Frownland

Great entry and a belated welcome back to you mate.

I know it's already been brought up, but you could even chalk western music theory back to ancient philosophers and mathematicians developing tuning systems prior to the relatively recent idea of equal temperament. Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and Boethius were huge in that sense. It may seem inconsequential since the differences in tuning systems are barely audible until you begin to play chords, but it was pretty impactful on the way instruments were made. Knowing what kinds of privileges and limitations old composers were working with in regards to instrumentation can help us understand/appreciate their music better imo. It would be cool to see an entry on the introduction of the piano/lute/harpsichord/violin/etc and their impact on classical music.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Trollheart

Sure, I'll bear that in mind. I just don't want to get too deep into the musical theory (wait till you see the entry on Gregorian Chant coming up!) as a) I'm not a musician so much of it doesn't make sense to me ("Counterpoint the underlying meaning of the metaphor?") and b) it can be quite dry and boring, but any insight you want to provide please do feel free to do so, and I'll be guided by you as a musician.

Hoping to keep it interesting while also informative; god some of it is so boring though. But that's it: you have to plod along and understand as much as you can if you want to get the real story out there.

Thanks for the welcome back; good to be back. Beware the curse of a thousand journals, heading your way!

Thanks for the compliments too. You might not realise it but it actually means a lot. Cheers.

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Trollheart

Going by the Book

In a time when liturgical and other spiritual music was the norm, if not the sum content of music, and as notation began to be understood and learned, musicians - pretty much this means mostly singers - had to read the music, and so books that helped with that were very important, many of them setting standards music still looks to and practices today. Some of them I have mentioned, but here’s a list.

Note: if anyone knows these works and thinks I’m doing a terrible job here describing them, you’re more than likely right. All I’m trying to do here is give a general and very basic sense of what they are or were about. This isn’t meant to be a deep discussion of Medieval age music textbooks. I only include these for the importance they had to the development of classical music - all music, indeed - and you’re of course free to read more about them or, if you so desire, tell me and everyone else about them here. I won’t be insulted, but neither will I apologise if I seem to have simplified them too much. I certainly don’t claim to be any sort of expert on these things.

Musica enchiriadis, written by unknown, approx 9th century. The first attempt to set down and establish rules for polyphony in western music.

Scolica enchiriadis, written by unknown, approx 9th century. A companion volume to Musica enchiriadis, a commentary on and discussion of same, with particular emphasis on the importance of mathematics in music.

De Musica, written by Johannes Cotto approx 1100. A practical guide for the working musician, it uses as its sources, among others, our friend Guido of Arezzo, whom we met at the beginning of this piece.

De Mensurabili Musica, written by Johannes de Garlandia, approx 1270. An important work that seeks to explain the idea of rhythm in music.

Ars Cantus mensurabilis, written by Franco of Cologne, approx 1250-1280. Written shortly after De Mensurabili Musica, it also concerned rhythm and was the first to suggest that musical notes could have their own durations, rather than rely on context with other notes.

Ars nova notandi, written by Philippe de Vrity, 1322. A treatise on music which ended up lending its name to the entire era.

The Montpellier Codex, written by unknown, 1300. A collection of over 300 polyphonic chants and songs, mostly motets. In addition to religious works the Codex also contains songs of French Courtly love, see further.

The Bamberg Codex, written by unknown, date unknown. Another collection of motets and chants, also containing two treatises on music. The Bamberg Codex is perhaps unique for the time, as it is not written only in Latin, but French also.

Las Huelgas Codex, written by unknown, 1300. A repertory of monophonic and polyphonic chants for the sisters of a Cistercian convent in Spain to sing. Using Franconian notation, it seems to blur some line where the Cistercian Order forbade the singing of polyphony, but the fact that the songs are only two-part motets might explain that. If you care.

Cantigas de Santa Maria, attributed to King Alfonso XII (1221-1284). A collection of over four hundred poems, every tenth one a hymn, set to music in the monophonic style with every single one mentioning the Virgin Mary.

The Ivrea Codex, written by unknown, 1370. A collection of chants, motets, masses and other spiritual songs, believed to have been compiled at Avignon.

Squarcialupi Codex, written by unknown, 1410-1415. A basic “guide to Italian composers and their music”, with folios of each composer and their works, a beautiful illuminated manuscript and the largest primary source of Italian music in their version of ars nova, the Trecento. Composers such as Francesco Landini, Bartolino da Padova, Andrea da Firenze and Donato da Cascia are just a few of the important Italian composers included along with their music.

The Rossi Codex, written by unknown, date unknown. Another large collection of music from the trecento period, with madrigals and ballatas. The larger section of the Codex is now at the Vatican library, and there seems to be some tenuous link between it and the Prince of Verona, who was the patron of Dante, which is cool.

The Chantilly Codex, written by unknown, 1350-1400. A collection of French courtly dances, motets, ballades and rondeaus, some very complex. All of the music in it is polyphonic, and there are some very clever examples of notation, with one, by French composer Baude Cordier, written to a “special lady”, written in the shape of a heart. Aah, bless.

The Old Hall Manuscript, written by unknown, 15th century. The greatest surviving example of English sacred music, mostly written for mass.



Genre-ally Speaking... (sorry)

Of course, there was no such thing as music genres in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, right?



