Oval spinet
Encyclopedia
The oval spinet is a type of harpsichord
invented in the late 17th century by Bartolomeo Cristofori
, the Italian instrument maker who later achieved fame for inventing the piano
. The oval spinet was unusual for its shape, the arrangement of its strings, and for its mechanism for changing registration.
The two oval spinets built by Cristofori survive today. One, built in 1690, is kept in the Museo degli strumenti musicali, part of the Galleria del Accademia
in Florence
. The other, from 1693, is in the Museum für Musikinstrumente
of the University of Leipzig
.
. This can be seen in the following schematic false-color diagram of the 1690 oval spinet, showing the outline, keyboard, bridges, and string arrangement. The diagram and those that follow are colorizations of an original by Tony Chinnery
.
Unlike in a virginals, the longest strings in an oval spinet are placed in the middle. The strings are arranged so the pair of strings that sounded the lowest note (C) are precisely in the middle, the next lowest pair (C#) is just behind the lowest pair, the third lowest pair (D) just in front of the lowest pair, and so on. Because of the alternating pattern, the highest two notes are the frontmost and hindmost string pairs, thus the farthest apart. By placing the strings in this way, the oval spinet has a (very roughly) oval shape; hence its name.
suspended in jacks, thin vertical strips of wood. Each jack rises from the far end of its key, passes through a guiding register in the soundboard, and terminates adjacent to its assigned string, close enough for the bit of quill held by the jack - the plectrum
- to pluck the string. In the diagram above, keys labeled with aqua dots lift the jacks that pass through the slots shown in aqua, and keys labeled in maroon control jacks passing through slots labeled with the same color.
This arrangement is feasible because the keys are of alternating lengths. These are shown in the following diagram of the keyboard, which rests in the lower part of the case, mostly obscured by the soundboard. The keys are color-coded in the same way as in the first diagram. The same color-coding appears at the far end of each key, schematically indicating the portion of the key that engages the lower end of the jacks.
As can be seen, underneath the keys are two balance rails, one for the keys that play the front row of jacks, the other for the keys that play the rear row.
Maintaining the integrity of the case was evidently important to Cristofori. Later on, in his (standardly-shaped) pianos and harpsichords, he employed two separate bentsides, one to support the soundboard and the other to bear the tension of the strings. This protected the soundboard from possible warping should the outer bentside be pulled out of position.
A second advantage of Cristofori's oval spinet design is that it allows for a more compact instrument. When the strings of a keyboard instrument are laid out in the simplest way (ascending in pitch from left to right, as in full-size harpsichords), the resulting triangular shape is space-consuming and inefficient. The spinet
harpsichord, which saves space by arranging the strings in slanted pairs, is still much longer than it is wide. Virginals, which enclose their triangle of strings in a rectangular box, have a great deal of unused space. In comparison with these designs, Cristofori's quasi-oval layout stands out for its compactness and efficiency.
(normal) pitch. In the pairs of strings seen in the diagram above, each pair consists of one string from each choir. The purpose of having two choirs was evidently twofold. First, when both strings are played at once, a louder sound is obtained. Second, the two choirs of strings have different timbre
s, so contrasting tone qualities can be obtained by selecting just one choir.
The contrasting timbres result from two factors. Owing to the slant of the bridges, in each pair the string closer to the outer edge of the case is shorter. Moreover, it is plucked relatively closer to the bridge, which emphasizes higher harmonic
s. Cristofori enhanced the difference in plucking points by placing the plectra on opposite sides of the jack in the two choirs, as seen in the detail figure below.
In playing the oval spinet, the player selects a registration; that is, the particular choirs (longer strings, shorter strings, or both together) that will be sounded when a key is depressed. Cristofori accomplished this end with an ingenious mechanical arrangement.
For the keys that play the near row of jacks (closer to the player), the mechanism works like this. The portion of the key that engages the lower end of the jack is U-shaped, with each prong of the U ending in a wide, flat upper surface. (This U-shaped part is shown in blue in the false-color diagrams below.) The entire keyboard mechanism can be slightly shifted toward or away from the player, using knobs at the sides of the keyboard. Depending on the location of the keyboard, the jacks will be aligned in different ways against the U, resulting in different strings being played. The three possibilities are shown in the diagrams below, which depict sounding jacks in green, silent ones in red.
