I really like the sound of the harpischord, perhaps because it is so rare. But, how is it that the piano is more commonplace today? Also, whatever happened to the airmonica (sp?)? - Jinx
I’m looking forward to the complete dope, but I can tell you it was the capacity to vary the loudness of play that sold the piano (originally called the pianoforte, or soft-loud). Harpsichords have essentially one loudness, because the strings are plucked, not hammered.
If you happen to have the Ovation network there’s a fascinating show on this by Howard Goodall. He marked the piano as 1 of the Big Bangs in music along with musical notation, opera, equal temperament and recorded sound.
He agrees with Yllaria. But goes into further detail in how it … I haven’t seen it in a long time and it’ll be on this tuesday. It’s really worth watching, the whole series is.
Whoops, thursday, not tuesday, I copied the wrong one.
Howard Goodall’s Big Bangs - Ep.4, The Invention of the Piano
Howard Goodall explores the evolution of music, this episode focuses on the invention of the piano.
Next Showing:
* Thursday, May 11, 2006 - 9:00:00 AMDarn! I don’t think we get that. That sounds wonderful.
The common understanding is that once the piano was introduced, its relative lack of maintenance and its soft-loud range of dynamic variation drove harpsichords under for centuries. I admit when I opened up this thread, I was going to leap in and say so — I play piano and know a little bit about the differences between them — but before I posted I decided instead to spend a few instructive hours learning more about harpsichords to make sure.
I’m still no expert, but I conclude the above reasons have some truth, but not the whole truth: a properly built harpsichord stays in tune for quite some time (though not as long as a piano) and the initial reception to the piano was cool — the early pianos weren’t as loud as the harpsichords.
Harpsichords weren’t very popular for composers in the 19th century. By the time they (harpsichords) became popular again, people had forgotten the old ways of playing them. A properly played harpsichord isn’t just a plucked piano; it’s a different beast altogether and requires different ways of playing and composing.
Some harpsichords had two manuals — think of the twin keyboards of a Hammond B-3 — and the manuals were sometimes coupled together in unusual ways. Look here for some good stuff on various ways harpsi keys were coupled. Playing one was a technique all its own.
Not only that, harpsichords were far from standardized, as pianos were.* Their ranges were different; some had one manual (keyboard) and some had three! You’d get different effects based on which instrument you owned and how your manuals were coupled, versus the instrument the composer intended. Your harpsichord might pluck the string in a different place than the composer’s, resulting in unwanted harmonic differences; and your own upper and lower manuals would sound slightly different for the same reason: each manual had its own jack and plectrum, plucking the string in its own unique location.
The diagram on the Wikipedia link shows a harpsichord that had a manual stop called a shove coupler (basically, a whatsitz you could use to adjust the thing mechanically). With the stop pushed in, the coupler on the lower manual misses the upper manual above it. Therefore the upper manual played C in octave 5, and the lower played a C in octaves 5 and 6.
Pull out the stop. Now you’ve moved the coupler dog, so when you press a key on the bottom manual, the coupler dog pushes at the key above it on the upper manual. The keyboards link together: the upper manual plays C5, and the lower manual plays C5, C6, and incidentally pushes the upper manual as well (which hits C5 again). The English dogleg coupler, as you can see, has no settings; so music written for a French harpsichord couldn’t be 100% reproduced on the English one since there was no “stop” to pull out or push in. It was basically in “stop pulled out” mode all the time, plucking that extra string whether the French composer wanted it plucked or not.**
Another note on composing for harpsichord: no pedals. You could not sustain a chord, as on the piano, that was bigger than the spread of your hands could comfortably hold down.
The harpsichord was very, very popular in its day, and nobody seemed to mind that harpsichord music didn’t have dynamic range or a sustain pedal. What was important was the music, and the music written for it emphasized its strengths. When the piano came along, it basically added a few new neat tools to the composer’s toolbox that everybody wanted to play with. Not everybody wanted to go back to the old way.
