Harpsichord

[1] The term denotes the whole family of similar plucked-keyboard instruments, including the smaller virginals, muselar, and spinet.

By the 16th century, harpsichord makers in Italy were making lightweight instruments with low tension brass stringing.

Their harpsichords used a heavier construction and produced a more powerful and distinctive tone with higher tension steel treble stringing.

Twentieth-century efforts to revive the harpsichord began with instruments that used piano technology, with heavy strings and metal frames.

Starting in the middle of the 20th century, ideas about harpsichord making underwent a major change, when builders such as Frank Hubbard, William Dowd, and Martin Skowroneck sought to re-establish the building traditions of the Baroque period.

The other end of the key lifts a jack (a long strip of wood) that holds a small plectrum (a wedge-shaped piece of quill, often made of plastic in the 21st century), which plucks the string.

As the key reaches its rest position, a felt damper atop the jack stops the string's vibrations.

Tuning pins are held tightly in holes drilled in the pinblock or wrestplank, an oblong hardwood plank.

Proceeding from the tuning pin, a string next passes over the nut, a sharp edge that is made of hardwood and is normally attached to the wrestplank.

Volume is increased when the mechanism of the instrument is set up by the player (see below) so that the press of a single key plucks more than one string.

The mechanism of the instrument, called "stops" (following the use of the term in pipe organs) permits the player to select one choir or the other.

This is normally heard by the ear not as two pitches but as one: the sound of the higher string is blended with that of the lower one, and the ear hears the lower pitch, enriched in tonal quality by the additional strength in the upper harmonics of the note sounded by the higher string.

Depending on choice of keyboard and coupler position, the player can select any of the sets of jacks labeled in "figure 4" as A, or B and C, or all three.

In contrast, low C and D, both roots of very common chords, are sorely missed if a harpsichord with lowest key E is tuned to match the keyboard layout.

When scholars specify the pitch range of instruments with this kind of short octave, they write "C/E", meaning that the lowest note is a C, played on a key that normally would sound E. In another arrangement, known as "G/B', the apparent lowest key B is tuned to G, and apparent C-sharp and D-sharp are tuned to A and B respectively.

The wooden case holds in position all of the important structural members: pinblock, soundboard, hitchpins, keyboard, and the jack action.

A clavicytherium is a harpsichord with the soundboard and strings mounted vertically facing the player, the same space-saving principle as an upright piano.

In the Low Countries, an ottavino was commonly paired with an 8' virginals, encased in a small cubby under the soundboard of the larger instrument.

[15] While these were mostly intended as practice instruments for organists, a few pieces are believed to have been written specifically for the pedal harpsichord.

However, the set of pedals can augment the sound from any piece performed on the instrument, as demonstrated on several albums by E. Power Biggs.

[16] The archicembalo, built in the 16th century, had an unusual keyboard layout, designed to accommodate variant tuning systems demanded by compositional practice and theoretical experimentation.

The great bulk of the standard repertoire for the harpsichord was written during its first historical flowering, the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Composers who wrote solo harpsichord music were numerous during the whole Baroque era in European countries including Italy, Germany, England and France.

Among the most famous composers who wrote for the harpsichord were the members of English virginal school of the late Renaissance, notably William Byrd (c. 1540–1623).

In France, a great number of highly characteristic solo works were created and compiled into four books of ordres by François Couperin (1668–1733).

Two of the most prominent composers of the Classical era, Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), wrote harpsichord music.

For both, the instrument featured in the earlier period of their careers,[citation needed] and was largely supplanted by the piano starting roughly in the late 1770s.

Under the influence of Arnold Dolmetsch, the harpsichordists Violet Gordon-Woodhouse (1872–1951) and in France, Wanda Landowska (1879–1959), were at the forefront of the instrument's renaissance.