What were small octave virginals used for? The compass seems too limited for anything musically useful.
Getting pitch references for vocal music?
Hello Andrew,
When I was young & beautiful I played a very small hand pumped harmonium with a range resembling your instrument. It was even transposable to up to 2 notes if I remember correctly. The instrument belonged to a convent where I accompanied the (bad) choir. All you can do is pump with your left hand and play the melody with your right hand. Think organetto & suchlike…
Regards,
Chris.
Indeed, Andrew, your picture shows a pretty decent 3-octaves short-bass-octave instrument. Actually I guess Baroque-era musicians were not too choosy as we are about playing masterpieces: they were happy (and this is well documented) with lots of run-of-the-mill music that just suited their interests and instruments. There are quite a few pieces, even very nice ones and composed by great masters such as English Virginalists, Frescobaldi and Louis Couperin, whose range fits into 3 octaves: transpose one octave up and there you are! F. Couperin also composed quite a few pieces within a 3 octave range, and a few also within a 2 octave range.
Needless to say, these small instruments are scarcely useful as continuo for a singer, say, and pointless in an ensemble: they were not meant for this use.
The range of the human voice, even assuming a choir rather than a single person, is about 3 octaves, except for freaky people. A lot of Renaissance keyboard music fits quite comfortably on my quadruple-fretted clavichord, after directions found in a Wroclaw monastery c. 1470, which is G-f’'. A bunch of it is intabulations of vocal music, of course. In fact, I will admit that the setting of Jannequin’s La Guerre found in the Johannes of Lublin manuscript would probably be less silly on the little virginals than on my clavichord.
Judy
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We have contemporary evidence of what the octave spinets were used for. Burney reports:
‘Throughout Italy they have generally little octave spinets to accompany singing, in private houses, sometimes in a triangular form […]’ ( Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, London (T. Becket and Co.), 1771, p. 288 note).
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I came across this completely by chance.
