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JOHN BARNES
STEWART POLLENS : The Early Pianoforte . Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xx. 297 pp. ISBN 0 521 41799 5. Price £50.00.
This excellent book is a credit to American methods of research and to the opportunities which organizations like the Metropolitan Museum of Art give their staff for research and foreign travel. It is a sign of the times that a book with this title deals only with the period up to 1763, but some justification is provided by tracing the beginnings of the piano back to Arnaut's fourth action, so that the book in fact covers more than three centuries. It covers this period very thoroughly and is almost entirely based on original research and personal observations over a period of nearly twenty years. Even so, perhaps it would have been better to call it 'The Very Early Pianoforte' or 'The Earliest Pianofortes' to avoid the implication that pianos after 1763 are 'late'.
The first chapter shows that the fourth action drawn and described hi Arnaut's manuscript, usually dated c .1440, was a striking and rebounding action. Pollens points out (p.33) that as a concept the basic hammer action is actually simpler than the plucking action and might therefore be expected to have preceded it. He also alerts us to the possibility that hammer actions were more common than has been suspected. This is because Arnaut's names for various keyboard instruments were determined by 'case form or string layout and not by the string-activating mechanism employed. If this system of nomenclature were widely practiced in Arnaut's time, then it is conceivable that any number of early references to clavicimbalum, clavicordium, clavicytherium, and chekker may have been allusions to keyboard instruments with striking mechanisms' (p.25).
The second chapter presents evidence of sixteenth-century keyboard instruments capable of dynamic gradation, including a group of letters of 1598 to Cesare d'Este, formerly of Ferrara, referring to ' instrumento pian et forte '. Since there is evidence of wind instruments being sent frown Philip the Good (Arnaut's employer) to the d'Este family in Ferrara in 1476. Pollens speculates that the idea of keyboards with striking action may have travelled by the same route. The striking action may have been by...