The preceding post traced the development of the colorfully named pig’s head psaltery from the 13th century through its mechanization near the end of the 19th century by the addition of damper bars. I promised to retell the same tale in a follow-up post — this one — focused entirely on its wing-shaped cousin. Beginning with a quick reminding look at a pig’s head psaltery, here is a typical representation in a sculpture on the 15th-century portal of the Saint Pierre Cathedral in Saintes, France.

This design appears to have been split down the middle in a comparable statuette on a late-14th-century gravesite monument in La Chaise-Dieu, France. The photo was taken at an angle from below and does not show the proportionality of the instrument’s sides as a frontal view would.

If the straight side at its top is envisioned as being longer than the side toward the player’s left arm, this becomes an archetypal wing-shaped psaltery. Multi-string courses and correctly positioned hands are clearly depicted, with a plectrum properly held in the right one (the left is too worn to tell). This suggests that the sculptor was paying attention to the instrument’s structure and use. It is also possible that it was an intermediate form on the conceptual path to the marked wing shape in the next image.

The preceding sculpted players are standing upright. A portrayal of King David in a mid-16th-century painting by Girolamo da Santa Croce shows him in a seated playing position. Psalteries large enough to need this type of support are variously seen flat on the player’s lap or an adjacent surface, or as here, with the back held upright against the player’s torso.

The structural details of the instrument in this image, and the extent to which it may be stylized, provide fuel for a good deal of interpretative discussion. I’ll leave that with passing mention for now, and simply use this painting as a springboard over a few centuries to a drawing of another wing-shaped instrument. This also includes mechanical detail serving a purpose that is not immediately apparent.

Continue reading “The autoharp takes wing” →

The following image comes from a mid-15th century panel painting attributed to the workshop of Jan van Eyck. I’m aware of the pitfalls of assessing pictorial representations of musical instruments and might question a few details of the lute seen here. The psaltery and harp appear to be quite credible.

The bass strings of the psaltery are placed closest to the body of the player, who holds a quill in each hand. The right one is positioned to move across the entire stringbed, while the left one is centered on the bass strings. This asymmetrical design is termed a “wing shape.”

The Standard German word for wing is Flügel, which also designates a grand piano. A list of musical instruments in a German treatise from 1404 includes a flegil, together with a psalterium and two mechanized variants — the clavichordium (clavichord) and clavicymbolum (harpsichord). An illustrated description of an upright form of the latter appears in another treatise on musical instruments written ca. 1440. It fits a wing-shaped psaltery with a single quill for each string, increasing the number available for simultaneous use.

With the possible exception of the flegil, the instruments named in the preceding paragraph all belong to the generic category of “box zithers.” The present text will make its way toward a later facet of their mechanization, after considering what the difference between a flegil and a psalterium might have been. Since the harpsichord and clavichord are named with them on the same list, two plausible suppositions would be that the flegil was an early implementation of a hammer mechanism on a keyboard zither (something that has left other footprints), or an unmechanized relative of the psalterium that differed enough from it to merit a name of its own.

Continue reading “A pig-headed approach to the autoharp” →