*But why were pianos more standardized? Beats the hell out of me. The action of the original pianos was a complicated one and difficult for later inventors to simplify or make more compact, and right around the time the harpsichord was losing favor with composers, pianos were being made with iron plates — that harp-shaped thingy inside — to withstand the stress created by all those tightly-tuned strings. I could guess that cast iron plates were harder to jigger and re-design than wooden harpsichords, and the action was already hard to simplify, so the builders stuck with the working design they knew.
**Incidentally, the idea of “stops” as a means of adjusting a keyboard came from pipe organ design: when you pulled out a stop, you made it possible for air to go through a pipe, making the sound of the instrument louder — that is, with more pipes playing simultaneously. This is where we get “pulled out all the stops” as a phrase, I think: to make an instrument as loud as possible, give her everything she’s got, etc.
The late Sir Thomas Beecham ( the well know British conductor) used to say the sound of the harpsichord is like “two skeletons making love on a tin roof”. I agree, I much prefer the mellow tones of the piano the the sometimes jangling sound of the harpsichord.
I thought a piano was nothing more than a harp in a box. At least, the baby grand and grand piano styles. The “box” provides the soundingboard (or added resonance) to sweeten the sound, as I recall being taught. But, I am by far no officianato here!
But, what sayeth the experts above about the piano vs. harp? Doesn’t the harp have the same range of tones as a piano; yet, it is plucked, not hammered. I am not sure why this matters, mechanically. A strike is a strike, and a string will vibrate at its natural frequency. While one could say the hammers of a piano can dampen the sound, so can a harp player’s hand decide how long or short a tone should be permitted to vibrate. (Not quite identical to the pedals of a piano, but a rough equivalent.)
Did a harpsichord have pedals, too? - Jinx
Revival harpsichord (those made just after the “rediscovery” of the harpsichord in the late 19th/early 20th centuries) often had pedals. And steel strings. And iron frames. And weighted keys. Basically, they tried to make them as piano-like as possible. The result, of course, was a horrible, faint tinkly sound that, unfortunately, many people still associate with harpsichord music. That’s not at all what a proper harpsichord should sound like. Harpsichords are not pianos and should neither be built nor played like a piano.
(Revival style instruments were finally abandoned in the '70s/'80s. New harpsichords are built like harpsichords are sound like them, too. We will not discus electric harpsichords or Laurie Partridge.)
With both instruments you have the problem of providing convenient access to strings meant to play different frequencies, so the “arch-shaped” structure suits well in both instances. Beyond that, there are a number of differences.
Actually, a harp has pedals too, but I don’t know what they’re for. (I think they force the harp’s strings to be tuned to a specific key? Harp experts?)
Because it is plucked, on a harp you have only one string per note (perhaps two, one on either side of it?) A piano hammer, except in the lowest registers, hits two or three notes tuned closely together, giving the piano a slightly more complex sound. Because it is hammered, a piano’s strings can be stretched taught to a much greater degree than can harp strings, which must conform to the abilities of the human hand to nove them.
The method of initiation of the sound makes all the difference in the world. Even on a sustained note, there are transients right at the beginning of the sound that can vary greatly between hammering an plucking. If you hear a recording of a single sustained piano note played backward, so you only hear the sustained part of the tone, unless you’ve heard it before it is unidentifiable as a piano.
This sets a bad precedent…
I’ve been told (by an older and possibly confused piano instructor) that harpsichords were associated somehow with just tuning – ie: C# was a higher pitch than Db, and so on – and somehow weren’t workable in equal tempered tuning (what we use now, where C# is Db etc etc). This meant that if you wanted to play a piece in certain keys, you had to retune your harpsichord.
Why pianos worked better for equal temper than harpsichords, or how we can have workable harpsichords today in equal tempered tuning, wasn’t explained to me.
As a former would-be pianist I thought I should chime in with some unchecked facts from memory and some thoughts.
