From the Clavichord to the Modern Piano - Part 1 of 2

you what we have here is a display of three historic and one modern keyboard instruments we've got a harpsichord over here on a late 18th century style piano over here and a small double strung clavichord here and then of course a modern Hamburg Steinway they make them in New York they also make them in Hamburg Germany and I thought it would be a great idea just to see the relative size of the instruments especially to see how much the piano has grown from this piano to the one right to my left arm it would probably be a good idea maybe start though by looking at the clavichord now this is the oldest stringed keyboard instrument we know of we see pictures of clavichord in the late Middle Ages and we know that these instruments were popular in one form or another straight up to around the Year 1800 and after the instrument I have right here is a replica of a German clavichord made about 1600 and the sound is very small the clavichord was never meant to be a public instrument was meant to be a private instrument to be played alone or for the listening pleasure of a small number of your best friends and maybe a very small voice could sing with it as you can see the clavichord is just a rectangular box with strings in it if I open it up like this I could put a book of music here if I wanted to and on this instrument there are two strings for every note but there's a catch there and that that means that some of the keys share the same set of strings and for that reason we call it a fredita clavichord um just like frets on a guitar where several notes are gotten from one string for example F F sharp and G are all gotten from the same stream that gives us to be sure some disadvantages you can't play those notes together but the older music the require them what it does give us advantage wise is that it makes for less strings to tune and also for less tension on this resonating box so the sound from the soundboard here is a lot freer and it sounds like this instruments like this were popular from the late Middle Ages all the way to almost after 1800 when historical keyboard instruments like the ones we have here today kind of went into oblivion but this instrument also could come in larger sizes as time went on so the clavichord x' that we have in the 1700s are proportionately bigger than the ones we had about 1600 or so here we have a harpsichord and it has one keyboard many people have probably seen harpsichords that have two keyboards that really just adds another set of strings to the instrument and fulfills different expressive requirements but fundamentally it's all the same now unlike the clavichord whose action you could see a second to go striking the strings um I'm a harpsichord it plucks the string just like you might do on a guitar and to that end harpsichords action looks like this just like the clavichord every notes got two choirs of strings except here every notes got its own two independent set of strings there's no such thing as a Fred at harpsichord and when I play a key it levers up a device here called a jack just like Jack and Jill and when I take that Jack out in it is a flexible tongue and in that tongue is a tiny little guitar pick which we call a plectrum and that tongue is flexible it can move so that after I've played my note that plectrum can fall back over the string now you'll hear sort of a putt ah there the strings are staggered and that makes for a more sensitive touch on the harpsichord if you had to muscle down both strings at the same time the sound wouldn't be as attractive and the player wouldn't have as much control but these instruments date as far as we know from the end of the 15th century that's the 1400s all the way to the 1790s when the harpsichord pretty well went out of fashion and was only brought back into fashion in the 20th century the stringing in this instrument is brass all the way through as is the case with the clavichord and this is a sort of an interesting instrument it was made by a man named Willard Martin from Bethlehem Pennsylvania and he made it from plans that come from the year 1617 a French fellow named Mersenne designed this instrument we don't know whether he ever built it or not but enough instruction existed that Martin could reconstruct this instrument in the 20th century this particular one was made in Pennsylvania in 1997 and harpsichords can vary from a kind of a delicate loot like whisper to a pretty brilliant sound I'll play you a little 16th century dance from the Antwerp dance book of 1587 you'll get an idea of what it sounds like you you it said sometimes that ladies who are less than svelte should dress and slimming black we have no better example of that than the modern grand piano and the piano as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Joseph Haydn or the young Ludwig van Beethoven knew it this piano is a replica of two different instruments one lives in a museum Nuremberg in Germany the other one lives in a museum in Vienna and they were both made by a man named Anton vaulters spelled just like Walter he was the one who made the instrument that Mozart finally bought as you can see this instrument has 58 notes whereas the modern piano has 88 notes so we're 30 notes gone but this has everything you need to play all the Classical period music straight up to almost middle period Beethoven that's for historical time probably around 1800 and this is indeed a piano though I should show you the action to give you an idea of the difference

Channel: BaroqueBand

Views: 2,169,418

Rating: 4.9268141 out of 5

Keywords: clavichord, harpsichord, fortepiano, modern piano, baroque, baroque band, david schrader

Id: 4uCCw_hmILA

Length: 7min 53sec (473 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2010

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Also watch part 2