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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 ...
The harpsichord used quills to pluck strings, and it had a delicate sound. Due to the design of the harpsichord, the attack or weight with which the performer played the keyboard did not change the volume or tone. Between about 1750 and the late 1700s, the harpsichord gradually fell out of use.
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.
In harpsichords, often there are two sets of strings of equal length. These "choirs" usually differ in their plucking points. One choir has a "normal" plucking point, producing a canonical harpsichord sound; the other has a plucking point close to the bridge, producing a reedier "nasal" sound rich in upper harmonics.
The New Grove musical dictionary summarizes the earliest historical traces of the harpsichord: "The earliest known reference to a harpsichord dates from 1397, when a jurist in Padua wrote that a certain Hermann Poll claimed to have invented an instrument called the 'clavicembalum'; [1] and the earliest known representation of a harpsichord is a sculpture (see below) in an altarpiece of 1425 ...
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 ...
It was given no title by its copyist and the ownership of the manuscript before the eighteenth century is unclear. At the time The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book was put together most collections of keyboard music were compiled by performers and teachers: other examples include Will Forster's Virginal Book, Clement Matchett's Virginal Book, and Anne Cromwell's Virginal Book.
The title 'voluntary' was often used by English composers during the late Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods. Originally, the term was used for a piece of organ music that was free in style, and was intended to sound improvised (the word voluntary in general means "proceeding from the will or from one's own choice or consent"). [1]