The clavichord

Clavichord

The clavichord is a European stringed keyboard instrument known from the late Medieval, through the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical eras. Historically, it was widely used as a practice instrument and as an aid to composition, not being loud enough for larger performances. The clavichord produces...

 is a keyboard instrument. From the 16th up to and including the 18th century, this instrument was excellently suited to serve as a practice, training and living-room instrument. Some clavichords had a pedal keyboard allowing them to be played with the feet. It served to replace the church organ.

While clavichords were typically single manual instruments, they could be stacked to provide multiple keyboards. With the addition of a pedal clavichord, which included a pedal keyboard for the lower notes, a clavichord could be used to practice organist repertoire. In the era of pipe organ

Pipe organ

The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air through pipes selected via a keyboard. Because each organ pipe produces a single pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre and volume throughout the keyboard compass...

s which used hand-pumped blowers, and of churches which were only heated during church services, organists used pedal harpsichords and pedal clavichords as practice instruments (see also: pedal piano

Pedal piano

The pedal piano is a kind of piano that includes a pedalboard, enabling bass register notes to be played with the feet, as is standard on the organ....

).

Repertoire

There is speculation that some works written for organ may have been intended for pedal clavichord. An interesting case is made by that Bach's

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...

 "Eight Little Preludes and Fugues"

Eight Short Preludes and Fugues

The Eight Short Preludes and Fugues are a collection of works for keyboard and pedal, originally attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. They were believed for a long time to have been composed by one of Bach's pupils, Johann Tobias Krebs, based on certain unusual characteristics of the music when...

, now thought to be spurious, may actually be authentic. The keyboard writing seems unsuited to organ, but Speerstra argues that they are idiomatic on the pedal clavichord. As Speerstra and also note, the compass of the keyboard parts of Bach's six organ trio sonata

Trio sonata

The trio sonata is a musical form that was popular in the 17th and early 18th centuries.A trio sonata is written for two solo melodic instruments and basso continuo, making three parts in all, hence the name trio sonata...

s BWV 525–530 rarely go below the tenor C, so could have been played on a single manual pedal clavichord, by moving the left hand down an octave, a customary practice in the 18th century.

Modern history

Various modern copies have been made of surviving pedal clavichords, such as the one in the Instrumenten-Museum

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...

 in 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...

 built in the 1760s by the organ-builder Johann David Gerstenberg from Geringswalde

Geringswalde

Geringswalde is a town in the district of Mittelsachsen, in the Free State of Saxony, Germany. It is situated 12 km northwest of Mittweida, and 27 km north of Chemnitz.- History :...

 in Saxony

Saxony

The Free State of Saxony is a landlocked state of Germany, contingent with Brandenburg, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. It is the tenth-largest German state in area, with of Germany's sixteen states....

.

The Pedalclavichord Foundation contributed to the knowledge of the 17th century music practice. Clavichormaker Dick Verwolf made a replica of the pedalclavichord by Gerstenberg in 1991. This replica is now used at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam

Conservatorium van Amsterdam

The Conservatorium van Amsterdam is a Dutch academy of music located in Amsterdam. This school is the music division of the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, the city's vocational university of arts...

for study purposes. Dick Verwolf also made a reconstruction of a pedalclavichord from the 16th century.

External links

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV246jxDTd0
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkxNL1W9Od0