Talk:Contemporary harpsichord

Harpsichordists without articles

I think it best not to include performers not eminent to have yet gotten a WP article, so I've taken this out:

Antoinette Vischer (Switzerland), Jane Chapman (UK), Annelie de Man (Netherlands), and Vivienne Spiteri (Canada).

If someone writes articles about them it would be fine to put them back in. Opus33 (talk) 18:47, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Pedals

I've been listening to Mahan Esfahani's The Alternative Bach, on BBC Radio 3. He makes reference to the tone effects heard in a Landowska recording where she makes use of the pedals on a 'revival' instrument. I can find little information online about the details of pedal devices. There is this. The ahistorical array of pedals is clearly visible on some of the instruments used to illustrate this article, but there's no reference to the function of these pedals (and the arrangements behind them) in the text. I was wondering whether the number of sound registers available is responsible for the deep, 'tubby', body of these instruments. William Avery (talk) 09:30, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi, William Avery, I randomly came across this article and checked out the talk. You may have worked things out in the meantime. The url you cited is weirdly broken, this points directly at the page. The articles Harpsichord#Multiple manuals and choirs of strings and Disposition (harpsichord) make some sort of explanation. In essence, the very simplest harpsichords have one set of strings, exactly like a modern pianoforte. You press middle C, and that's what you get. But harpsichords, having fewer physical keys on the keyboard, have a limited range of playable notes. So the 18th-century makers added more sets of strings, often doubling the lower or upper octave. These extra sets of strings function exactly like pipe organ stops and add an extra timbre.

As far as I know each extra set of strings on a harpsichord is also known as a 'stop', just like in an organ. Standard pitch is known as an 8-foot stop (I can't begin to describe the maths of the harmonics); the same sound an octave lower is a 16' stop, and the higher octave is a 4' stop. There are various mechanisms by which these 'stops' are brought into play - they can look like a sliding button on the vertical back face of the keyboard, or can be controlled by pedals. Essentially there is more than one set of jacks per physical key which are activated by each button or pedal, and they pluck another set of strings. A 'sliding stop' pushes the entire keyboard inwards so that another set of jacks engages more strings. A second manual brings yet another set of strings (or jacks) into play - for example an effect known as a 'lute stop'. The player can couple the manuals together with another button or pedal - on an organ there will be a stop marked 'Couple Choir to Great' or 'Great to Pedals'. The effect is the same- more sound/sonority.

Thus the pedals are one way of controlling the stops, or sets of strings. They are not particularly like the pedals on a piano, where the 'soft pedal' shifts the entire mechanism sideways so as to strike two rather than three strings per note; and the sustaining pedal lifts the dampers away. The pedals are also not like those on a pedal harp, which raise or lower (for example) all the Fs by a semitone.

I'm not sure if the number of stops affects the overall sound, but it appears that the sturdier modern construction with metal frames has something to do with it. Also, congrats with the Frederick Bligh Bond article, I bought The Gates of Remembrance many years ago. I they had only announced *beforehand* where they were going to dig and what they expected to find, it would have been much much more convincing. It's a good read, anyway. Cheers, MinorProphet (talk) 01:58, 3 December 2020 (UTC)