I don’t think that it can be said univocally that the piano was an “improvement” on the harpsichord: rather the style of music, and the roles in which keyboards were used, changed in a way which befitted the fortepiano.
The original fortepiano was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori already somewhere as early as 1701 (according to wikipedia). And it took around 100 years or more before it had replaced the harpsichord.
During the first 50 years or so the spread was rather slow and people didn’t seem very interested in the new invention. Of course there are a lot of self-evident reasons why spread would be slow in the beginning: you’d wait until the harpsichord that you already owned was getting old before you thought about replacing it with a new keyboard. And pianos were rather expensive things in the beginning. But reception was rather slow even if you take that in account: people were simply not very impressed by the concept of a keyboard with flexible dynamics.
I think the development from the Baroque to the Viennese Classical style and its predecessor styles helped the piano a lot: the wiener-classical style of composition uses clearly defined phrases with a beginning and an end (whereas baroque music typically has an “eternally forth-spinning” melody (or several, in counter-point with each other)). These phrases should be demarked dynamically with crescendi and diminuendi, rather than just “terrace dynamics.” And it generally has a much quicker change between different contrasting sections, a more dense kind of musical drama. (A great book about the classical style is Charles Rosen’s “The Classical Style.”)
One important use of the harpsichord had been in “basso continuo.” This was when a keyboard instrument was used in an ensemble to fill out the harmonies above a notated base line (which was typically played by one or more celli), using a baroque version of modern jazz chord notation. As can be heard in for example most recordings of Vivaldi concerti, or the recitativo sections in operas.
In my opinion the harpsichord sounds great in this role: it blends much better into the orchestral sound than I think an 18:th century fortepiano would do. Also harpsichords were somewhat louder than the first pianos. But the Viennese Classical style of writing for ensembles, especially with certain developments by Haydn and Mozart, made the use of continuo superfluous and even totally distracting, so it fell out of use.
In one way it could be said that the piano was as much a replacement of the clavichord. The clavichord was an instrument for practising and music-making in an intimate/private environment, which was sensitive to touch, but whose range of dynamics on the whole was somewhere between very soft and very very soft.
Here follow some notes about famous composers and whether their keyboard works are meant for the piano or the harpsichord. This is a matter of some controversy since pianists often try to find some kind of historical excuse for playing great early compositions on the piano. It should be remembered though that the fortepiano of the 1700’s was a totally different beast than the modern piano (more about this in a second) so it’s yet another question whether it is acceptable to play their works on a modern piano.
*
Couperin, Handel, Telemann and lots of others:* I haven’t checked these out in detail, but the great bulk of baroque keyboard music is for the harpsichord.
Domenico Scarlatti: There was a fortepiano in the court where he was employed. And his Sonatas are written in a dramatical way that seems fitting to the piano. But they can surely be played on the harpsichord too.
J S Bach: It is said that he tried out a fortepiano sometime in the 1730’s, but that he didn’t like the sound of it. However, some people point out that the fortepiano that he tried was of a dubious German brand that indeed may have sounded a lot worse than Cristofori’s Italian instruments. And it is documented that he later was in contact with, and probably used, fortepianos of a different brand (although nothing is known about what he thought about them). Also several of Bach’s works seem to be written in a rather abstract, almost instrument-independent way. The most extreme example of this might be The Art of the Fugue, which is arranged so that it fits within the range of a keyboard of that time, and is playable technically on a keyboard, but is notated in a way which suggests an unspecified (instrumental) four voice ensemble. And Das Wohltemperierte Klavier appears to be written for an unspecified keyboard instrument, which would include the harpsichord, the clavichord, the organ, and yes, the fortepiano too, although perhaps certain of the preludes or fugues are composed with specific instruments a little bit more in mind.
