Clavichords, was Invitation

On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Rick McGowan wrote:

> Judith, I must be missing something or at least not understanding... I
> thought a clavichord was a keyboard instrument. "Unfretted"?

Yes, clavichords are a keyboard instrument. They have horizontal
brass strings at right angles to the keytails; at the end of each key is a
brass tangent, when you depress the key the tangent rises to the level of
the strings where it rubs against them. The note that sounds is produced
by the length of string from the tangent to the bridge, which is on the
soundboard to the right of the keys.the string part that is to the left of
the tangent is damped by means of woven 'listing cloth', otherwise you
would hear two notes every time.

One can either have one string per note, as in an 'Unfretted clavichord',
and this was really a late-eighteenth century invention, or one can have
more than one string per note -- ergo 'fretted'.

WHat I own are a 'keyed monochord', which has 12 keys, all diatonic except
for one b-flat, and only one string for all 12 (plus another string which
is plucked as a drone) -- this is a putative reconstruction of an
ur-clavichord from the 14th or 15th century; A 'triple-fretted' clavichord
which has 45 notes on I think 18 string pairs; a 'double-fretted'
clavichord on a mid-eighteenth century model, with just over 4 octaves on
37 string pairs; and the 5-octave unfretted I'm giving this concert on.

The advantages to fretting are many -- the fewer strings the faster the
tuning, also the fewer strings the less the sound-board is bound down and
the louder the instrument. And the little ones are lighter, easier to
transport. The problem is that you can't play strings that are fretted to
the same string simultaneously. I can only play the monochord melodically.
The double-fretted isno't much of a problem on Baroque music, because what
you fret are notes to their sharps or flats, leaving two notes, in my case
e and a, unfretted; and as long as you stick to the mean tone keys, you
will seldom want to use them simultaneously. But Chopin...

Judy

Judy's pen seems to have slipped when she wrote:
"One can either have one string per note, as in an 'Unfretted clavichord',
and this was really a late-eighteenth century invention, or one can have
more than one string per note -- ergo 'fretted'."

There are indeed clavichords w/ more than one string per note - same as
pianos in the treble. But she certainly meant it the other way around:
more than one note per string: more to the point, more than one note per
key, since the [tangent on the] key determines the pitch of whatever string
it touches.

A usual way to arrange the frets is to put F and F# [for example] on the
same string. The fact that these 2 pitches, being on the same string,
cannot be used in the same harmony, is made irrelevant by the fact that
musical practice doesn't require it.

Dale C. Carr

-----Original Message-----
From: D.C. Carr <d.c.carr@obgron.nl>
To: tuning <tuning@onelist.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 12, 1999 8:39 PM
Subject: Clavichords, was Invitation

|[...] more to the point, more than one note per
|key, since the [tangent on the] key determines the pitch of whatever string
|it touches. [....]

Now my own pen seems to've slipped! It's just simply 'more than one note
per string', not 'more than one note per key'.

That's what I get for sticking my tangents into other people's business.

Dale