Word: plectra
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...balky harpsichord nearly destroyed the Bach Fifth Brandenburg at the start of the evening. A sticking action, hampered by the intense heat of a packed JCR, combined with a number of broken plectra to render the instrument nearly useless. Hugh Wolff, the harpsichordist, somehow managed to play through the 70-bar cadenza at the end of the first movement, in the process inadvertently producing a number of truly bizarre harmonies. Wolff appeared remarkably calm and demonstrated a fine technique when not obscured by the instrument's problems. Given that the Bach was the first of two programs that same evening...
...growing harpsichord set, the test of a man's technique is whether he has his Schnellen properly under control; see Music, The Plectra Pluckers...
...tensions and noisiness of the day," thinks that "you can't be a pest on a harpsichord." Most harpsichord buffs are piano players who discovered baroque music on LPs; once accustomed to the sweet, incisive, brilliant tone of the harpsichord (its metal strings are plucked by leather plectra or picks, instead of being struck by hammers), they find its sound mystically satisfying. West Coast Psychologist Bob Johnson, 39, heard his first harpsichord on a recording by Yella Pessl, found, while living in Portland, that he felt "sad and in limbo because there was no harpsichord in 1,000 miles...
...sort of Pleistocene piano. The true ancestor of the piano is not the harpsichord but the dulcimer, a more primitive stringed instrument played like a xylophone, with little hammers held in the hands. The harpsichord's strings are not hammered but plucked with quills or leather plectra (picks...
Bakelite and Boar Bristles. John Challis makes his harpsichords in a two-floor studio above an Ypsilanti dress shop. Two assistants, who have been with him for years, help him fit together the intricate combination of carved hardwoods, leather plectra, metal strings and frames, ivory keys and Siberian boar-bristle springs out of which a fine harpsichord is concocted. A slow, painstaking craftsman, Challis turns out only about eight harpsichords a year, at prices ranging from $400 to $2,700. So far, wartime shortages of materials have not affected his output...
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