If you think people did nothing else but stand around singing, and that there weren’t different styles of music, even back then,



Gregorian Chant

One of the earliest and simplest forms of music, Gregorian Chant (named after Pope Gregory I, even if historical evidence seems to suggest this to be a fallacy) featured nothing more than simple, monophonic singing by monks, created as it was for and by the Roman Catholic Church. Performed in Latin, or sometimes Greek, basically you’re talking hymns of praise here, aren’t you? The kind of thing you could only hear in churches and monasteries, as detailed at the beginning of this piece. Usually ensemble works for the mass, therefore liturgical (though not always, but always sacred) they were performed by choirs, usually of men and boys, sometimes men and women. Singing hymns, of course, goes right back to the time of Christ, and is mentioned many times, including when Jesus gathers his followers and Caiphas growls at the crowd to be silent, Jesus says if every tongue were silent the rocks and stones would cry out (or is that from Jesus Christ Superstar?) and hymns are sung at the Last Supper, to name but a few examples.

One assumes, too, that the likes of the Romans and the Greeks had their songs, the former more likely marching songs, songs of battle, and the latter probably in praise of their gods and poetry and the like, but that’s all by the by. People have been singing since they first appeared on this earth, probably. In terms of liturgical, organised music though, it seems Gregorian Chant was the first proper system, and though its practice has died out today (not surprising, given a) how few people attend church these days b) how the Church wants to be seen as more relevant, less rooted in the past and c) how few people understand Latin) it’s still occasionally used, and was even, as I briefly mentioned, and will again, revived in the last century by the rather unexpected channel of pop music.



Being the “music of the Church” or the “divine sound of God”, Gregorian Chant was used as a propaganda tool by, among others, the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, who ordered its dissemination across Europe in order to tighten the Church’s hold on power, this order carrying with it the sentence of death for disobedience. The sanctioned chant then spread further, to Scandinavia and into eastern Europe, until by the twelve and thirteenth century it was the official and only chant in town. As the first “proper” - or one might even say, I suppose, popular - music, Gregorian Chant was also responsible for the beginnings of music notation, much of this being again down to our good friend Guido d’Arezzo; note heads that were flat and square became more rounded and the use of a staff to “hold” the music came into practise.

The shock of 1994 was when an album of Gregorian Chant (entitled, with typical self-effacement and humility, Chant) by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos reached number three in the pop charts. Nobody knows why, though I suppose it could be the yearning to return to a simpler time, like staring out at the birds in a tree in your garden after spending hours arguing with your friends about which celebrity is doing what, or working on a book, or watching TV. Of course, it didn’t last, and was the most passing of fads, but it does show that, for a time, this music could still be popular - and in a secular way - almost eight hundred years after its heyday.

Ars Nova

We’ve already come across this, both in the timeline, where this new musical form gives its name to an entire era of music, and in the writings of, among others, Johannes de Muris and Phillippe de Vitry, and ars nova (new art) was essentially a move away from the monophonic compositions of Gregorian chant and other plainchant into a magical world of polyphony and new rhythms, which must at the time have seemed very exciting. It should of course be pointed out (and if I don’t someone will no doubt bring it up) that there was polyphonic music before ars nova, in the period known as ars antigua, covering the period approximately from 1170 to 1320, but the ars nova movement seems to have developed in the fourteenth century and to have moved the whole idea forward in leaps and bounds.

New rhythms, the polyphonic compositional techniques previously only available to sacred music now being applied to secular music, new notation: an exciting time for musicians, I’m sure - music became more expressive, more varied, more interesting. Let’s see who the movers and shakers were.


Phillippe de Vitry we have already covered, so our next composer is


Jehan de Lescurel (unknown, fl. 14th century)

As per usual, not exactly three volumes of information on this guy. In fact, the most interesting fact I can find about him is that it was once believed he was hanged for, ahem, crimes against women. Given that his name was quite common at that time though, it’s generally accepted this was an oopsie and that it was some other Jehan de Lescurel who danced in the air at the end of a rope. That’s good then. Other than that, he was a Frenchman, probably studied at Notre Dame and only seems to have got into the new music of polyphony later on, with most of his work monophonic. Yeah.


Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377 approx)

One thing I tend to do now when researching these guys is look to the right of the Wiki page. If there’s a decent length of scroll, I know there’s stuff to write about him. A short scroll means a few lines and that’s your lot. This one has a pretty long scroll so that’s good. Also, we have dates for his birth (approximate anyway) and death, which makes it easier to talk about him as an actual person who lived, and not just a charcoal line sketch.

Turns out he’s a big cheese in ars nova; phrases used include “immensely influential”, “most significant composer whose name is known” and “the most important poet and composer of the fourteenth century.” He even seems to have had an influence on Chaucer. It says here. Like Guido, our man Guillaume seems to have been named for the region from which he came, Machaut, which makes me wonder if this was standard practice in Medieval times? Could surely get a bit confusing, no? What it you had twenty Guillaumes, all born in the same area? Would they all be called Guillaume de Machaut? Or would parents advise each other when they had a Guillaume, so that they didn’t name their kid the same? More than likely though, it’s that he had a real name, lost to history, and this is just a handy way of identifying him.



Surviving through the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague that ravaged Medieval Europe in the fourteenth century and later, de Machaut composed the first complete setting of the Mass, but his secular works always seem to have been on the theme of courtly love - the only other form allowed by the times. This was chaste love, proper love, worshipping from afar and with great respect for the lady. In other words, no "you ma biatch" or any of that sort of thing. Presumably. He also wrote about 400 poems (these not intended for musical performance), many of which used allegory and dreams. He wrote a poetic chronicle of Peter I of Cyprus, which would often be read out during banquets at that country’s court. There is apocryphal evidence that de Machaut may have met Chaucer when both were taken prisoner at Calais, though this is certainly disputed.