When the keyboard is fully extracted (pulled toward the player), the jack closer to the player is aligned with the slot of the U, so that only the string plucked by the jack farther than the player (the longer string) will sound.
When the keyboard is in an intermediate position, neither jack will align with the U-slot, and both sets of strings will sound.
Lastly, when the keyboard is fully inserted (pushed away from the player), the far jack aligns with the slot, and only the string plucked by the near jack (the shorter string) will sound.
A separate device prevents any jacks aligned above the slot from actually sinking into it.
The mechanism just described is used only for the near row of jacks. In the far row, a simpler, mirror-image scheme is used: a single block of wood engages the jacks. It is just wide enough to raise both if the keyboard is in the intermediate position, but will engage only the front jack (longer string) if the keyboard is fully extracted, and only the rear jack (shorter string) if the keyboard is fully inserted.
The result is that when the keyboard is fully extracted, all of the inner jacks on the instrument are engaged, playing all of the longer strings, and when the keyboard is fully inserted, all of the outer jacks are engaged, playing all of the shorter strings. The intermediate position plays all the strings.
The assignment of keys to pitches is the broken octave
, which was a system of pitch assignment used in early keyboard instruments. The following diagram shows the assignment of pitches to the bottom eight notes of the keyboard:
The somewhat cumbersome scheme is less awkward than it might initially seem, since it would have been troublesome only in rapid chromatic passages, which seldom occur in this pitch range. The other surviving oval spinet by Cristofori, from 1693, has no split keys, but implements the same range (four octaves, C to c
The two elegant sections that resemble Gothic arches at either end of the instrument are made of circular arcs. A musical instrument builder and scholar, Grant O'Brien, investigated their design. Cristofori first drew a line exactly 13 Florentine soldi long (a soldo was, at the time, 27.56 mm) to serve as the base of the arch. Then, he extended this line by one soldo in either direction, and made marks one soldo beyond the base line. He then centered a compass or string on these marks and laid out the circular form of the arches with a radius of 14 soldi. This construction was the traditional method for obtaining the form of Gothic arches; see Ogive
.
The string lengths of the 1690 instrument are similar to later harpsichords, except for the lowest bass strings, where the length of the instrument doesn't match. The same is true of the plucking points, calculated as percentages of the string length for the longer choirs of strings:
All this suggests that Cristofori, despite a penchant for innovation, was conservative in string scaling. The consistency of the measurements also illustrates the meticulous care Cristofori took to lay out his instruments.
family of Florence. Cristofori's patron was Prince Ferdinando
, the son of Grand Duke Cosimo III
and heir to the Tuscan
throne.
Prince Ferdinando, a great opera enthusiast, organized many operatic productions at the Medici villa at Pratolino. According to William Holmes (references below), the prince often participated as the continuo
player, seated at a harpsichord among the orchestral musicians. The theatre the Prince had available at Pratolino was small, so the prince had a strong incentive for a compact instrument that could fit in the orchestra, but had multiple string choirs to provide volume. The oval spinets may have been Cristofori's effort to fulfill this requirement (and not the only such effort—see below).
The two oval spinets are luxury items—the novel product of a very skilled craftsman—which alone would have made them expensive. Moreover, they are enclosed in fine cabinetry made from costly woods. Bills that Cristofori submitted to his employers indicate that the cabinetry is the work of a different craftsman, subcontracting for Cristofori. The cabinet maker probably also produced outer cases to enclose the instruments—but, if so, these are now lost.
The two oval spinets both appear in a 1700 inventory of Prince Ferdinando's musical instrument collection. This inventory is better known today as the first written evidence for the existence of Cristofori's newly-invented piano. The next Medici instrument inventory, evidently made by Cristofori himself, dates from 1716, three years after Prince Ferdinando's death. The oval spinets do not appear in this inventory, and evidently had been disposed of (through gift or sale).
In 1726, long after the two original spinets were built, but still in Cristofori's lifetime, the Bolognese
builder Giuseppe Maria Goccini (1675-post 1733) built an instrument on similar principles, with the longest strings in the middle, alternating key lengths, and the ability to change stops by sliding the keyboard. However, Goccini's instrument was octagonal (a rectangle with truncated corners) rather than rectangular with appended arches. It is not known whether this instrument was inspired by Crisfori's or was an independent invention.
called the oval spinet "a tour de force of mechanical design, fully the product of Cristofori's inventive character." Yet aside from the possible example by Goccini, the oval spinet did not catch on in Cristofori's day.
