A History of Stringed Keyboard Instruments

Description

This book explores the history of keyboard instruments from their fourteenth-century origins to the development of the modern piano. It reveals the principles of their design and describes structural and mechanical developments through the medieval and renaissance periods and eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, as well as the early music revival. Stewart Pollens identifies and describes the types of keyboard instruments played by major composers and virtuosi through the ages and provides the reader with detailed instructions on their regulating, stringing, tuning and voicing drawn from historical sources.

Trained as a harpsichord, organ, and violin maker, Stewart Pollens served as the conservator of musical instruments at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1976 to 2006. He has published widely on the history of musical instruments and is the recipient of the American Musical Instrument Society's 1997 Bessaraboff Prize for The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge University Press, 1995).