Mozart: Most of his music is a perfect fit for the fortepiano. But I have heard that his six first piano sonatas, which were composed 1774-1777, were initially composed for the harpsichord, but later refitted with dynamics markings for the piano (and indeed they are composed in a style which seems to gain a lot from the dynamic abilities of the fortepiano). The case may be similar with his earliest piano concerti.
Haydn: I think Haydn adopted the pianoforte whole-heartedly some decade later than Mozart did.
Beethoven: fortepiano, already of a somewhat different kind than mozart’s instrument, but far from the modern piano.
Now the early pianos were completely different instruments than those that we’ve come to know. The range of dynamics was much smaller and generally softer, the tone was brighter and a bit metallic, and less “romantic,” and died away much quicker. The frequence range was smaller (less than six octaves). There was rather early a thing corresponding to the modern right pedal, but it didn’t have at all the same effect: since the tone of the instrument died away so quickly it was used only for a change in tonal color. And it was often operated awkwardly by the knee so that it couldn’t be used in a subtle way. This was the case through all of the Viennese classical period (including Beethoven).
Recordings of a Mozart era fortepiano
Even the pianos of the early Romantic era were less sturdy creations than the modern ones (but their “tonal ideal” was more in the same direction):
How about Lurch, from The Addams family—can we discuss him? 
(By the way, Jinx, was this thread inspired by the thread on modern harpsichord music from a couple of days ago?)
The harp plays only the notes of the diatonic scale. There is a pedal for each note of the scale–seven in all. With all the pedals in the middle position (note that these are not simple “on-off” pedals like those of the piano; rather they have three positions in a stairstep-shaped slot), the harp plays the notes of the C major scale. When a pedal is moved to the raised position, it flattens the associated strings a half step. When the pedal is moved to the lowered position, it sharpens the string a half step. For example, if you want to play in the key of D, you would lower the C and F pedals, and all of the C and F strings of the harp would be raised to C# and F#.
And here is a page with sound samples which shows the variety of sounds of different kinds of harpsichords, and contrasts them with the sounds of different virginals, clavichords, pianofortes and other stuff.
Note how the sound of at least some earlier pianofortes was much closer to the tonal universe of harpsichords than to that of modern pianos.
It is also good to remember that today too different individual pianos and/or piano brands have very different sounds from each other. And as is the case for many other instruments too the tonal ideal of recently produced pianos is a bit different from pianos from early in the 20th century (generally brighter and a bit less murky).
mani, very informative posts. Thanks, and welcome to the SDMB!
It’s the same difference between a guitar that is played with a pick, and one which is played with the fingers.
The pick — or in the case of a harpsichord, the plectrum — is sharp, and made of harder material quick does not dampen the initial sharp resonances of the string. A hammer — or a finger — is broad and soft and tends to muffle that initial sharp twang of the string before it starts. The string will sound at the same pitch but it will not have the same tone quality.
What that meant for a harpsichord, since those high-frequency resonances carry better over short distances, what that it sounded louder and clearer than a similar note on a piano.
To compete with the volume of the harpsichord, one note on a piano may strike as many as three identical strings at once, because one string alone simply isn’t loud enough except in the bass register.
Early pianos had hammers made of paper. Modern pianos have hammers often made of soft wool (for American-made pianos) and baked wool (Japanese-made). The difference between the soft wool and the baked wool hammers is… well, striking. American pianos tend to have a rich, soft, warm sound; and pianos from east Asian manufacturers sound crisp and clear.
Hey, at least Lurch was real (Ted Cassidy was a harpsichordist in real life–that is him actually playing in The Addams Family).
The volume on a harpsichord can also be adjusted by turning on the buff stop. It’s a long strip of felt than can be lowered onto the strings to dampen them. It not only makes it quieter, it also makes it sound very much like a lute, which is why it’s sometimes incorrectly called a lute stop (an actual lute stop is something different).
Harpsichord plectra are traditionally made from quills, but nowadays are mostly plastic. In the revival period, they were hard leather or even brass.