Pierre (?) de Molins (fl. Mid-14th century)

So little is known about this lad that even his first name is a guess, and the entry calls him P. de Molins. Could be Percy for all I know, but they seem to think it was Pierre. Would anyone like to hazard a guess, perhaps even this month’s salary on what nationality he was? Seems he composed only two works, but those are important ones and the most popular of the fourteenth century. Does that make him the first rock star of the Middle Ages? Dunno. The pieces are a ballade (De ce que fol pense (that might translate to “it’s you I’m thinking about”, very Boyband for the time! Or not) and the rondeau Amis, tout de vis (“I see you, friends”?) but as usual we have the “no secure biographical information about him exists”, thanks a lot.

Interestingly, some scholars tried to ascribe the rondeau above to our old buddy Guillaume de Machaut, but this has been fiercely shot down, and quite right too, I say, as if I had a scooby-doo what I was talking about, but it sounds authoritative, doesn’t it? Does not this beard make me seem more distinguished? No? As you will then, sir!

Jehann Vaillant (fl. 1360-1390)

Tuning was the name of his game, and he wrote a treatise on it, though some people have claimed he was even in advance of the technique of Machaut. He composed a very popular piece called Par maintes foys which has imitation bird calls in it, possibly (though I couldn’t confirm) the first time such a thing had been attempted in music.


Grimace (fl. Mid to late 14th century)

Here we go again! Virtually nothing is known about his life save speculation yadda yadda yadda. Hell, they can’t even say for sure if he was French! Three of his works are contained in the Chantilly Codex, which is mentioned in the section before this, and surely he must have the funniest name, even for a Frenchman, in the Middle Ages. Wonder if there was anyone in that time with the name Smile or Frown? Hah. Enough levity. This is serious stuff. Maybe.

The similarity in his work to that of de Machaut seems to put them in the same sphere, though whether or not they ever met is not mentioned - how many Frenchmen can have been wandering around mid-fourteenth-century France, composing, writing, notating and generally creating musical forms while failing to bump into each other? Weird. Then again, the French are not exactly noted for their friendliness now are they? Probably just ignored each other.



I have this scene in my head, of two of these composers, both walking heads down, working on their material and colliding in the street. Conversation then goes thus:

Composer 1: “God bless you, pray have a care where you tread, sir! Cannot you see I am working on an important motet?”

Composer 2: “Hah! Peace be upon you, sir! Ah! Monophonic I see! Have you not woken up to the new polyphonic music yet, grandad?”

Composer 1: “You kids and your multi-part harmonies! God’s beauty is in single notes, sir! Single notes!”

Composer 2: “Were you not so old, I feel I would fain thrash you, sir, for such ignorance!”

Composer 1: “Oh indeed? You and what papal army, pray?”

etc.



But to return to serious subjects, In both of Grimace's four part works, A l’arme A l’arme and Des que buisson, each upper part shares a contrapuntal relationship with the tenor yeah you don’t care about that and neither do I. There’s certainly a lot of technical waffle on those pages; you could go blind just reading it. We have birdsong again cropping up (and let’s be honest here, birds were the original singers oh no wait, they didn’t come along till after the dinosaurs. But was that before or after we hopped up onto the scene to mess everything up? Which came first, the chicken or the human?) in one of Grimlock, sorry Grimace’s works, Des que buisson and as that’s meant to represent Spring arriving, it makes sense.

Another interesting thing about this possible Frenchman was his usage of battle motifs, particularly in A l’arme A l’arme (I assume that’s Army to Army?) where he uses battlecries and fanfares to represent war.

Francoise Andrieu (fl. Late 14th century)

No guarantee the guy’s first name was Francoise, as he’s usually just called F. Andrieu, but seemingly at least confirmed to be a Frenchman this time, there’s only one of his works left extant, but it is important, as it commemorates the passing of the man seen as the father of this whole style of music and indeed the era to which it gave its name, the G-Man, Guillaume de Machaut, and is seen to be the first example of a composer writing a tribute to another dead composer.

And once again the section begins with those annoyingly familiar words “nothing is known for certain about…” Gahhhh! The elegy he composed, Armes amours, was however based on a text by another pupil of de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, which I just wanted to mention because it sounds like this guy should definitely have had a moustache, and if he didn’t I’ll be real disappointed. What a cool nickname it would have been after all - Eustache “Moustache” Deschamps. Chortle. Seems there were over 1,500 lyrics in the poem (not entirely sure what constitutes a lyric in these terms, but it seems a lot) so if poor old G-Man had not already been dead, then sitting through that might well have finished him off anyway. Oh wait! I see now he was only “likely” French, so no confirmation, despite the opening lines. Well was he or wasn’t he? We’ll never know. Or care.

Incidentally, if anyone is wondering why I’m being so flippant, it’s because a) much of this stuff is tres boring and b) I find in general enthusiasts of classical music can tend to take themselves and it too seriously, the old stick-up-the-arse attitude, and I don’t hold with that. Well, I wouldn’t hold any stick once it’s been up someone’s ahhh where was I? Oh yeah. It can get really stuffy and formal, with far too much over-reverential praise for composers, and while of course they deserve the praise, it’s good I feel to also lighten the mood and poke gentle fun from time to time, and it makes it easier to read through all this, frankly, sterile and mind-numbingly tedious data in order to decide what to actually use, and how to use it.

