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The tangent piano is a very rare keyboard instrument that resembles a harpsichord and early pianos in design. It normally features five octaves of keys and the strings are acted upon by narrow wooden or metal slips when the keys are depressed.
In 1440, Arnault de Zwolle described what is believed to be the first keyboard instrument which used a tangent action. [1] The earliest surviving instrument with a tangent action is a spinet built by Francesco Bonafinis with its jacks replaced with wooden tangents before 1700. [2] Jean Marius proposed a design for a hammered instrument similar to a tangent piano in 1716, though it was only published after his death in 1735. [3] Christoph Gottlieb Schröter claimed that he had invented the tangent piano in 1717. Franz Jakob Späth presented a tangent piano to the elector of Bonn in 1751. [4]
In 1777, Mozart referred to the tangent piano as the "Spättisches Klavier," after the maker of tangent pianos, Spath. Other names included the Italian cembalo angelico, and the French clavecin harmonieux et celeste. This is all evidence that the tangent piano spread throughout Europe. By the earliest decade of the 19th century, Spath tangent pianos were sent all over the globe and given a wide 6 octave range, which enabled them to compete with the piano. At the same time, the fortepiano began to eclipse the harpsichord and clavichord as the keyboard instrument of choice.
The creation of the tangent piano, and the fortepiano, were the results of attempts to remedy the lack of dynamics in harpsichord sound. Both the tangent piano and fortepiano offered a variety of sound that was appealing to the changes in classical music, which featured more expressiveness and intensity than the harpsichord could offer. The tangent piano had a short life in popularity, and dropped off somewhere in the late 18th century or early 19th century. The fortepiano, however, surpassed the harpsichord in popularity by 1800. It then slowly evolved to the massive modern iron-framed giant of 88 keys. The tangent piano's popularity lasted for such a short time that very little music was written for it. It is possible that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's keyboard concerti were written for this instrument or for the fortepiano. In either case, the tangent piano is an appropriate choice for the keyboard instrument in the concerti. In addition, other sons of Johann Sebastian Bach wrote pieces expressly for the tangent piano.
There are currently approximately twenty intact tangent pianos in existence. In 2006 a tangent piano was discovered on the estate of Johann Esaias von Seidel in Sulzbach-Rosenberg in its original condition. [5] After extensive restoration it was presented to the public during a concert by Christoph Hammer and Sylvia Ackermann in 2012. [6]
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In the action of a tangent piano, the tangent is a small slip of wood similar in shape to a harpsichord jack or similar to an unleathered fortepiano hammer which strikes the string to produce sound.
It is similar to the tangent of a clavichord only in the sense that they both are driven ultimately by the player's finger to strike the string to initiate sound. In the clavichord, the tangent remains in contact with the string to keep the note sounding, while in the tangent piano, the tangent immediately rebounds from the string so that the string is allowed to vibrate freely (that is, it has an escapement).
The instrument can have numerous stops to soften and sweeten the sound: una corda, moderator, harp. Also, it has a device which allows the performer to raise all the dampers (like the modern damper pedal), and another that will only raise the treble dampers (a typical feature on many early pianos). See Piano pedals.
The tangent piano has an unusual sound that combines the qualities of the harpsichord and piano. The treble resembles the bright sound from a light action piano, and the bass resembles the bass from a harpsichord. The sound varies from instrument to instrument, as do personal descriptions of the tangent piano's sound.
The clavichord is a stringed rectangular keyboard instrument that was used largely in the Late Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical eras. Historically, it was mostly used as a practice instrument and as an aid to composition, not being loud enough for larger performances as it was tiny. The clavichord produces sound by striking brass or iron strings with small metal blades called tangents. Vibrations are transmitted through the bridge(s) to the soundboard.
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. This activates a row of levers that turn a trigger mechanism that plucks one or more strings with a small plectrum made from quill or plastic. The strings are under tension on a soundboard, which is mounted in a wooden case; the soundboard amplifies the vibrations from the strings so that the listeners can hear it. Like a pipe organ, a harpsichord may have more than one keyboard manual, and even a pedal board. Harpsichords may also have stop buttons which add or remove additional octaves. Some harpsichords may have a buff stop, which brings a strip of buff leather or other material in contact with the strings, muting their sound to simulate the sound of a plucked lute.
A musical keyboard is the set of adjacent depressible levers or keys on a musical instrument. Keyboards typically contain keys for playing the twelve notes of the Western musical scale, with a combination of larger, longer keys and smaller, shorter keys that repeats at the interval of an octave. Pressing a key on the keyboard makes the instrument produce sounds—either by mechanically striking a string or tine, plucking a string (harpsichord), causing air to flow through a pipe organ, striking a bell (carillon), or, on electric and electronic keyboards, completing a circuit. Since the most commonly encountered keyboard instrument is the piano, the keyboard layout is often referred to as the piano keyboard.
