Introducing the Clavichord — Transcript

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1. 0:12This is the clavichord, again, there are lots of different flavours of clavichord
2. 0:17and this is kind of the wild card keyboard instrument. It's never really died out.
3. 0:22Early examples from the 15th century are quite similar in many ways to examples
4. 0:27from the 18th century to the 19th century and it didn't need to be revived
5. 0:32because there was still a hardcore of enthusiasts building clavichords through
6. 0:35the 20th century, in the 21st century. It's now achieving great popularity but
7. 0:41as you can hear and see from this style of instrument, it achieves great
8. 0:46popularity but in very very small circles, it's an exceptionally quiet
9. 0:50instrument. Here's a very loud chord...
10. 0:55...and that's it and this is quite a loud
11. 0:57clavichord - this is a copy of an instrument from
12. 1:00about 1700, originally made in Leipzig and this instrument is a certain flavour
13. 1:08of clavichord called a fretted clavichord and what that means is that certain
14. 1:12notes share pairs of strings which means that some notes combinations are not
15. 1:18possible so I could take for example the C, the B and the C sharp and they
16. 1:27all share the same strings. This is a triple fretted clavichord which is quite
17. 1:30rare and what it means is that if I play the C sharp, I then can't play the C or
18. 1:35the B because they all share the same strings. What this means in practice is
19. 1:42you have to be very, very careful and very precise about your finger touch and
20. 1:45we find theorists from the 18th century particularly, talk about that when you've
21. 1:51mastered the clavichord touch you can play anything else, the fortepiano, the
22. 1:55harpsichord, the organ - really really wonderfully well and to a
23. 1:59certain degree that's absolutely true. This little instrument though has a lot
24. 2:05of expressivity even within it's very quiet dimensions. You can play sort of
25. 2:10loud and soft you have certain degree of control of
26. 2:13which is rather nice and we also have this amazing effect called the bebung
27. 2:17whereby if I vary the pressure of my finger when it's playing the note I can
28. 2:22alter the pitch of the string a little bit and give myself a vibrato, a bit like
29. 2:26a modern string player so if I play a straight note it
30. 2:31sounds like this...
31. 2:34...if I play it with bebung it sounds like this
32. 2:38and this is a very expressive thing that composers knew and were writing for that's only
33. 2:43really possible on the clavichord