Clavichord

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Clavichord is a small keyboard instrument which was very popular for many years, especially in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

If you play a note on a xylophone or metallophone you must make your beater bounce off the key quickly so that the key can vibrate. This is how the hammers in a piano work.

If you play a string instrument like the violin, you will know that if your left hand has strong fingers you can hammer them onto the string and you can hear a note if you listen carefully. This is how the clavichord works.

When you play the clavichord you play a note by pressing a key down. The other end (inside) comes up. It has got a thin metal blade called a tangent which hits the string. The tangent stays on the string until you take your finger off the note.

On some clavichords many of the strings share more than one note. For example: a C and C sharp might share the same string. The tangent of the C sharp will be slightly nearer the bridge than that of the C. This is the part of the string that vibrates. So C and C sharp could not be played together. Clavichords like these were called “fretted”. If each string had its own note it was called “unfretted”. A fretted clavichord was smaller and cheaper to make.

On a piano, once you have played a note you cannot change the sound any more. On a clavichord you can shake the key up and down and this will make the tangent push the string up and down, making it tighter or looser. This was called “Bebung” in German. It is like vibrato on a string instrument.

The clavichord was a very quiet instrument. It was not suitable for playing with other instruments because it was so quiet. But it sounds very beautiful in slow, expressive music. It was used as a practice instrument by harpsichord players, or by organists who wanted to practise at home instead of in a freezing church. They were so small that you could lift them up and put them on a table. You could put one on top of another and pretend you were playing a two-manual organ. Sometimes they even had pedals for organists to practise their pedalling.

Many German composers like Johann Sebastian Bach wrote music for the “Clavier”. This meant any keyboard instrument: harpsichord, clavichord or organ. The player could choose which he wanted to use.

When the piano suddenly became popular – in the 1760s and 1770s – people started to forget about harpsichords and clavichords. Today a few people make harpsichords and clavichords again so that we can play Renaissance and Baroque music and make it sound like it did then.