That OTHER Keyboard Stringed Instrument...And What I Have Done About It

Ivor Darreg

(1982?)

Probably I am writing this pamphlet for some people I haven't met yet. Most of my friends and acquaintances know something of this story and sometimes have offered suggestions. Indeed, I am setting this down because of certain persons who don't want to see a promising and already-tested idea go to waste.

We live in the middle of an historical situation about which nobody can be objective because all of us are immersed in it. The keyboard-instrument scene, which has been piano piano PIANO for so long, has suddenly opened up in both directions--back to the harpischord, forward to the synthesizer; back to the tracker-action unenclosed baroque organ, forward to all manner of computerized electronic organs that even tune themselves.

Turn on the record player or radio and you are now more likely to hear guitars than pianos. Not too long ago for some of us to remember, there was a piano in every home; now it's probably a guitar. Back then, the organ was something associated with solemnity and churches, now, it's more likely to be in a cocktail bar or sports stadium. If you DO hear a piano today, it's on a record most likely.

But there is an enormous keyboard literature, which the piano claimed for its own in the 19th century, so the Musical Establishment ignores today's reality and pretends that everything is for pianos, when you can plainly hear that other instruments are demanding and getting their place in the sun.

After 150 years of silence, the harpsichord is reborn and with the new popularity of the guitar, the Public Ear has been conditioned back in the harpsichord direction. We don't have to worry about the future of harpsichords and similar instruments with or without keyboards. However, the CLAVICHORD has not yet recovered from that same century and a half of neglect and silence. Only a few devoted specialists have clung to it and tried to effect a revival.

Why so? For one thing, nobody knows what a clavichord IS. Even professionals often confuse the clavichord with the harpsichord. Until lately, the standard books on music were full of garbled misinformation. If a pianist or harpsichordist takes up the clavichord, chances are it will be played in the wrong style with the wrong technique. besides, we live in a very noisy age, and the clavichord is extraordinarily quiet and demure and its gentle whisper is lost in the din of today. Realistically, one can't expect an extensive revival and acceptance of the TRADITIONAL clavichord. It is often softer than the guitar, and unable to compete with anything louder than a ukelele or mandolin.

So long as the history-minded and the antiquarians the scholarly revivers of Bach and pre-Bach keyboard music have a monopoly on it, the average person who might want a clavichord will be intimidated by the implied prohibition of playing anything written after 1800 on this instrument. Having met some of those people and experienced first-hand their cries of "Sacrilege!" when I mentioned any of my ideas to them, I really do know what I am talking about.

It is important to realize that during much of the nineteenth century, the piano evolved from a thin-toned gentle instrument blending the strings, to a powerful concert grand that could compete with a symphony orchestra and thunder away in lush overstuffed richly-upholstered Romantic chords and runs. From the drawing-rooms of the 18th century it moved to the imposing auditorium. No traditional clavichord could have done that: while this was happening, the world got noisier and noisier--trains, factories, big cities; later, autos, planes, pandemonium.

Today jet airports and rock groups. The traditional clavichord is rather small--an oblong box with a rather small sounding board. Maybe 4.5 octaves of keys: Bach wrote for four. The strings run at an angle and are not very tight by modern standards. Often they were of brass for part of the compass. Instead of hammers being thrown at them with considerable force, and instead of the vigorous plucking action of the harpsichord, the clavichord's action is extremely simple and inefficient in the engineering sense: a small piece of metal (brass in those days) is set into the back of the key-lever and is at once hammer and bridge. It cuts off the vibrating length of the string and remains pressed against it for the duration of the tone. The other, cut-off-temporarily, portion of the string is damped with interwoven muting-felt, thus dissipating half of the available energy; when the tangent falls, it takes effect and automatically damps the whole strings. On traditional clavichords, which means 99.9% of all those now in existence, tangents are tiny and flimsy, so cannot impart much energy to the strings. If brass strings are used, they cannot be really tight, so cannot store much energy either. The wooden frame of the instrument couldn't stand much tension: the poor thing would collapse.

But--the clavichord is the most intimate and expressive keyboard instrument possible. Nothing comes between the performer and the string, any more than it does not guitar and violin--the slightest change in pressure on a key is transmitted to the string and so it has the same vibrato capabilities as the violin family. The tone can be altered in mid-sounding, whereas on the piano the hammer is NOT under the control of the player after the tone has been sounded. Pressure on a clavichord key also raises the pitch, since it stretches the string; this is analogous to the way today's guitarists "bend" their tones--and if you are one of those hidebound traditionalists, don't you dare heckle me about that! Neither piano nor harpsichord has any such bending capability. Until the imitation harpsichords came along--i.e., the harpsichord effect on synthesizers and some electronic organs, a bent harpsichord pitch was impossible.