If you think I’m being irreverent, I am, but not to give offence. I just have a weird sense of humour, and if you don’t like it, if you’re insulted by it or feel I’m not taking this seriously, let me tell you: research like this can fry your eyeballs and deaden your soul, so I take my fun where I can. There is, after all, no harm in it that I can see, and I’m not exactly worried about the families of guys dead nearly a thousand years coming after me, but if it offends you then maybe this is not the journal for you.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Nevertheless, much of the early history of classical music is without question tedious and boring, so let’s leave it there for a moment and explore another aspect of the genre, one without which, with one exception, classical music would not even exist, certainly not in the form we know it today and have done down through recent history.

Tools of the Composer’s Trade: The Musical Instruments that made Classical Music

That’s right: a composer could be the most accomplished in the world, able to write the most beautiful symphonies, concertos or operas, but if there were no musical instruments he would have been extremely restricted in how that music was to be disseminated to the world at large. While many composers wrote for an orchestra, the principle is the same. Without musical instruments to interpret his compositions, all we would have had would have been oral renditions, and they can get a bit tiresome.

So this section will celebrate, explain and relate the history of the major instruments that featured, and still do, in classical music. The violin. The cello. The organ. The oboe. The French horn. And of course, the piano. There’s a lot more than those few of course, but right now I’d like to start off with a distant relation of that last one, the piano. Its breathless, more impatient, hurried cousin, in fact; beloved of genteel ladies in the drawing rooms and parlours of the seventeenth, eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, it puts the rock in baroque, it’s

The Harpsichord

I’m not very musically inclined. When I tried to learn to play the keyboard I found it a challenge I really was not up to. So I’m not all that concerned really on the specifics, the workings of these instruments, how they operate or even how they’re played necessarily. I’m more interested in their history, their use in classical music, and how theyve helped to drive the advances (at the time) of the different ages of classical.

However, for those of you who are interested, leaving it to those much better suited to such explanations than I am, here’s an extract from the book The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord, edited by Mark Kroll:

The keyboard or manual, of which harpsichords often have two, consists of a set of levers to be pressed down in front so that the far end rises. Sound is produced by plucking the string with a plectrum traditionally cut from bird quill but occasionally of leather or metal (or plastic in most modern instruments), protruding from a small wooden tongue held by an axle in an upright slip of wood called a jack, which rests on the far end of the key lever. When the key is depressed, the jack is raised and the plectrum plucks the string. When the key is released, the falling tongue swivels to pass around the string and is returned to its resting position by a spring. A small cloth flag held in a slot at the top of the jack comes to rest on the string to damp it. A jackrail over the jacks limits their upward motion.

Harpsichords have the familiar wing shape from which the form of the modern grand piano was derived (see Figures 1.1, 1.3, 1.4, 1.7, 1.9, and 1.10). They may have only one choir (set of strings) but most often two or three, occasionally more. In terminology derived from organs, an 8-foot choir is at “normal” pitch, which historically could range from about a tone lower than modern a1 = 440 Hz to three-quarters of a tone above (i.e., with a1 sounding from about 385 to 475 Hz). A 4-foot choir sounds an octave higher than an 8-foot; a 16-foot sounds an octave lower (the designation “foot” will occasionally be omitted, and only the number used, in some references to registration). Each choir is plucked by one set of jacks, or occasionally two with different plucking points. Strings plucked closer to their midpoints sound rounder or flutier, while those plucked closer to one end sound brighter or more nasal.

A harpsichord’s major structural components are the walls (spine, tail, bentside, and cheekpiece); the bottom closing the entire underside of the instrument; the wrestplank; the nameboard; the guides to hold the jacks; the belly rail; the soundboard and often a soundhole in which a decorative rose is placed; and reinforcing inner supporting ribs under the soundboard and internal bracing of the walls.2

A “stop” or “register” consisting of a set of jacks can be turned off by moving its guide slightly to the right or left so that the plectra miss the strings as they rise. In many instruments, when a stop is off, dampers do not touch their strings, which are free to resonate sympathetically. Guides can be moved directly by hand, by stop levers on the wrestplank or protruding through the nameboard, or, exceptionally in historical instruments, by pedals or knee levers. In two-manual or “double” harpsichords, there is usually a provision to combine the two keyboards or their stops. This can be done by a shove coupler, in which the entire upper-manual keyboard (or occasionally, the lower manual) can be shoved back or pulled forward about 7 mm. In the shoved-back position, the back ends of the upper key levers are pushed up by upright “dogs” fixed to the lower-manual key levers. Another method of coupling is the dogleg jack, the front portion of which rests on the upper-manual key while a leg extends down from the jack to rest on the lower-manual key. When a dogleg stop is engaged, it can be played from both keyboards. A choir of strings may be provided with a buff (“lute” or “harp”) stop, usually consisting of pads of soft leather that can be moved to touch the strings, thus eliciting a pizzicato tone.


Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s go back in time and see first of all how this instrument came to be. We’re told the earliest reference to a harpsichord goes back to 1397 (whether the first model was built much before that or not I don’t know) and was of course based on the much older organ, both of which would later give birth to the modern piano. However one thing I did not know is that the design of the harpsichord derived from something called the psaltery (I’m assuming the “p” is silent, as in psalm, so it would be pronounced “salt-ery”?) which flourished in the Middle ages.