As noted above, the impetus for the oval spinet may have been Prince Ferdinando's wish for a compact multi-choired harpsichord suited to the orchestra pit. It may be that the Prince was not satisfied with Cristofori's first efforts in this area, because later on in the 1690s, Cristofori created a different design, his spinettone
("large spinet"), which deployed multiple string choirs at an angle to the keyboard, following the basic principle of the spinet
. It may be that Ferdinando thought the spinettone a better solution to the problem of making a small but audible continuo instrument than the oval spinet.
Evidence Giuliana Montanari gathered from the Medici records supports this conclusion. While Cristofori's spinettoni were constantly loaned out from the Medici collection for use, this is not so for the oval spinets, which according to Montanari "remained in the same places, gradually deteriorating." Given that the oval spinet failed to achieve popularity at the Medici court, it's unlikely it would have been adopted in society at large, given the expense of building it and the conservatism of the instrument-makers' guilds of the time.
of the University of Leipzig
, has been restored. The instrument is physically attractive, but because the restoration process obliterated information about the earlier state of the instrument, this spinet has diminished historical value for understanding Cristofori's work.
The other surviving oval spinet was discovered only in the year 2000, having sat unnoticed in storage for a great period of time in the vast collections of Stefano Bardini
, an antique dealer around the turn of the 20th century. The long period when the instrument sat unnoticed was due in part to delays in the transfer of the Bardini collection from his heirs to public ownership. The instrument was noticed when the collection was finally acquired by the Italian state and submitted to a systematic inventory. It is unknown how the spinet made its way into Bardini's hands.
The 1690 instrument (shown above) has an outwardly decrepit appearance, but is of great historical value, for it appears that in all of the three centuries of its existence it has never been restored.
device (to establish dimensions without any need to touch the instrument), X-ray
s (to detect case-internal parts), optical microscopy
(identification of wood species), electron microscopy
(for wire and pin composition), and infrared spectrophotometry
(to identify glue).
To preserve the instrument's historical value, Italian authorities placed it on display unchanged in the Museo degli Strumenti Musicali in the Galleria del Accademia
. To give a sense of what the instrument was like when it was new, they commissioned harpsichord builders Tony Chinnery and Kerstin Schwarz to build a modern copy (pictured above), which the museum displays alongside the original.
. "Spinet" designates a kind of harpsichord with strings at an angle to the keyboard. Since the oval spinet places its strings parallel to the keyboard, it is more properly called a virginals
. The term "oval spinet" is used simply because it is the most convenient English rendering of Cristofori's own Italian term, spinetta ovale. Evidently, 17th-century Italian used the term spinetta more loosely than 21st-century English uses "spinet.".
Harpsichord
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...
invented in the late 17th century by Bartolomeo Cristofori
Bartolomeo Cristofori
Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco was an Italian maker of musical instruments, generally regarded as the inventor of the piano.-Life:...
, the Italian instrument maker who later achieved fame for inventing the piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
. The oval spinet was unusual for its shape, the arrangement of its strings, and for its mechanism for changing registration.
Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze
The Accademia di Belle Arti is an art academy in Florence, Italy and it is now the operative branch of the still existing Accademia delle Arti del Disegno that was the first academy of drawing in Europe.-History:The Accademia delle Arti del Disegno The Accademia di Belle Arti ("Academy of Fine...
in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
. The other, from 1693, is in the Museum für Musikinstrumente
Museum of Musical Instruments of the University of Leipzig
The Museum of Musical Instruments of the University of Leipzig is a museum in Leipzig, Germany. It is located on Johannisplatz, near the city centre...
of the University of Leipzig
University of Leipzig
The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...
.
String layout
In the oval spinet, the strings were placed parallel to the keyboard, the same arrangement as in a virginalsVirginals
The virginals or virginal is a keyboard instrument of the harpsichord family...
. This can be seen in the following schematic false-color diagram of the 1690 oval spinet, showing the outline, keyboard, bridges, and string arrangement. The diagram and those that follow are colorizations of an original by Tony Chinnery
Tony Chinnery
Tony Chinnery is a builder of historical keyboard instruments, particularly of harpsichords and early fortepianos. He collaborates with his wife Kerstin Schwartz and keeps a workshop not far from Florence in Italy. The instruments from their workshop, which generally are replicas of particular...