I wonder how many millions of pianists have tried to put vibrato in their tones. A good many, I believe, hypnotized themselves and others into thinking they were getting it. Of course it's mechanically impossible. The only way to vibratize a piano tone is to send it through a microphone and amplifier and one of those rock groups' effect-boxes. The pianist is often a sort of magician and illusionist. This explains why they wish to be seen as well as heard. Make the audience believe the impossible has been done.

Clavichord and piano do have this in common: the harder you hit the key, the louder the sound. Not so on traditional organ and harpsichord. But the range of loudnesses of the piano are usually pp to fff, whereas the clavichord's range of loudnesses is from i.a. (my abbreviation for Inaudible) through pppp to mp. I mean, the dynamic range of the clavichord is just as long as that of the piano, but most of it is buried in extreme faintness below the human ear's ability to hear anything. Bring a piano or a trumpet or an opera-singer on the scene, and almost all the clavichord's dynamic range is smothered, blocked out, drowned out.

So what's the answered? Obviously, amplifying the clavichord till it is the same loudness as a grand piano, or even louder still. Instead of itsy-bitsy teenyweeny flimsy paper-thin tangents, put in heavy tangents that can be real hammers and real bridges. Instead of loose brass strings, use steel strings at least as tight and substantial as those in electric guitars. Instead of a sounding board so small as to be a rather poor joke, don't have any to drain the small amount of energy stored in clavichord strings. Instead of a wooden frame, have a substantial metal frame.

Let the antiquarians go on making the traditional clavichords--that's their right and privilege, but they have NO right to tell me or any other contemporary composer what not to do. They have no right whatsoever to embalm the clavichord as a mere museum-piece and prevent it resuming growth and progress through modern tools and materials and electronic apparatus.

These ideas just stated above are not something I just dreamt up: I reached these conclusions over 40 years ago! In Summer 1939 I made some preliminary drawings and figured out some of the parameters and prerequisites for an amplifying clavichord, which could then compete on equal terms with other instruments and would be as fully revived as the harpsichord and as modern as the electric guitar.

In February 1940 I had a frame welded and started to build an amplifying clavichord, so that before the year was out I had it working. To avoid wound strings and all the experimenting that would have had to be made with endless restringing, I made the instrument 8 feet 4 inches long, and I obtained a 7-octave (A to A) piano keyboard.

Over the next several years many possible pickup systems and kinds and forms of tangents were tried out, starting with the the traditional brass and going to steel. Of course different amplifiers and speaker systems were tried also. This research was repeatedly thwarted by (a) illnesses, my mother's and my own; (b) poverty, so I couldn't get materials; (c) having to move and disrupt everything and settle in another place before the instrument could be reconnected--often having to store everything for lack of floor-space (this is the present problem); (d) the very word clavichord itself, since practically nobody knew what it meant, so there was no way of explaining why the instrument existed; (e) the fact that the clavichord touch is very strange to pianists--they can't understand the shallow key-dip--about 1.5 or 2 mm before the tangent hits the string, as opposed to 9 mm or so to bottom a piano key--they can't understand the "elastic" feel of the remainder of the key-stroke, which permits stretching the string for vibrato; (f) the fact that the clavichord has no damper (loud) pedal, so you can't play in lush muddy Romantic style, but must have all your mistakes exposed in sharply-defined clarity--now there's the word: the clavichord is clear as opposed to vague; (g) until quite recently, keyboard meant PIANO to almost everyone, so any non-piano was treated as an intruder; there wasn't any Frame of Reference in the mind of evaluate the clavichord justly--the all-powerful pervasive Image of the Piano was in the way...until lately, there were no auditory memory-images of the guitar and the synthesizer and the percussion effects on electronic organs, which now are becoming familiar to everyone--otherwise stated, the environment was wrong for it; (h) in 1940, amplifiers and pickups and speaker-systems were not what they have become today, sot eh imperfection of equipment made during the 1930's was seized upon by assorted critics, opponents, and adversaries to condemn any and all electronic or amplified instruments; (i) during the first 10 years of this clavichord's existence, the steel guitar was in eclipse, so its closest commercially-available relative was not being heard enough times impress anybody's subconscious--and besides that, the steel or Hawaiian guitar was used only for very trivial purposes--indeed, this has led me the last few years to invent a whole new family of instruments--the Megalyra and Kosmolyra and Drone Instrument, described elsewhere.

