In 1986, it seems so long ago now, I graduated from The London College of Furniture on the Commercial Road in Whitechapel London E1. “Elsie Eff” (LCF) has undergone many transformations since, as have I, but suffice it to say it is now the London Guildhall University. I had been there to study for a BTec HND in Musical Instrument Making (Harpsichord) and had decided early on to specialize in early English instruments. I felt this would make me different from all the other makers who created fine copies of early Italian harpsichords or Flemish instruments in the tradition of Ruckers and the like.
For my final dissertation I decided to do a comparative study of the English Bentside Spinet in its heyday period from 1660 to 1730.
I will probably add more to the story of how this dissertation came about, the collection of information and what happened to it since in a later post. For now though there have been some requests over the years for the dissertation to be shared in the public domain. I had left a copy at LCF, together with my archive of photos, notes and measured drawings, in the care of Lewis Jones but I am sure it has since mouldered away in a backroom behind the library. A recent request to read my text prompted me at last to catch up with technology and scan the document into PDF format so ti could at last be shared. I never had a soft copy. It was created on my first ever Personal Computer Wordprocessor and Amstrad 512! With its green screen and locoscript software I thought it was the bees knees! Unfortunately it was not capable of storing images or files above a paltry 144kb which was all you could fit on a “floppy disc” in those days.
Here then for the time being is the full dissertation in PDF format split into chapters or available as a single zip file………… download, read, enjoy and comment……..
01 Spinet Intro
02 Charles Haward text
03 Charles Haward details
04 Player and Aston text
05 Player and Aston details
06 Stephen Keene text
07 Stephen Keene details
08 Hitchcock text
09 Hitchcock details
10 Other makers text
11 Other makers details
12 Appendix A – ironmongery
13 Appendices B-D etc
The English Bentside Spinet 1660 to 1730 whole dissertation Zip File
Well it’s about time this was made public. Right on
Yes, I had meant to get round to this for such a long time – many apologies to those who had asked over the years.
Dear Steve,
Thanks very much for posting this, it’s an excellent resource.
On the English-language Wikipedia, an anonymous editor recently cited your work in the article “Spinet”, specifically for a spinet built by Player that had two choirs of strings, both at 8′ pitch. I am fascinated/baffled by this: given the crowding of the jacks in the basic spinet design, how were the two choirs deployed? For instance, were they stacked vertically, with two plectra per jack? I couldn’t figure it out from just looking at the dissertation, so any guidance you can offer would be much appreciated.
Yours very truly,
Orcas Thurman
Wikipedia participant (“Opus33″)
Hi Orcas, It was me that put that reference on Wikipedia – so good to know you picked it up within one day! I wish I could help you but unfortunately what is in my dissertation is all I know. The spinet in question was restored by Chris Nobbs and I could find out from him if you like. In fact, now it is bugging me that I didn’t make more of an attempt to investigate this at the time and so I shall pursue this line of enquiry.
Regards
Steve
Thank you. If you find out how it works, please post!
I was in touch with Chris Nobbs and fortunately he did remember the instrument, which is in private ownership and thus not accessible to the public. He confirmed that the spinet was set up with 2 x 8′ choirs of strings and that there was no mechanism to change the disposition. He says the following:”I can be certain about the jacks and registers – there was no way to disengage a choir; the register was simply a doubled and compact version of the usual block-built bentside spinet register, with smaller jacks, so that the ‘wide’ pairs became the same note – as on a harpsichord. Not being able to easily switch off a register for tuning and regulation was inconvenient and a possibility of a change from the richness of the two eights would have been an improvement as well I feel, but of course quite difficult to arrange with jacks at the fairly acute angle of a wing spinet. Perhaps the only way would be a keyboard that withdraws from the feet of one set of jacks as on some Italian double strung instruments.” Perhaps Chris might be tempted to add his own post here with any further detail.
If you are a subscriber to Early Music magazine you can download an article by Peter Mole
“On the trail of Purcell ’ s spinet” which has further discourse on this unusual double strung Player spinet.
http://em.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/3/409.full.pdf+html?sid=13090f6a-5de6-4ba9-8854-48850948648e
Thanks I aim to please