.
Arrangement of jacks and keyboard
As in all harpsichords, the strings in the oval spinet are plucked by plectraPlectrum
A plectrum is a small flat tool used to pluck or strum a stringed instrument. For hand-held instruments such as guitars and mandolins, the plectrum is often called a pick, and is a separate tool held in the player's hand...
suspended in jacks, thin vertical strips of wood. Each jack rises from the far end of its key, passes through a guiding register in the soundboard, and terminates adjacent to its assigned string, close enough for the bit of quill held by the jack - the plectrum
Plectrum
A plectrum is a small flat tool used to pluck or strum a stringed instrument. For hand-held instruments such as guitars and mandolins, the plectrum is often called a pick, and is a separate tool held in the player's hand...
- to pluck the string. In the diagram above, keys labeled with aqua dots lift the jacks that pass through the slots shown in aqua, and keys labeled in maroon control jacks passing through slots labeled with the same color.
This arrangement is feasible because the keys are of alternating lengths. These are shown in the following diagram of the keyboard, which rests in the lower part of the case, mostly obscured by the soundboard. The keys are color-coded in the same way as in the first diagram. The same color-coding appears at the far end of each key, schematically indicating the portion of the key that engages the lower end of the jacks.
Advantages of the design
Cristofori's design permits a structurally very stable instrument. In a normal harpsichord, the far ends of the strings pull on the bentside (the long, curved, slanting side of the case, at the player's right). For reasons having to do with the string lengths, the curve of the bentside must be concave, making it naturally weak. In contrast, in an oval spinet the strings pull at either end on a convex arch, an inherently very strong configuration.Maintaining the integrity of the case was evidently important to Cristofori. Later on, in his (standardly-shaped) pianos and harpsichords, he employed two separate bentsides, one to support the soundboard and the other to bear the tension of the strings. This protected the soundboard from possible warping should the outer bentside be pulled out of position.
A second advantage of Cristofori's oval spinet design is that it allows for a more compact instrument. When the strings of a keyboard instrument are laid out in the simplest way (ascending in pitch from left to right, as in full-size harpsichords), the resulting triangular shape is space-consuming and inefficient. The spinet
Spinet
A spinet is a smaller type of harpsichord or other keyboard instrument, such as a piano or organ.-Spinets as harpsichords:While the term spinet is used to designate a harpsichord, typically what is meant is the bentside spinet, described in this section...
harpsichord, which saves space by arranging the strings in slanted pairs, is still much longer than it is wide. Virginals, which enclose their triangle of strings in a rectangular box, have a great deal of unused space. In comparison with these designs, Cristofori's quasi-oval layout stands out for its compactness and efficiency.
Changing registration
Cristofori's oval spinets have two choirs of strings, each at 8-footEight foot pitch
Eight-foot pitch is a term common to the organ and the harpsichord. An organ pipe, or a harpsichord string, designated as eight-foot pitch is sounded at standard, ordinary pitch...
(normal) pitch. In the pairs of strings seen in the diagram above, each pair consists of one string from each choir. The purpose of having two choirs was evidently twofold. First, when both strings are played at once, a louder sound is obtained. Second, the two choirs of strings have different timbre
Timbre
In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...
s, so contrasting tone qualities can be obtained by selecting just one choir.
The contrasting timbres result from two factors. Owing to the slant of the bridges, in each pair the string closer to the outer edge of the case is shorter. Moreover, it is plucked relatively closer to the bridge, which emphasizes higher harmonic
Harmonic
A harmonic of a wave is a component frequency of the signal that is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, i.e. if the fundamental frequency is f, the harmonics have frequencies 2f, 3f, 4f, . . . etc. The harmonics have the property that they are all periodic at the fundamental...
s. Cristofori enhanced the difference in plucking points by placing the plectra on opposite sides of the jack in the two choirs, as seen in the detail figure below.
For the keys that play the near row of jacks (closer to the player), the mechanism works like this. The portion of the key that engages the lower end of the jack is U-shaped, with each prong of the U ending in a wide, flat upper surface. (This U-shaped part is shown in blue in the false-color diagrams below.) The entire keyboard mechanism can be slightly shifted toward or away from the player, using knobs at the sides of the keyboard. Depending on the location of the keyboard, the jacks will be aligned in different ways against the U, resulting in different strings being played. The three possibilities are shown in the diagrams below, which depict sounding jacks in green, silent ones in red.
