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The ideal harpsichord sound: First, the harpsichord must stay out of the way; you must be able to hear what the player is doing, what his thoughts are. The second is to contribute something to the music; that is, to add some beauty of sound which might not be immediately imaginable to you if you were looking at the notes on a page.
The disposition of a harpsichord is the set of choirs of strings it contains. This article describes various dispositions and gives the standard notation for describing them. If a harpsichord contains just one set of strings at normal concert pitch, its disposition is called 1 x 8'. Here, the 8' means eight foot pitch, which designates normal ...
Like a pipe organ, a harpsichord may have more than one keyboard manual, [b] and even a pedal board. Harpsichords may also have stop levers which add or remove additional octaves. Some harpsichords may have a buff stop, which brings a strip of buff leather or other material in contact with the strings, muting their sound to simulate the sound ...
An organ pipe, or a harpsichord string, designated as eight-foot pitch (8′) is sounded at standard, ordinary pitch. [1] For example, the A above middle C in eight-foot pitch would be sounded at 440 Hz (or at some similar value, depending on how concert pitch was set at the time and place the organ or harpsichord was made).
In earlier times when English spelling was less standardized, "spinet" was sometimes spelled "spinnet" or "spinnit". "Spinet" is standard today. Spinet derives from the Italian spinetta, which in 17th-century Italian was a word used generally for all quilled instruments, especially what in Elizabethan/Jacobean English were called virginals.
Like the harpsichord, the virginals has its origins in the psaltery, to which a keyboard was applied, probably in the 15th century. The first mention of the word is in Paulus Paulirinus of Prague's (1413–1471) Tractatus de musica , of around 1460, where he writes: "The virginal is an instrument in the shape of a clavichord, having metal ...
HPSCHD is composed of 7 solo pieces for harpsichord and 52 computer-generated tapes. The harpsichord solos were created from randomly processed pieces by Mozart , Beethoven , Chopin , Schumann , Gottschalk , Busoni , Schoenberg , Cage and Hiller, rewritten using a FORTRAN computer program designed by Ed Kobrin based on the I Ching hexagrams.
The sound of the Kirkman and Shudi instruments is described by the authors of Grove Dictionary as "enormously rich and powerful"; "whereas that of a French harpsichord may be compared to the sound of a woodwind ensemble, the tone of these developed English instruments, with their brilliant trebles and imposing basses, may be compared to that of ...