 2nd ed. (1974), presents known data on all makers whose names have survived as well as the locations of their extant instruments; Edwin M. Ripin (ed.), Keyboard Instruments: Studies in Keyboard Organology, 1500–1800, 2nd rev. ed. (1977), collects articles on specialized topics, including Italian, Flemish, and English harpsichords, 15th-century instruments, and the Geigenwerck; Franz J. Hirt, Stringed Keyboard Instruments, 1440–1880 (1968; originally published in German, 1955; reissued with parallel English and German text, 1981), is a splendid picture book with interesting but not always reliable supporting text; Wolfgang Zuckermann, The Modern Harpsichord: Twentieth Century Instruments and Their Makers (1969), remains a standard work, though it is unreliable for historical information and technical aspects of instrument design and building; Willi Apel, “Early History of the Organ,” Speculum, 23(2):191–216 (April 1945), gives an excellent account, especially useful for the details on the evolution of the keyboard; Edwin M. Ripin et al., The New Grove Early Keyboard Instruments (1989; also published as Early Keyboard Instruments), is a collection of previously published materials. See also Howard Schott, Playing the Harpsichord (1971); and John Paul, Modern Harpsichord Makers (1981).

The piano
Rosamond E.M. Harding, The Piano-Forte: Its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851, 2nd ed. (1978), is a standard work in the field, with excellent diagrams; Alfred J. Hipkins, A Description and History of the Pianoforte and of the Older Keyboard Stringed Instruments (1896, reprinted 1977), is a classic that has never been superseded as a brief account of the subject; Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (1954, reprinted 1990), surveys all keyboard instruments, their music, and their place in society—the author's bias in favour of the modern piano makes the book less reliable for details on instruments before 1840; Dieter Hildebrandt, Pianoforte, a Social History of the Piano (1988; originally published in German, 1986), is a much later similar work, focusing on the cultural imagery of the 19th century; Daniel Spillane, History of the American Pianoforte: Its Technical Development, and the Trade (1890, reissued 1969), remains a standard work on American piano building; William Braid White, Piano Tuning and Allied Arts, 5th rev. ed. (1946, reprinted 1964), is the standard technician's manual in America; Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History, rev. ed. (1990), is valuable for later developments; David Wainwright, The Piano Makers (1975), concentrates on British manufacturers. See also Edwin M. Good, Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos: A Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert Grand (1982).Edwin M. Ripin Laurence Elliot Libin

The organ
Austin Niland, Introduction to the Organ (1968), is, as its name implies, a good introduction to the subject from a British point of view; in a similar vein, very practical, but from a continental approach, is Hans Klotz, The Organ Handbook (1969; originally published in German, 7th ed., 1965). The classic work on the subject is Edward J. Hopkins and Edward F. Rimbault, The Organ, Its History and Construction, 3rd ed. (1877, reprinted in 3 vol., 1987); less complete, but more general and contemporary coverage is given in William Leslie Sumner, The Organ, 4th rev. ed. (1973, reprinted 1981). Peter Williams, The European Organ, 1450–1850 (1966, reissued 1978), is a thorough history of continental organs. Poul-Gerhard Andersen, Organ Building and Design (1969; originally published in Danish, 1956), emphasizes architecture and the organ's relation to it. National schools are discussed in Cecil Clutton and Austin Niland, The British Organ, 2nd rev. ed. (1982), post-revival; Fenner Douglass, The Language of the Classical French Organ (1969); and William Harrison Barnes, The Contemporary American Organ, 9th ed. (1971), heavy on mechanics with drawings. Orpha Ochse, The History of the Organ in the United States (1975, reprinted 1988), is a comprehensive study of American builders; Robert F. Gellerman, The American Reed Organ: Its History, How It Works, How to Rebuild It (1973), cites the most important patents; William H. Armstrong, Organs for America: The Life and Work of David Tannenberg (1967), deals with the 18th-century German immigrant builders. A fascinating book on portatives, positives, and regals is Michael I. Wilson, The English Chamber Organ: History and Development, 1650–1850 (1968). Peter Williams, A New History of the Organ from the Greeks to the Present Day (1980), covers the development of the instrument in all countries and over 2,000 years. Other informative monographs include Barbara Owen, The Organ in New England: An Account of Its Use and Manufacture to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1979); Robert B. Whiting (comp.), Estey Reed Organs on Parade: A Pictorial Review (1981); and John Allen Ferguson, Walter Holtkamp, American Organ Builder (1979).Cecil Clutton Laurence Elliot Libin

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