When the keyboard is fully extracted (pulled toward the player), the jack closer to the player is aligned with the slot of the U, so that only the string plucked by the jack farther than the player (the longer string) will sound.
The mechanism just described is used only for the near row of jacks. In the far row, a simpler, mirror-image scheme is used: a single block of wood engages the jacks. It is just wide enough to raise both if the keyboard is in the intermediate position, but will engage only the front jack (longer string) if the keyboard is fully extracted, and only the rear jack (shorter string) if the keyboard is fully inserted.
The result is that when the keyboard is fully extracted, all of the inner jacks on the instrument are engaged, playing all of the longer strings, and when the keyboard is fully inserted, all of the outer jacks are engaged, playing all of the shorter strings. The intermediate position plays all the strings.
Split keys
The lowest F# and G# on the keyboard of the 1690 oval spinet are split. The purpose was to include the low notes C and D in a compact keyboard. A rather complex arrangement of key levers (see keyboard diagram above) permits both halves of the split keys to control their own jacks.The assignment of keys to pitches is the broken octave
Short octave
The short octave was a method of assigning notes to keys in early keyboard instruments , for the purpose of giving the instrument an extended range in the bass...
, which was a system of pitch assignment used in early keyboard instruments. The following diagram shows the assignment of pitches to the bottom eight notes of the keyboard:
Layout of the arches
Ogive
An ogive is the roundly tapered end of a two-dimensional or three-dimensional object.-Applied physical science and engineering:In ballistics or aerodynamics, an ogive is a pointed, curved surface mainly used to form the approximately streamlined nose of a bullet or other projectile.The traditional...
.
String lengths and plucking points
The strings and plucking points of the 1690 oval spinet, as measured by Tony Chinnery, are in striking agreement with the same measurements from two regular harpsichords built by Cristofori decades later, in 1722 and 1726. The following chart shows the lengths of the longer set of strings:History
Cristofori built the two oval spinets for the MediciMedici
The House of Medici or Famiglia de' Medici was a political dynasty, banking family and later royal house that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the late 14th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of the Tuscan countryside,...
family of Florence. Cristofori's patron was Prince Ferdinando
Ferdinando III de' Medici
Ferdinando III de' Medici was the elder son of Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Marguerite Louise d'Orléans. Ferdinando was heir to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, with the title Grand Prince, from his father's accession in 1670 until his death in 1713. He is remembered today...
, the son of Grand Duke Cosimo III
Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany
Cosimo III de' Medici was the penultimate Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany. He reigned from 1670 to 1723, and was the elder son of Grand Duke Ferdinando II. Cosimo's 53-year long reign, the longest in Tuscan history, was marked by a series of ultra-reactionary laws which regulated prostitution and...
and heir to the Tuscan
Grand Duchy of Tuscany
The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was a central Italian monarchy that existed, with interruptions, from 1569 to 1859, replacing the Duchy of Florence. The grand duchy's capital was Florence...
throne.
Prince Ferdinando, a great opera enthusiast, organized many operatic productions at the Medici villa at Pratolino. According to William Holmes (references below), the prince often participated as the continuo
Figured bass
Figured bass, or thoroughbass, is a kind of integer musical notation used to indicate intervals, chords, and non-chord tones, in relation to a bass note...
player, seated at a harpsichord among the orchestral musicians. The theatre the Prince had available at Pratolino was small, so the prince had a strong incentive for a compact instrument that could fit in the orchestra, but had multiple string choirs to provide volume. The oval spinets may have been Cristofori's effort to fulfill this requirement (and not the only such effort—see below).
The two oval spinets are luxury items—the novel product of a very skilled craftsman—which alone would have made them expensive. Moreover, they are enclosed in fine cabinetry made from costly woods. Bills that Cristofori submitted to his employers indicate that the cabinetry is the work of a different craftsman, subcontracting for Cristofori. The cabinet maker probably also produced outer cases to enclose the instruments—but, if so, these are now lost.
