The Idea Of Fitting A Keyboard To An Instrument With Strings, Which Started To V

Below is a free term papers summary of the paper "The Idea Of Fitting A Keyboard To An Instrument With Strings, Which Started To V." If you sign up, you can be reading the rest of this term papers in under two minutes. Registered users should login to view this term paper.

Term Paper Title	The Idea Of Fitting A Keyboard To An Instrument With Strings, Which Started To V
# of Words	4113
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	16.45

The idea of fitting a keyboard to an instrument with strings, which started to vibrate when struck by hammers, was conceived probably in the fourteenth and certainly in the fifteenth century. For the next two hundred and fifty years, however, the harpsichord with plucked, rather than struck, strings, held undoubted sway. The clavichord also, had its adherents and within its severe limitations was responsive to gradations of finger touch, its strings struck by miniature tangents.

In the late seventeenth century a new realisation was afoot of the possibilities contained in broad melody, in a phrase growing louder and then softer, and in accentuation. This nascent demand for greater expressive possibilities produced the climate in which the piano, once it appeared, could develop in its own good time.

Bartolommeo Cristofori, a Paduan harpsichord maker, is credited with constructing the first piano, the date usually put at between 1709 and 171 1. He called his new instrument "gravicembalo col piano e forte", or "harpsichord with soft and loud". In shape and general construction it resembled a harpsichord, but it differed in its action mechanism. Deer leather hammersstruck the strings, and a primitive escapement or "set off" was employed, enabling the hammer to escape from the string, rather than to block on it, thereby smothering the vibrations the hammer itself had originated. By the 1720's Cristofori had made some twenty "gravicembali" and had added a padded check to catch the hammer on the rebound (Fig. 1)-an attempt to prevent its bouncing to and for on and off the strings, after escapement.

In the next century the cheek was to be exploited further, as it came to be realised that the swift repetition of a note demanded by the more dazzling pianists, could be achieved if the hammer could be held at a position midway to the string, so that on repeat it did not travel the full distance from its rest position. Cristofori had spotted immediately a number of problems which were to bother makers for the next century, and it is remarkable that in his action he suggested the kernel of the ultimate solution.

Although the fingers could project Cristofori's hammers to the strings at various speeds, empowering the performer to vary the volume of adjacent notes in an expressive way-herein lay the piano's essential difference with the harpsichord-most did not grasp the potential of the infant pianoforte, and they cannot be blamed, for Cristofori's pianos sounded frai...

This is not the end of the termpaper! Register below to see the complete version of this term paper.

Membership Plans	Credit Card	Check

1 month membership

3 month membership (You Save 50%)

6 month membership (You Save 67%)

Copyright © 2002-2007 Mid Term Papers. All rights reserved. This term papers website is used for research purposes only.
If you have forgotten your username or password, please click here.
If you like to cancel your account, please click here.

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22