A psaltery was more of a harp than an organ, with metal strings and as opposed to a normal harp, often more than one string per tone, whatever that means. It dates all the way back to ancient Greece, so can surely be said to be one of the oldest musical instruments in existence, and seem often to be favoured by artists as the preferred instrument of angels. Because of the strings being made of metal (rather than catgut, as harp strings are) they were usually played with a plectrum, something all guitar players will be familiar with, rather than the fingers. Well, it would lend new meaning to the song “While My Guitar Gently Bleeds”, wouldn’t it? The psaltery gave birth in its turn to the likes of the dulcimer, and later the autoharp and zither, but overall, apart from some places like Mexico where it is still played, the psaltery died out in common usage around the early nineteenth century.

As we’ve come to learn by now, for the first say five hundred years of modern music, religion, worship and the Church were the ones making the music - and really, the only ones - so it’s no surprise to find that the first representation of a harpsichord is found on the altar of a church, in Germany, a place called Midden. It was originally called a clavicembalum (clavi being the Greek for key, hence the later clavier) and would go on to have various types, such as virginals, spinets and clavicytherium. It’s generally accepted that the inventor of what would become the traditional harpsichord was an Austrian physician called Hermann Poll (1370 - 1401), born in Vienna (appropriate, considering what a locus of music that city was to become), and while our proof, such as it is, for this honour comes from one solitary reference in a letter, given that up to then the chances of being able to name anyone as the inventor of a musical instrument were about zero, it’s the first real evidence we have of anyone being credited with the invention of one.

On a visit to Padua in Italy, and on his way to study medicine at the University of Pavia, Poll happened to run into a man called Lodovico Lambertacci. We don’t know if there was any connection between the two - there probably wasn’t - but Lambertacci asked Poll to deliver a cup to his son, who was also a student at the college. Lambertacci wrote to his son that Poll was a “young man of good conversation and good manners, a very ingenious man and inventor of a musical instrument he calls the clavicembalum.” Now surely this could ordinarily be discounted as Lambertacci had, as far as we know, no direct knowledge nor evidence of this instrument; he had not seen it with his own eyes, probably did not even know what it was. But here’s the thing.

Hermann Poll was not just a doctor, he was an astrologer, and forced to build his own mechanical devices in order to follow the movements of the heavens for the horoscopes on which so much of his profession depended. This is because there was no expertise in making these machines, leading to Poll and his ilk being likened to the innovators of their day, all but engineers and craftsmen as well as men of learning. So Poll would definitely have known how to build a harpsichord. His being chosen as the personal physician to King Rupert, Holy Roman Emperor from 1400 - 1410, shows he was at the very least a leading figure in his profession, and had the respect both of his colleagues and the nobility.

There’s no happy ending to Poll’s story though, in fact it’s very gruesome. After becoming involved in a plot to kill his benefactor (why, we have no information) he was caught and sentenced to die by breaking on the wheel. If you’ve read my journal on serial killers you’ll know what this was, if not, then let me just tell you, it was not an easy, a pretty or a quick death. Poll was a mere thirty-two years old when he died, cutting short what would surely have been a glittering career.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

So how did the harpsichord as we are familiar with it come to be? Well, as mentioned, it began with the psalter, indeed a specific type of psalter called a canon, to which a keyboard was added. The problem now was to work out a mechanism whereby the keys on the keyboard could operate devices to pluck the strings, and though the first attempt, called, rather dully, a monochord, was not able to make music - and was more used for tuning and finding musical pitch - the first real keyboard instrument ancestor of the harpsichord was known as the clavichord. There are different types of harpsichords - the Clavicytherium, spinet, virginal - but the differences between them are largely technical and not really of any interest unless you’re studying to play the instrument or really get to grips with its mechanics, neither of which is the object here. So, for all intents and purposes, and for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use the term harpsichord interchangeably.

The first ones were quite small, having grown, as it were, from the hand-held psalter, they measured maybe three feet across, but by the fifteenth century harpsichords measuring five to six feet were being built. Incidentally, our man Guido of Arezzo was involved in the development of the monochord, adding a moving bridge underneath the string, which gave it better intonation, but still failed to make it regarded as any sort of instrument capable of making music. With the addition of more strings and tangents - metal wedges that struck the strings - the monochord metamorphosed over the next century into the true predecessor of the harpsichord, the clavichord.

Playing one of these was not easy, by all accounts. For anyone who has gone through the trying process of learning the piano - a real piano, not a synth or MIDI one - one of the hardest things to do (other than play two different parts of the instrument independently with either hand, something I never managed, hence my giving up grumpily and using the many voices installed on my synthesiser) is to press the keys with the correct pressure. Some music requires only soft notes, others hard, strident ones, and I imagine getting this balance right may be one of the reasons so many people begin, but quickly abandon, trying to learn the instrument. However those people should count themselves lucky they never had to learn to play a clavichord, where the keys had to be pressed with the correct pressure in order to get the proper note, every time, as there were two tangents for each wire.

