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.

This is the first comprehensive study of the life and work of Bartolomeo Cristofori, the Paduan-born harpsichord maker and contemporary of Antonio Stradivari, who is credited with having invented the pianoforte around the year 1700 while working in the Medici court in Florence. Through thorough analysis of documents preserved in the State Archive of Florence, Pollens has reconstructed, in unprecedented technical detail, Cristofori's working life between his arrival in Florence in 1688 and his death in 1732. This book will be of interest to pianists, historians of the piano, musicologists, museum curators and conservators, as well as keyboard instrument makers, restorers, and tuners.

This is the first book to combine museum-based conservation techniques with practical instructions on the maintenance, repair, adjustment, and tuning of virtually every type of historical musical instrument. As one of the world's leading conservators of musical instruments, Stewart Pollens gives practical advice on the handling, storage, display and use of historic musical instruments in museums and other settings, and provides technical information on such wide-ranging subjects as acoustics, cleaning, climate control, corrosion, disinfestation, conservation ethics, historic stringing practice, measurement and historic metrology, retouching, tuning historic temperaments, varnish and writing reports. There are informative essays on the conservation of each of the major musical instrument groups, the treatment of paper, textiles, wood and metal, as well as historic techniques of wood and metalworking as they apply to musical instrument making and repair. This is a practical guide that includes equations, formulas, tables and step-by-step instructions.

For over 200 years, Antonio Stradivari has been universally regarded as the greatest violin maker who ever lived, yet it is not widely known that he made virtually every kind of bowed- and plucked-string instrument popular in the Baroque period, including lutes, viols, mandolins, guitars, and harps. Stradivari provides a fascinating biography of this legendary maker, based on newly discovered material in church and civic archives, alongside technical descriptions and analyses of many of the maker's workshop materials preserved in the Museo Stradivariano in Cremona, particularly as they relate to extant and lost instruments, baroque stringing and instrument adjustment, and early performance practice. There are separate chapters for each type of instrument, allowing the reader to easily locate information. The book contains tables of measurements of Stradivari's forms and patterns, over 100 black and white photographs and drawings, and colour photographs of 16 of Stradivari's most important violins, violas, and cellos.

This is the first comprehensive historical and technological study of the pianoforte based on important primary source material. Most histories of the piano begin with its invention by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence in about 1700: this study begins with the earliest fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript sources and extends over Cristofori's rediscovery of the principle of the hammer action, the early exportation of Florentine pianofortes to prominent European courts, and the building of copies of these instruments in Portugal, Spain and Germany. Technical information is presented in a comparative format and the text is illustrated with many photographs, measurements, line drawings and tables. While written primarily for the technical specialist, there is much here of significance for the history of the piano and performance practice.

This is the first comprehensive study of the life and work of Bartolomeo Cristofori, the Paduan-born harpsichord maker and contemporary of Antonio Stradivari, who is credited with having invented the pianoforte around the year 1700 while working in the Medici court in Florence. Through thorough analysis of documents preserved in the State Archive of Florence, Pollens has reconstructed, in unprecedented technical detail, Cristofori's working life between his arrival in Florence in 1688 and his death in 1732. This book will be of interest to pianists, historians of the piano, musicologists, museum curators and conservators, as well as keyboard instrument makers, restorers, and tuners.

Along with the instruments of Stradivari and del Gesu, the violins of Giovanni Battista Guadagnini have long been favored by professional musicians for their responsiveness, tonal quality, and projection. Originally published in 1949 in a very limited edition, this study remains the most comprehensive account of G. B. Guadagnini's work and the legacy carried on by his descendants.
Author Ernest N. Doring conducted painstaking research into eighteenth-century documentation of Guadagnini's itinerant life. He traces the craftsman's progress from Piacenza, Milan, Cremona, and Parma to Turin, where Guadagnini created his most prized stringed instruments. A catalog of the family's masterpieces is organized by city and provides a detailed provenance for each instrument. A new Introduction by Stewart Pollens, a leading authority on musical instruments, offers historical perspectives. Widely available for the first time in an affordable edition, this rare and authoritative work provides violinists, musicologists, and music history enthusiasts with a fascinating resource.