The two oval spinets both appear in a 1700 inventory of Prince Ferdinando's musical instrument collection. This inventory is better known today as the first written evidence for the existence of Cristofori's newly-invented piano. The next Medici instrument inventory, evidently made by Cristofori himself, dates from 1716, three years after Prince Ferdinando's death. The oval spinets do not appear in this inventory, and evidently had been disposed of (through gift or sale).
In 1726, long after the two original spinets were built, but still in Cristofori's lifetime, the Bolognese
Bologna
Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...
builder Giuseppe Maria Goccini (1675-post 1733) built an instrument on similar principles, with the longest strings in the middle, alternating key lengths, and the ability to change stops by sliding the keyboard. However, Goccini's instrument was octagonal (a rectangle with truncated corners) rather than rectangular with appended arches. It is not known whether this instrument was inspired by Crisfori's or was an independent invention.
Reception
Musical instrument scholar Stewart PollensStewart Pollens
Trained as a violin and keyboard-instrument maker, Stewart Pollens served as the Conservator of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1976–2006...
called the oval spinet "a tour de force of mechanical design, fully the product of Cristofori's inventive character." Yet aside from the possible example by Goccini, the oval spinet did not catch on in Cristofori's day.
As noted above, the impetus for the oval spinet may have been Prince Ferdinando's wish for a compact multi-choired harpsichord suited to the orchestra pit. It may be that the Prince was not satisfied with Cristofori's first efforts in this area, because later on in the 1690s, Cristofori created a different design, his spinettone
Spinettone
The spinettone was a kind of harpsichord invented in the late 17th century by Bartolomeo Cristofori, who was later the inventor of the piano...
("large spinet"), which deployed multiple string choirs at an angle to the keyboard, following the basic principle of the spinet
Spinet
A spinet is a smaller type of harpsichord or other keyboard instrument, such as a piano or organ.-Spinets as harpsichords:While the term spinet is used to designate a harpsichord, typically what is meant is the bentside spinet, described in this section...
. It may be that Ferdinando thought the spinettone a better solution to the problem of making a small but audible continuo instrument than the oval spinet.
Evidence Giuliana Montanari gathered from the Medici records supports this conclusion. While Cristofori's spinettoni were constantly loaned out from the Medici collection for use, this is not so for the oval spinets, which according to Montanari "remained in the same places, gradually deteriorating." Given that the oval spinet failed to achieve popularity at the Medici court, it's unlikely it would have been adopted in society at large, given the expense of building it and the conservatism of the instrument-makers' guilds of the time.
The spinets today
The two spinets, though similar in design, are very different in their current state. The oval spinet of 1693, now in the Museum für MusikinstrumenteMuseum of Musical Instruments of the University of Leipzig
The Museum of Musical Instruments of the University of Leipzig is a museum in Leipzig, Germany. It is located on Johannisplatz, near the city centre...
of the University of Leipzig
University of Leipzig
The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...
, has been restored. The instrument is physically attractive, but because the restoration process obliterated information about the earlier state of the instrument, this spinet has diminished historical value for understanding Cristofori's work.
The other surviving oval spinet was discovered only in the year 2000, having sat unnoticed in storage for a great period of time in the vast collections of Stefano Bardini
Stefano Bardini
Stefano Bardini was an Italian connoisseur and art dealer in Florence who specialized in Italian paintings, Renaissance sculpture, cassoni and other Renaissance and Cinquecento furnishings and architectural fragments that came on the market during the urbanistic reorganization of Florence in the...
, an antique dealer around the turn of the 20th century. The long period when the instrument sat unnoticed was due in part to delays in the transfer of the Bardini collection from his heirs to public ownership. The instrument was noticed when the collection was finally acquired by the Italian state and submitted to a systematic inventory. It is unknown how the spinet made its way into Bardini's hands.
Research on the rediscovered 1690 oval spinet
The historical importance of the 1690 instrument was immediately recognized, and a team of experts assembled to study it with technology specially designed to keep the instrument intact. The equipment and techniques employed included a frame-mounded laser pointerLaser pointer
A laser pointer or laser pen is a small portable device with a power source and a laser emitting a very narrow coherent low-powered beam of visible light, intended to be used to highlight something of interest by illuminating it with a small bright spot of colored light...
device (to establish dimensions without any need to touch the instrument), X-ray
X-ray
X-radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz and energies in the range 120 eV to 120 keV. They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma...
s (to detect case-internal parts), optical microscopy
Microscope
A microscope is an instrument used to see objects that are too small for the naked eye. The science of investigating small objects using such an instrument is called microscopy...