In 1503 Giovanni Spinnetti invented a new take on the clavichord, which he modestly called the spinet. However this has widely been regarded as something of a step back, rather than one forward. With much of its area taken up by the soundboard, and having longer strings, the spinet was much louder than its predecessor, but was unable to produce the dynamic sounds possible with a clavichord, and this is why. The increased length of the strings meant that they had to be plucked, rather than struck, and so the pressing of a key caused upward movement of the jack - the piece of wood that contained the quill which plucked the string, and which had a spring on the end - which then allowed the end of the quill to pluck the string. When the key moves back up, the sound is dulled by a piece of cloth attached to the end of the jack. In England, Spinnetti’s invention was called the virginal, possibly, though I haven’t confirmed, due to its main players being young women.

The harpsichord, then, was basically a larger spinet (or virginal; some English people persisted in calling them the latter) but with more strings, but it was loud and quite harsh-sounding. Within the context of an orchestra - into which it was introduced in the seventeenth century - it was tolerable, but as a solo instrument it grated on the ears, and many experiments were attempted to try to dampen its acerbic sound. Of these, only four were deemed of worth. The forte stop lifted the dampers, the soft stop pressed the dampers onto the strings to stop the vibrations, the buff stop used soft cloth or leather between the jacks and the strings, and the shifting stop shifted the whole keyboard in an early form of transposition. The bus stop was where buses took on and let off passengers, the short stop is a position in baseball I believe, and the full stop is at the end of this sentence, and every other.

And yet, despite the harsh sound of the instrument, manufacturers endeavoured to make the harpsichord even bigger, with sixteen-foot specimens coming out, but because the size of these necessitated the strings being thinner, the sound became less musical and the size went back to around eight feet. More strings per note were added, and, around 1600, a second keyboard (known at the time as a manual), which meant the player could use two or three strings at once, or separately, and combined with pedals for the instrument helped to make the harpsichord easier on the ear.

But the limitations of the harpsichord irked composers, who felt stilted and restricted when using it, and needed something that would allow them to express themselves better, which is why around the late nineteenth century interest in the harpsichord diminished as the bright new thing on the horizon, the piano, beckoned the artistic and the musical.

Some of the greatest innovations concerning the harpsichord came out of Flanders in the early seventeenth century, mostly from the famous manufacturing firm of the Rucker Family, who not only made functional and durable instruments, but beautifully ornamented and finished ones, too, real works of art. They were heavier than the ones made in Italy, and sounded better, Italian ones were generally considered too light, both in terms of their construction and their sound, and believed only really suitable to accompany a singer. Rucker’s models could easily grace any orchestra, or produce solo instrumental works, and became very popular. They were elegant, smart and looked well in a lady’s drawing room.

So popular were they that in eighteenth-century France, a process called grand ravalement became very widespread, where restorers would take apart surviving Ruckers, pimp them up and sell them as genuine models from the Flanders factories. In England, the greatest harpsichord makers were Jacob Kirkman and Burkat Shudi. Based on the inner construction of the Rucker models, Kirkman’s harpsichords had veneering and wood marquetry, and certainly made a statement for and about anyone purchasing one. To some degree, even if you couldn’t play the thing it would look great in your living room, and would be a conversation piece. To nobody’s surprise, when the piano began to become popular in the late eighteenth century Kirkman went on to produce them, leaving the harpsichord to history.

Shudi was quite the innovator, and surely the more successful of the two, as his customers included such giants as Handel and Haydn, the emperor Frederick the Great and the painter Gainsborough. Mozart took one for a spin but didn’t buy it, and the empress Maria Theresa and the Prince of Wales could always be sure of a frequent flyer discount at his shop. He also exported to Russia and Naples, where in the latter state his instrument caused quite a stir among the natives, who were probably fed up buying Guaranteed Italian products that fell apart as soon as you got them home.

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We’ve already heard that legends such as Haydn and Handel composed on the harpsichord, and even Queen Elizabeth had one, but let’s now take a look at some of the other famous composers who used this instrument to make their music.

Note: these are sketches of the composers, not necessarily what they composed on the harpsichord, but an overall view of their music and lives.


William Byrd (1539, 1540 or 1543 - 1623)

Organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral, Byrd got into some trouble with the Dean, for “certain matters alleged against him”, though given this area was under the strict control of the Puritans, this could have been anything from playing too elaborate music to, I don’t know, whistling on a Tuesday? As this was the late sixteenth century, naturally the music he composed was of a liturgical or sacred type - masses, hymns, glorias etc - and his pieces were certainly appreciated, as he indulged in what could only be termed an embryonic form of royalty payment four hundred years before such a thing was even considered. When he left Lincoln he was paid by the Dean on condition he continued to send the cathedral his compositions, a situation which would have been, to quote the great twentieth century philosopher Arthur Daley, a nice little earner.

Gaining the post of Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1572 he may very well have met the queen, who was an avid keyboard player herself, and had little time for the doom and gloom of Puritanism. Certainly, he had to petition Her Majesty when a joint effort between himself and fellow composer Thomas Tallis to publish and sell books of music proved a non-starter and on which both men lost their doublets. The queen came to their rescue, granting them land that would tide them over and make good their losses. However he doesn’t seem to have been that grateful, as later he appears to have converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and even been identified with the plot to overthrow the queen and replace her with her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, and even the Gunpowder Plot. He became, not quite an outlaw, but certainly on the list of those suspected of crimes against the State, and his Gentlemanship was revoked.

In turn, he became basically the hero or poster boy for Catholics, writing and performing masses when such practices were at best frowned upon, at worst illegal under Elizabeth and later James. This of course got him into trouble, but perhaps due to his relationship with the queen he did not end up in jail, though he paid heavy fines for non-attendance at Anglican mass. He then compounded his defiance by penning pieces for two Catholic nobles, one of which was his patron, Sir John Petre. He must have regained favour in later life though, as some of his keyboard pieces were included in the collection Parthenia, compiled to celebrate the upcoming marriage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, King of Bohemia in 1613.

