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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.
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 ...
Such instruments were harshly criticized during the 1960s by Zuckermann, who described their sound as feeble and their appearance as tubby, a betrayal of the tradition of beauty seen in historical instruments. Harpsichords played today tend to follow closely the building practices established in the historical period.
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 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 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 ...
Baroque pop (sometimes called baroque rock) is a fusion genre that combines rock music with particular elements of classical music. [1] [4] [5] It emerged in the mid-1960s as artists pursued a majestic, orchestral sound [4] and is identifiable for its appropriation of Baroque compositional styles (contrapuntal melodies and functional harmony patterns) and dramatic or melancholic gestures. [3]
A harpsichord has an easy touch; it can be played very fast, almost fast enough to reach the level of continuum, but not quite (it takes about eighteen separate sounds per second to reach the threshold where you can no longer make out individual notes and the limit set by the mechanism of the harpsichord is about fifteen to sixteen notes a second).