As I said before, for a century and a half, roughly from the end of the French Revolution to the early 20th century with the Jazz Age and all that, which depended heavily upon the piano, the piano evolved from a light, thin-toned wooden-framed affair fitting an average living-room of the 18th century into a powerful concert grand with heavily-upholstered Romantic sounds, and in so doing, vigorous growth and progress took place, and composers were inspired to try almost everything it could do. Somewhere around the turn of the century or before, this progress reached its limits. While inventors kept on trying to improve it, anything further was anticlimax, moving away from the ideal instead of toward it. (See my booklet, SHALL WE IMPROVE THE PIANO?) [ This booklet is not included in Ivor's complete writings. It was written in 1962 and today, 30 years later, is completely obsolete. The piano is currently in danger of extinction and the question posed by the booklet's title has become moot, since ordinary humans can't afford to buy pianos, much less spend thousands of dollars improving them. ] The piano then stayed on a high plateau for a while, but inexorable economic and social and physical/mechanical factors started it downhill. Worst of these was the "spinet" or "vertical" compact piano design of the 1930s and continuing, alas, even now. Piano tone and volume and quality has evolved to compete with the symphony orchestra in the concerto and to fill big auditoriums in virtuoso recitals, not to fit the average person's apartment or living room or the tiny places some of us have to live in these days. Instead of going back to the piano of Mozart's day, the manufacturers simply shrunk the concert grand without thinking of the artistic consequences, and with absolutely no regard for the progress of music or what today's or tomorrow's composers would need. In consequence, much of the piano-image of today is Nostalgia APpeal. Period Furniture, if you will.

What has that got to do with amplifying a clavichord? Very much indeed. This is the late 20th century, not the 19th. This is the age of PRecision, of computers, of functional design. Clear contrasts, not heavy blurred outlines. Economy of means, rather than luxuriant extravagance. COntemporary art takes account of the nature of new materials. So why not in music also? Both the harpsichord and the clavichord were killed off by the piano and forgotten. With almost religious zeal, the inner workings of harpsichord and clavichord were ignored and all accounts of them was expunged from books and from music-teaching. Now, with the help of the guitar boom, the harspichord is back and the do-it-yourselfers are making them at home and in small shops everywhere, whereas the great success of the piano was strictly a mass-production big-factory affair, and the design of the piano changed from something anyone could make at home to something requiring a whole army of skilled craftsmen and heavy ponderous complicated machinery. Have you ever seen a book on How To Make Your Own Piano?

This point is very important--it would be useless writing this pamphlet at all if amplifying clavichords had to be made ONLY in big factories with oodles of expensive special machinery and specially-trained workers. If I can do it under the many difficulties I went through, then anybody can make an amplifying clavichord in a small shop. It would still be futile to write this, if the average person's tonal environment had not changed profoundly during the sixties and seventies. Now there is a continual comparison between the 19th- and 20th-century musical tones and styles, and on top of that, long-neglected 17th- and 18th-century music and instruments are frequently heard--even earlier styles are now being resurrected. The keyboard player now has a choice, whereas during the piano's heyday, he was forbidden to investigate anything else. THis is reflected in the very word keyboardist which some people now use to describe themselves, rather than "pianist." And in magazines with KEYBOARD in their titles.

This article is not about a design for mass-production, but a design for the small group of persons making instruments, or even the lone individual. The product to be issued in quantity would be recordings of music played on these do-it-yourself or small-custom-shop amplifying clavichords, rather than a giant advertising and marketing campaign for the grinding out of thousands of instruments. It might come to that later, but I am over 60 and can't entertain unrealistic visions to the distant future. I want something right now which is feasible.