[b]Christoph Graupner (1683 - 1760)]/b]
If William Byrd rubbed shoulders with some giants, the same could be said of Graupner, who began his musical career playing the harpsichord in the Hamburg Opera in 1705, alongside a little-known young violinist by the name of Handel. While in Hamburg he composed six operas, but in 1709 he moved to Hesse-Darmstadt, then a state of the Holy Roman Empire, and two years later was granted the title of court chapel master. He was however no wandering minstrel, remaining at the court and composing music for the chapel there for forty-five years, until he went blind in 1754, and passed away six years later.

That, however, is nowhere near the whole story.

A court it may have been at Hesse-Darmstadt, but it was not a paying one. Belts were tightened, and, as is usual, he who had to tighten most was the working man, in this case court musicians. Graupner sued for his wages, having a wife and a whole bunch of squealers to support, and, whether a ploy or not, this is how he prised money out of the court. He applied to be kantor in Leipzig, and got the job. However his patron, the Landgrave Ernst Ludwig, was reluctant to let him go, recognising his worth and probably thinking those philistines in Leipzig wouldn’t know a good motet if it got up and blessed them in the name of the father, son and holy spirit! or something no doubt similarly religious and not at all unbecoming, and so crowbarred the locks off the court coffers and dug in his pockets to pay his chapel master. Not only was Graupner paid, but the got a raise and a promise to be kept on no matter what. As a side-effect, this cleared the way for Bach to take the job Graupner now declined. Everybody wins!

Again I have to imagine the conversation, as Graupner goes to see the Landgrave.

“Land, me old buddy, it’s been fun here and I’ve enjoyed my time, but my wife and sprogs can’t live on air, so I took a peek through the want ads and found a better position in Leipzig. Hell, they’ll even pay me! With real money!”

The Landgrave, visions in his head of a cow trailing gold marks or whatever they used in sixteenth century Germany, leaving and leaping over fences labelled “Hesse-Darmstadt” holds up his pudgy hands. (I assume they’re pudgy since, well, I imagine old Landy don’t do much work): “Cool yer jets there, mein herr. Your pay is on the way, just got stuck in the system. No need to leave. They’re a bunch of stuck-up bastards in Leipzig anyway. You wouldn’t like it there.”

Graupner, realising he has the Landgrave now by das short und kurlies: “Yeah well, you know, now I think about it, I really was hoping for a raise…”

Landgrave: “Done.”

Graupner: “But then again, what about job security? That’s important when you have six kids - maybe seven; she don’t know it but she will soon. Leipzig told me I’d have a job there for life.”

Landgrave (shuffling feet in a most un-noble way): “Well, okay. Your job here is safe, guaranteed forever, or at least until Hesse-Darmstadt merges with all the other states into one big country, and I don’t see that happening!”

(From round the corner peeps Bach, winking)
Bach: “Good on yer mate. I really wanted that job. Cheers!”

In fact, this may actually have been a common ploy among court musicians, as it seems George Philipp Telemann had also applied for the post previously, squeezed money out of the court at Hamburg, and then said “Nah it’s all right mate, I’ll stay where I am, thanks all the same.” Surprising in a way that the Landgrave Ernst didn’t suss out what his chapel master was at, considering it had been done before. Maybe he wasn’t aware, but you would think Landgraves in general would keep their finger on the pulse and make it their business to know. What’s a landgrave? Opposite of being buried at sea, I expect. No seriously though: it was a royal title used in the HRE, kind of equal in rank to a duke. Fat rich bastard, basically. Sorry. Fat rich German bastard, I do beg your pardon.

Having heard that the man to take the place he had turned down was to be Johann Sebastian Bach, Graupner lost no time writing him a testimonial, advising the city council of Leipzig of his credentials and how he was a wonderful choice. Graupner was a prolific composer, with about 2,000 pieces he wrote still surviving today, including over fifty for harpsichord. However, again mirroring what often happens when a musician or other star dies, and assuming there was no will made, his heirs became embroiled in a bitter battle for custody and copyright of his music, the court at Hesse-Darmstadt insisting that the music was their property. After a long, protracted legal battle, the courts sided with the nobility (oh how surprising) and Graupner’s descendants were prohibited from distributing or publishing his music, the greedy Landgrave hoarding it and refusing to allow the public to hear it.

Selfish and short-sighted this undoubtedly was, and prevented the name of Christoph Graupner from taking its rightful place alongside Bach, Telemann and Handel, but it did serve to keep all of the composer’s music together, preserved for future ages. It wasn’t until the 1920s that new research turned up Graupner’s music, and now he is beginning to get the sort of recognition he was prevented from receiving for two hundred years after his death.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583 - 1643)

Born in Ferrari, sorry Ferrara in Italy, Frescobaldi’s music was an influence on the likes of Bach and Henry Purcell, and he was considered one of the great musicians of the seventeenth century. He was one of only a select few who could play and compose on the archicembalo, basically a larger version of the harpsichord with more keys and strings, and another one who never left his native country, except once when he travelled to (stupid) Flanders in the company of the Archbishop of Rhodes. No relation to the Colossus, I would assume. On his return to Rome, Frescobaldi found he had been elected as organist in St. Peter’s Basilica. He fell foul though of the superpowerful Medici family, who were in dispute with the Archbishop, and was temporarily ousted from his position, though he returned and did end up holding it up to his death.

