I’ve done two 7-splits wing-shaped harpsichords in the last year, and this occasioned careful reading of the articles cited by Ibo. In Denzil Wraight’s important dissertation on stringing of historical Italian harpsichords is a thorough catalogue (at the time the dissertation was completed) of extant Italian instruments, with details about compass and such.

I learned that among the surviving 7-splits instruments (I’m not including the true omnitonia/chromatico instruments, since they are a much more ambitious and complicated issue) a high percentage are virginals, and among those it seems that the majority are by the Florentine maker Poggio, who also has a fair number of such instruments surviving which do not have the split semitones.

Perhaps the most prominent of the 7-splits’ Poggios is the one in the Edinburgh collection, which is playable (though right now, like the rest of the collection, in storage during a major renovation of St. Cecilia’s Hall); it is reported, by a colleague/client of mine, to be a drop-dead gorgeous musical instrument. I will shortly be starting an instrument based largely upon the Edinburgh Poggio. I can’t remember offhand if the Poggios (or attributed Poggios) in the Smithsonian and the Leipzig collection have the split accidentals, but I’m pretty sure that Leipzig does.

Here is a link to a good description of the enticing Edinburgh Poggio:

http://collections.ed.ac.uk/mimed/record/15032?highlight=*:*

In passing, I’ll remark that my experiences with the two 7-splits’ wing-shaped harpsichords I have designed (based largely on what I have gleaned from Wraight’s dissertation and Stembridge’s article) have been very rewarding from a musical point of view. The curious thing is that one learns of many little subtle possibilities that go beyond the mere expansion of enharmonic range of good thirds. One can do some very interesting things with shaping melodic lines (higher one going up, lower one coming down) which are pretty cool, and it has been suggested by a colleague that the splits might also have served (as they do on original transposing Ruckers doubles) to facilitate transposing at the fourth and fifth.

There are also some curious consequences to tuning such a compass in Pythagorean, since the split accidentals “leap-frog” over the disruptive comma “fifth."

Owen, just back from Chile, and recovering from the long trip, and trying to get my head back into things Poggio.


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Owen Daly Early Keyboard Instruments
557 Statesman St. NE
Salem, OR 97301
http://www.dalyharpsichords.com
(503)-362-9396

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