Case in point: the Hohner Clavinet, introduced a few years back, which is something like the clavichord idea and indeed looks something like a traditional clavichord from the outside. It does not have the expressive vibrato of the real clavichord because instead of the back of the key having a tangent (the clavichord's combination hammer-and-bridge which puts the player's finger in full control of the string's tension) it has a sort of padded finger or bumper which slams the string against a "fret" or obstacle that determines the string length--i.e., the hammer and bridge functions are specialized and separated in the Clavinet design. It still has a trace of vibrato capability but this is small. The touch is converted into something more acceptable to players of pianos, organs, and synthesizers. If you are content with this limitation, read no further; go out and buy one. I'm not trying to compete with any big factory. I am trying to rescue and save the ideas I built into solid real functioning hardware back in 1940, but which are now fully acceptable in the 1979 tonal environment, and admit of further evolution and progress--that is why I address individuals and small shops, rather than some giant corporation which would have to freeze its designs for mass-production, and for sale in ordinary stores.

There are a number of possible variations on my design. So giving this idea to experimenters is the logical step to take. Do your OWN thing, not necessarily my thing, nor yet what the antique-reviver demands that you keep to, nor the conventional-type thing required by big factories and huge organizations. We have a new freedom now. So many things are now possible and affordable and feasible today, which were idle dreams in the 50s or 60s and absolutely inconceivable in the 1930s when I grew up, that few people realize what IS within their reach. NOW, not in some future Utopia, or science-fiction fantasy world. Here and now.

I am publishing this pamphlet because I don't have the energy or resources or floor-space at the present time to do it all by myself, and because as I just said, each person will have a different notion of how to carry the amplifying clavichord idea onward. There is plenty of room for innovation and extension. The time has come.

About 7 years ago, while engaged in rebuilding and modifying my amplifying clavichord for the third time, I was suddenly forced to move,a nd then two more moves within three years, and no place to store the instrument for work on it, and it was moved a number of times and so all my work and trouble has gone down the drain. All I have to show for it are pictures and a few tape recordings, which I have been diligently copying.

Cutting my garment according to the cloth, and working within the limited energy and resources I now have, during the last two years I have built 12 instruments of another type, described and illustrated elsewhere. They bear a certain relation, so far as tone is concerned, to the amplifying clavichord. I will not go into this similarity so far as it is relevant here.

Consider the steel or Hawaiian guitar. If you are a Bach and Renaissance fan, or if you are a harpsichordist, or if 1920s jazz piano or Scott Joplin ragtime; or again if Liszt, Schumann and Chopin are your bag, this is going to be really difficult! Maybe you were taught to sneer at steel guitars, or disdain them because they are almost always electrically amplified. Now suppose that instead of holding the steel bar (confidentially, sometimes this bar or rod or tube is made of brass or bronze) against the strings, you STRIKE the string or strings with it, you are then duplicating the clavichord's tone-production method almost exactly. I have had great success recently with a wooden steel if you will pardon the phrase! You have everything about the amplifying clavichord except the keyboard. You may put your other hand over the non-used part of the string(s) to act as the muting-felt does in the real clavichord. SInce you strike the strings, you do not have to pluck them. I have taken my collection of steel and wooden bars over to harpsichords and produced these clavichord tones on them, of course making those who only want to preserve the tradition of the past stark raving mad at me. The attempt to do this on a piano is rather indifferent because the strings are too thick and try to behave as chime-rods. On an electric guitar of the ordinary kind, it is successful unless you strike too hard and slam the strings against the frets. (That latter possibility has been successfully used in the Chapman Stick.)

So you now have been told how to experiment with amplified clavichord tones, even without having the instrument at hand. It is impossible for me to describe a sound you have never heard, but I can tell you how to make something like it.

If you are into electronic instruments, you may wonder, why do this with actual strings? It will become possible sooner or later to synthesize or imitate this kind of tone very closely. Partly, it's a matter of cost--it does not cost any more to do it this way and might even cost less, especially if we are talking in terms of exact imitation. It's partly a matter of INTERFACE, of so-called human engineering. With keys bearing hammer-&-bridge tangents, there is an intimate feel and kinesthetic feedback to the performer from the string itself as it is hit and then stretched for the vibrato or Bebung as the Germans call it. Compared to the Rube Goldberg wooden machinery in a piano action, this is real, elegant simplicity.

To do the same or a closely-similar thing electronically, special controls would be required. Either complicated dynamic and kinesthetic-feedback mechanisms fitted to each key, or some kind of preprogrammed circuitry to alter the pitches of the oscillators in response to key-pressures, or the invention of entirely new control-panels and pedals and whatnot to give the performer this kind of intimate relation to every tone-generator. That means expense. I rather wonder if this is only worth the expense if we are talking about an automatically-played computerized setup, where the composer is the performer and predetermines these effects by typing out codes on a computer input peripheral. Some people may be content with the clavichord imitations possible on present-day synthesizers. Even then, they could do better if they had a chance to hear and play the real thing.

