Max Weber: Selections in Translation

The second specifically modern keyboard instrument, the piano, developed from two historical sources which were technically very different from each other. On the one hand, there was the clavichord, which developed by an increase in the number of strings from the early medieval ‘monochord’, a single-stringed instrument with a movable bridge which was the basis of the rational tone-measurement which prevails across the whole of the Western world. In all probability, the clavichord was a monastic invention. Originally it had grouped strings for several tones, which could thus not be struck at the same time, and free strings only for the most important tones: the number of free strings, however, gradually increased from bottom to top, at the expense of the grouped strings. On the oldest clavichords it was impossible to strike c and e simultaneously – in other words, the third. However, the instrument had by Agricola's time (the sixteenth century) been brought from a range which in the fourteenth century encompassed twenty-two diatonic tones (from G to e′ including b flat next to b) to a chromatic scale from A to b″. Its rapidly fading tones encouraged figuration, and so it was pre-eminently an instrument suitable for genuinely artistic use.