He married in 1613 but obviously couldn’t wait to do the nasty as his wife-to-be had two illegitimate children prior to then, having five in all. Guess he had to exercise his organ! Sorry sorry sorry. He must have patched things up with the Medicis though, as he ended up working for one, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, in Florence in 1628, the highest paid musician in the state. He stayed there till 1634, when the equivalent of playing for Leeds and getting an offer to join Barcelona came his way: the Pope, Urban VI, called him to back to Rome to be his official organist.

Frescobaldi was different to many of his contemporaries in his devotion to the development of instrumental music, rather than the liturgical masses most other Italians, and Europeans, concentrated on writing music for. He is known as one of the fathers of Italian music, and one of the greatest composers of keyboard music.

Louis Marchand (1669 - 1732)

Just goes to show that even in a potentially and on the surface boring and dull subject such as the biographies of harpsichord players, history comes up trumps again. All the guys I’ve picked out so far have had interesting lives, and when I see the words “violent temper” and “scandal” in the write-up on this lad, I know he’ll be no less fun to talk about. If Frescobaldi had the honour of being organist to the Pope, Marchand went one better, and was one of four men employed by the King of France, however his family was obviously born under a bad star, as it were, as his uncle Jean was accused and convicted of abduction and rape in 1676, and sentenced to death. This was commuted though, to servitude for life on the galleys, where he died in 1694. Not a good start for the kid, who would have been only seven when Uncle Jean was sentenced.

At the age of twenty he married the daughter of a famous harpsichord maker, Jean Denis and in 1708 attained the position of one of the Organists du roi. There seem to be many rumours, stories and scandals that followed him through his life, some of which are unsubstantiated and may be merely rumour, or even lies put about by his enemies, of which he had many. Some are however documented and confirmed, among them his attempt to take the post of organist-priest at St. Bartelemy, a position he wanted, by paying a sixteen-year old girl to say the priest, Pierre Dandrieu, was the father of her child. This accusation was later withdrawn, and though it doesn’t say so, I assume Marchand did not get the post.

He had a violent temper, and was known to beat his wife, who divorced him in 1701, having suffered his abuse for over ten years. Marchand did not reserve his temper for his wife alone though; he even went so far as to insult the king, Louis XIV, who had made some derogatory remark about his hands, to which Marchand responded by commenting on His Majesty’s ears. Personal insults were fine when you were the king - you could do what you liked then, being an absolute monarch - but it absolutely did not work the other way around, and Marchand had to go on the run, fleeing to Germany, chased no doubt by his suffering ex-wife’s curses.

Another account claims that His Majesty, surely aware of the composer’s fiery temper and brutal treatment of her, announced that half of Marchand’s salary be paid to his wife, whereupon the organist broke off in the middle of a mass, sneering that if his wife was to get half his salary he would only play half the service. I suppose you have to grudgingly admire the old bastard’s cheek: back then, insulting or even correcting the king, or talking out of turn could lead you to a very messy end. Still, it wasn’t all bad. Louis-Abel de Bonafous, abbot of Fontenay, related how Marchand, while yet quite young, entered the chapel of the College of Louis le Grand, penniless and friendless, as the mass was beginning and asked to be allowed to play the organ. Distrustful of his talent, they nevertheless gave him a go, and were “quite astonished” at his skill and knowledge. They took him in and trained him to be a truly great musician.

Georg Telemann (1681 - 1767)
Not certain what his father would have thought about it, as he died when Telemann was only four years old, but his remaining parent, and all other family were against him becoming a composer, or even having anything to do with music. The fact that he is now considered not only one of the masters, but the most prolific composers ever, is testament to his perseverance, studying and somehow composing in secret. An odd fact I’ve discovered in my research is that many composers - not all, but quite a few - seem to have studied law before turning to music. I don’t see the connection myself, but there it is, and Telemann was one such, though in his case you’d have to consider the possibility that he went to law school to either appease or fool his family. He of course then ended up having a glittering career in music, despite their protests, though whether or not they continued to frown on his composing after he became famous I don’t know.

Having moved to Poland to take up a position at the court of Count Edman II in 1705, he only lasted here a year due to the ongoing Great Northern War spilling over its frontiers, and returned to Germany where he composed for Duke Johann Wilhelm in Eisenach, the birthplace of J.S. Bach, and in 1709 married one of the countess’s ladies-in-waiting, who bore him a daughter two years later, but sadly did not survive the birth herself. This threw Telemann, as you might expect, into a fit of deep depression. It would be three years before he would marry again, but this time his marriage would be blessed by nine children, making ten in all. As we’ve seen, he went for the post of kantor at Leipzig city, but though the job was his he declined, as he had managed to squeeze more money out of his current employer, leaving the way free for Chrisoph Graupner, who pulled the same stunt, leaving Bach to take up the position.

Productive and fertile his second wife may have been, but she didn’t mind spreading it around, and her infidelities, coupled with a passion for gambling (and losing) drove Telemann to distraction, to the point that he and his wife separated around 1736, but his troubles didn’t end there. His eldest son died in 1755, and Telemann, now in his mid-seventies, took on the demanding task of raising his son, Telemann’s grandson, but it may have all been too much for him, and he died of a chest complaint twelve years later.

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