Remember I'm not talking about the future; I am talking out of forty years' experience and what I did already--what I can prove by playing tapes. What I could do with severely limited means under bad circumstances, not what requires a huge laboratory and research teams to perfect. What you can do, not just read about. In these terms, the real-strings approach is practical now; the other things require further planning and research and I am not getting younger and cannot be expected to have any more patience.

Up to this point I have deliberately kept silent about a further possibility for clavichords as against pianos and mass-produced commercial instruments. For financial, mechanical, psychological, and other reasons, the 12-tone equal temperament has been standard (realistically, it has been the ideal striven for) for about 200 years, on keyboard and fretted instruments. It would cost a king's ransom to build pianos in some other scale, and beyond about 19 tones to the octave, would be impossible mechanically. No piano tuner would be willing to learn the new routine for other systems. As I have explained carefully elsewhere in other articles, the piano tone evolved in such a manner that it sounds badly in most non-twelve tuning-systems, including just intonation. But the 12-tone system has almost been exhausted. Today's composers can't do anything that hasn't been said before. Unless they strain instruments beyond their limits and go in for weird noises. Some of the avant-garde affairs of today amount to sheer desperation. Even in the popular-music field, people strain against the 12-tone scale by tone-bending and singing "blue notes."

Now, the Bebung or vibrato of the clavichord through up-and-down wiggling of the key while the tangent is kept pressed against the string, is also a perfectly good tone-bending facility. The piano cannot bend tones--unless the recording engineer does something to the recorder tones on tape. The harpsichord and organ can't either. Some synthesizers can bend tones, but one at a time, whereas the tone-bending ont he clavichord is separate for each finger on each key. That phrase "the well-tempered clavichord" must be carefully and critically reexamined; i.e., a strict 12-tone equal temperament on a clavichord could have been "bent" considerably, a fact which no harpsichordist or pianist would even dream of; and in particular the violinist's practice of sharpening all leading-tones such as B going to C in the key of C major, or G# going to A as a chromatic, can be done very well on a clavichord. Such deviations must have made 12-tone equal tuning much more bearable than it is on today's organs or accordions. This also means that meantone and other tunings could have been bent.

Probably one of the reasons the Hohner Clavinet is not capable of a wide vibrato is to prevent such bending or deviation from a fixed 12-tone tuning. Some expert may have told the makers to eliminate this choice of altered pitches from the performer's options.

I am not asking you to experiment with more than 12 tones per octave, if all you want is a different kind of keyboard instrument on which to play existing pieces. The clavichord does not do well with heavy Romantic-period pieces, but is quite suitable for much of Debussy and for a range of early 20th-century keyboard pieces as well as for the 18th century and earlier. It would even do well with some of the atonal and serialist pieces.

But since I am a composer first of all, and since I have gone as far as I could with conventional 12-tone tuning, I must go on to something else and have been a part of the new xenharmonic or non-twelve movement which is now gaining many followers. It appears that a 19-tone-per-octave clavichord is entirely feasible, now that ERvin Wilson and others have designed the keyboard for it. Probably it could be taken as high as 24 or 22 tones per octave; 31 would present problems. A quartertone piano has to be two pianos built together, or two pianos tuned a quartertone a part with two players. The action can't be made any smaller or narrower and the tension on the frame is already 20 tons, so increasing it any more is out of the question.

The tuning problem for non-12 can be solved by taking pitches from a non-12 guitar, or a non-12 metallophone, both of which now exist, or an electronic tuning device now widely available in several makes and models. If the meantone temperament is taken out to 19 notes, the "wolf" problem is virtually eliminated. Given a design for an amplifying clavichord in the ordinary 12-tone system, the changes to accommodate up to 22 or possibly 24 tones do not entail any increase in the size of the instrument or its appearance as furniture. There is the possibility of a gebunden or fretted clavichord--more than one pitch from the same string by hitting it with two tangents in different places. That might be the answer if someone insists on the 31-tone system and does not want to go to an extra-strong frame for the higher string-tension.

That is, there is no reason for not building a 12- and a 19-tone clavichord from the same design drawings at the same time, except for the string-spacing and the keyboard.

