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Fortepiano by Paul McNulty after Walter & Sohn, ca. 1805. The earliest pianos by Cristofori (ca. 1700) were lightweight objects, hardly sturdier in framing than a contemporary harpsichord, with thin strings of low tensile strength iron and brass and small, lightweight hammers.
What primarily distinguishes the spinet is the angle of its strings: whereas in a full-size harpsichord, the strings are at a 90-degree angle to the keyboard (that is, they are parallel to the player's gaze); and in virginals they are parallel to the keyboard, in a spinet the strings are at an angle of about 30 degrees to the keyboard, going ...
Americus built both harpsichords and pianofortes. He is described by composer, musician and chronicler Charles Burney in Rees's Cyclopaedia for 1772 as "a harpsichord maker of second rank, who constructed several pianofortes, and improved the mechanism in some particulars, but the tone, with all the delicacy of Schroeter's (see below) touch, lost the spirit of the harpsichord and gained ...
Harpsichord with double keyboard. The inside of the lid is decorated with two original paintings depicting the battle between Apollo and Pan based on The Judgment of Midas by Hendrick Goltzius (1590). The front cover shows Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon. The exterior was repainted with red chinoiserie decoration in the 18th century.
The use of "fortepiano" to refer specifically to early pianos appears to be recent. Even the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary does not record this usage, noting only that "fortepiano" is "an early name of the pianoforte". During the age of the fortepiano, "fortepiano" and "pianoforte" were used interchangeably, as the OED's attestations ...
(Quartet for harpsichord, two violins, and double bass in E minor) 1777: Marche des insurgents, (March of the Insurgents, which was first published in an arrangement for brass quintet in 1992 by the Hildegard Publishing Company) 1779-1785: Duos pour clavecin et pianoforte. (Duets for harpsichord and pianoforte).
When the piano was invented in 1700, it failed to catch the public's attention due to its expense and the fact that the harpsichord was the preferred instrument of the time. Very few people knew of the piano until after the Seven Years' War when a young man named Johannes Zumpe fled Germany for London. While there he refined Cristofori's piano ...
Belt also ventured into the area of user-built kit instruments, following the lead of Wolfgang Zuckermann, who had introduced a hugely successful harpsichord kit, and Frank Hubbard, who had created a more demanding but more historically authentic harpsichord kit. Belt sold his first pianoforte kit to Hubbard in 1972. [13]