(identification of wood species), electron microscopy
Electron microscope
An electron microscope is a type of microscope that uses a beam of electrons to illuminate the specimen and produce a magnified image. Electron microscopes have a greater resolving power than a light-powered optical microscope, because electrons have wavelengths about 100,000 times shorter than...
(for wire and pin composition), and infrared spectrophotometry
Spectrophotometry
In chemistry, spectrophotometry is the quantitative measurement of the reflection or transmission properties of a material as a function of wavelength...
(to identify glue).
To preserve the instrument's historical value, Italian authorities placed it on display unchanged in the Museo degli Strumenti Musicali in the Galleria del Accademia
Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze
The Accademia di Belle Arti is an art academy in Florence, Italy and it is now the operative branch of the still existing Accademia delle Arti del Disegno that was the first academy of drawing in Europe.-History:The Accademia delle Arti del Disegno The Accademia di Belle Arti ("Academy of Fine...
. To give a sense of what the instrument was like when it was new, they commissioned harpsichord builders Tony Chinnery and Kerstin Schwarz to build a modern copy (pictured above), which the museum displays alongside the original.
Nomenclature
As Grant O'Brien (see links below) has observed, the oval spinet is, technically, not a spinetSpinet
A spinet is a smaller type of harpsichord or other keyboard instrument, such as a piano or organ.-Spinets as harpsichords:While the term spinet is used to designate a harpsichord, typically what is meant is the bentside spinet, described in this section...
. "Spinet" designates a kind of harpsichord with strings at an angle to the keyboard. Since the oval spinet places its strings parallel to the keyboard, it is more properly called a virginals
Virginals
The virginals or virginal is a keyboard instrument of the harpsichord family...
. The term "oval spinet" is used simply because it is the most convenient English rendering of Cristofori's own Italian term, spinetta ovale. Evidently, 17th-century Italian used the term spinetta more loosely than 21st-century English uses "spinet.".
Books and articles
- La spinetta del 1690/The 1690 Oval Spinet, edited by Gabriele Rossi-Rognoni (Sillabe for the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, 2002). This definitive volume, prepared following the discovery of the 1690 instrument, contains several essays by experts on Cristofori and on early instruments. It also contains laboratory reports by experts in botany, radiography, and metallurgy. There are also many diagrams and glossy illustrations. The text is bilingual. Chapters cited above:
- Gabriele Rossi-Rognoni's general overview
- Giuliana Montanari's survey of the evidence from the Medici records
- Tony Chinnery and Kerstin Schwarz's account of how they built their replica instrument
- Grant O'Brien's account of how the instrument was designed and laid out, which describes the geometric construction given above, and also establishes that the unit of measurement used by Cristofori was the older Florentine soldo.
- Various chapters reporting laboratory results
- Frank Hubbard (1967) Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; ISBN 0674888456) documents the conservatism of the guilds of harpsichord makers, noted above, as well as providing general background on the historical harpsichord.
- Holmes, William C. (1999) "Operatic commissions and productions at Pratolino: Ifianassa e Melampo by Moniglia and Legrenzi," Journal of Musicology vol. 17 no. 1, pp. 152-167. Documents Prince Ferdinando's participation in opera productions as continuo player.
- Kottick, Edward (2003) A History of the Harpsichord. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Pollens, Stewart (1991) "Three Keyboard Instruments Signed by Cristofori's Assistant, Giovanni Ferrini," The Galpin Society Journal 44: 77-93.
External links
- The web site of Tony Chinnery offers extensive discussion, including:
- pictures of both of the historical instruments as well as of the replica made by Chinnery and Schwarz
- a sound file of the replica instrument being played
- A preprint of the Chinnery/Schwarz chapter of The 1690 Oval Spinet
- This article by Grant O'Brien offers an articulate and impassioned plea, made when the 1690 instrument was rediscovered, that this instrument should never be "restored" to playing condition, but kept unaltered to aid future research and replica construction. (According to O'Brien's later annotation, his advice was unheeded.)
- A preprint version of Grant O'Brien's chapter in The 1690 Oval Spinet can be downloaded from this site.
- Image of the 1693 Leipzig instrument (website of the Leipzig Museum für Musikinstrumente)