My design worked for a number of years and can be updated or modified to any customer's requirements, or the resources of a small shop. So the preliminary testing was all done quite a while ago! No need to waste more time and money on planning and debating all kinds of minor details. I could serve as consultant to anyone reasonably close to where I live, while the instruments are built. Whether I can have on in my own studio in the future depends on whether I will ever have sufficient floor-space. I don't have room enough now. (February 1979) I have written a considerable amount of music for clavichord and have improvised and recorded some. I could teach the special touch and technique of the instrument.

Apropos of the lack of a loud (damper) pedal on clavichords noted above, the reverberation units now used by guitarists and others would make up for this in great measure. I prefer to use magnetic pickups for several reasons: they have now been tried out on guitars and other instruments and the design is reliable. Three or four sets of pickups can be placed along different points of the strings for that many distinct tone-qualities, thus giving the clavichord the same timbre variety as a harpsichord or guitar. Hitherto this was impossible. Contact microphones or regular microphoning of the instrument's sounds is really not too practical: no such timbre-variety (especially none of the odd-harmonics-only clarinet-like tones you get with magnetic pickups at the half-length point) as is available with direct magnetic pickup; one pickup can cover several strings; the contact and air mikes require a sounding board which drains energy from the strings and shortens the sustain too much. The contact and air mikes pick up all kinds of airborne noises and the conduction action and tangent noises which can be very disturbing when amplified enough to make the clavichord compete on an equal basis with other instruments. Furthermore, the electrical signal from the magnetic pickups can be modified extensively without risk of feedback, or of the disturbing effect of the acoustic sound from the sounding board being heard along with the modified amplified sound. Believe me, I've tried all these things and more for the last 40 years and ought to know something about it.

At the time I drew up the first plans, 1939, there was quite an interest in the electrostatic or capacitance pickup (similar to the condenser microphone). This is not practical for clavichords even though it will work on a piano, since the piano has three strings to a note and thicker strings with much more capacitance to the pickup elements. A later variation on this was the frequency-modulation pickup which did not require a high D. C. polarizing voltage on either strings or pickups. These ideas still might be worth considering on a number of instruments, but are, as shown by actual experiment, not good for clavichords.

Similarly, the piezoelectric pickup is excellent for some instruments but again on the clavichord it would pick up too much tangent and keyboard noise, with a most unpleasant effect. These noises would be amplified as much as the signal, and that is why they are not so annoying on a traditional clavichord. But the conventional clavichord pays a heavy price--more than half its potential dynamic range is buried below the threshold of normal audibility in an average room.

With magnetic pickups the signal can be amplified without pickup of those noises. Tangent noises will depend on the smoothness of the striking surface and the adjustment of the angle at which it strikes the string. Magnetic pickups can be adjusted to equalize the volume and voice the clavichord; where they are put along the string is very critical and much more important than the technical details of their construction.

Certain features of clavichord construction have become traditional with no real reason to keep them any more--I have had terrible arguments in past years because I was being treated as though I were sinning against some weird kind of religious precept. For instance, the tangents are usually thin, light, and flimsy. The strings run parallel or a t a slight angle to the nameboard rather than parallel and straight out from the key-levers as they do in corner grands and many harpischords. The compass is restricted to 5 octaves or less. Actually the glory my amplifying clavichord was its full 7-octave compass with most impressive bottom notes and high tones comparable to those of the violin. The sustain and vibrato are much better with fairly tight steel strings as long as possible, and heavy tangents. By comparison the low notes of conventional clavichords are frustrated and smothered. I am not telling any more instrument-maker to follow my design, but by the same token I am entitled to promote what I have discovered and demonstrated that it will work. Clavichord tone is too good to let it be forgotten and lost to the future.

Some readers will wish I had gone into minute details of construction etc. We are now in a very rapid state of flux and change and unexpected surprises. By the time I am able to build another amplifying clavichord or persuade someone else to do so, details will have changed enough to require revisions. Why not avoid this needless paperwork and non-constructive yakkity-yakking? I don't want to repeat certain features of the 1940 instruments because I know better now. Each new instrument can be a little different, customized for a certain person. As more people read this article and hear my tapes, supplements can be issued with more information and eventually the whole thing can be farmed out to someone willing to make amplifying clavichords. The right persons are probably out there already.

Last but not least: the instrument almost certainly needs a new name, to avoid confusion with the harpischord. Suggestions are very welcome.