The piano is a keyboard instrument that produces sound when the keys are pressed. Most modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys: 52 white keys for the notes of the C major scale and 36 shorter black keys raised above the white keys and set further back, for sharps and flats. This means that the piano can play 88 different pitches, spanning a range of a bit over seven octaves. The black keys are for the "accidentals", which are needed to play in all twelve keys.
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument played using a keyboard, a row of levers that are pressed by the fingers. The most common of these are the piano, organ, and various electronic keyboards, including synthesizers and digital pianos. Other keyboard instruments include celestas, which are struck idiophones operated by a keyboard, and carillons, which are usually housed in bell towers or belfries of churches or municipal buildings.
Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco was an Italian maker of musical instruments famous for inventing the piano.
An electric piano is a musical instrument that has a piano-style musical keyboard, where sound is produced by means of mechanical hammers striking metal strings or reeds or wire tines, which leads to vibrations which are then converted into electrical signals by pickups. The pickups are connected to an instrument amplifier and loudspeaker to reinforce the sound sufficiently for the performer and audience to hear. Unlike a synthesizer, the electric piano is not an electronic instrument. Instead, it is an electro-mechanical instrument. Some early electric pianos used lengths of wire to produce the tone, like a traditional piano. Smaller electric pianos used short slivers of steel to produce the tone. The earliest electric pianos were invented in the late 1920s; the 1929 Neo-Bechstein electric grand piano was among the first. Probably the earliest stringless model was Lloyd Loar's Vivi-Tone Clavier. A few other noteworthy producers of electric pianos include Baldwin Piano and Organ Company, and the Wurlitzer Company.
A harpsichord concerto is a piece of music for an orchestra with the harpsichord in a solo role. Sometimes these works are played on the modern piano. For a period in the late 18th century, Joseph Haydn and Thomas Arne wrote concertos that could be played interchangeably on harpsichord, fortepiano, and pipe organ.
A fortepiano, sometimes referred to as a pianoforte, is an early piano. In principle, the word "fortepiano" can designate any piano dating from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1698 up to the early 19th century. Most typically, however, it is used to refer to the mid-18th to early-19th century instruments, for which composers of the Classical era, especially Haydn, Mozart, and the younger Beethoven and Hummel, wrote their piano music.
Keyboard expression is the ability of a keyboard musical instrument to change tone or other qualities of the sound in response to velocity, pressure or other variations in how the performer depresses the keys of the musical keyboard. Expression types include:
Johann (Georg) Andreas Stein was an outstanding German maker of keyboard instruments, a central figure in the history of the piano.
Gottfried Silbermann was a German builder of keyboard instruments. He built harpsichords, clavichords, organs, and fortepianos; his modern reputation rests mainly on the latter two.
Piano pedals are foot-operated levers at the base of a piano that change the instrument's sound in various ways. Modern pianos usually have three pedals, from left to right, the soft pedal, the sostenuto pedal, and the sustaining pedal. Some pianos omit the sostenuto pedal, or have a middle pedal with a different purpose such as a muting function also known as silent piano.
Americus Backers, sometimes described as the father of the English grand pianoforte style, brought the hammer striking action for keyboard instruments from his master Gottfried Silbermann's workshop in Freiburg to England in the mid-18th century. Unlike the eleven other ex-apprentices of Silbermann who followed him to England and built square pianos with his action, Backers developed Silbermann's action into a reliable, powerful and responsive form that he built into a grand harpsichord case and added two tonal effects – una corda and damper lift – activated by pedals built into the dedicated trestle stand, again his original innovation. This new instrument altered the landscape of English music, causing composers and musicians to consign the plucked string harpsichord and its music to history. It is upon Americus's design that the modern grand pianoforte we know today is based.
The clavicymbalum is an early keyboard instrument and ancestor of the harpsichord. The instrument is described as a psaltery to which keys, but no dampers, have been attached, allowing the keys rather than the fingers to pluck the strings, which then ring until their sound fades out.
Christoph Hammer is a German conductor, forte piano player, musicologist and specialist of historically informed performance.
Franz Jakob Späth was a German keyboard instrument builder. He was born and died in Regensburg, where he worked for most of his life. An organ builder by training, he is known, along with his son-in-law Christoph Friedrich Schmahl, as the most prominent builder of tangent pianos.
Christian Ernst Friederici was a German builder of keyboard instruments. He is most known as a manufacturer of stringed keyboard instruments such as the Pyramidenflügel and the fortbien. He apprenticed under Gottfried Silbermann and Tobias Heinrich Gottfried Trost and from 1737, worked in Gera with his brother until his death. His instruments were owned by C.P.E. Bach and the Mozart family.
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