Clavichord made in 1999 by Keith Hill Opus 333 after the 1748 Frederici

        Over the last 47 years, I have made 58 clavichords.  Yet, of all the keyboard instruments I have made, it was the search for how to make a good clavichord that was the most elusive.  One would think all you have to do is make a rectangular box, insert a keyboard, soundboard and strings, then add the tangents and you have a clavichord.  Its a nice thought as long as you don't care a whit how the result sounds or plays.  When I play the antique clavichords, I am struck by how sophisticated they sound and play, especially the "Bauerninstrumenten", clavichords made in the winter by farmers to keep themselves occupied.  The same cannot be said of most clavichords made since 1900 as their effect is decidedly underwhelming.  They either sound like a box of rubber bands and feel squishy, like playing on wet sponges, or they sound like a bad harpsichord with almost no sound and what sound there is has no dynamic properties.  

       At their very best, clavichords should have the sound of thought.  If this idea is new to you, focus for a while on your own thoughts and calculate how "loud" they are.  Thought sounds extremely intense when impassioned with meaning.  Thought ranges in volume from the faintest whisper to the loudest conceivable energy level. It is a paradox because the clavichord is almost dismissively soft even when played loudly...but then, as you will have concluded from your brief experience with thinking this way, only we alone can hear our own thoughts.  Thought changes in affect according to what is being thought about, and sings irrepressibly when moved by love or enchantment.  It is for this reason that I place the quality of being enchanting as foremost of all qualities that a clavichord should have.  Though not always an obvious quality, enchantment has the power to make us want to play the instrument every time we come near the instrument...like a subtle compulsion.  

       The touch on the best  clavichords I have played feels to the fingers like molding stiff yet flexible modeling clay...it yields to the fingers by assuming the shape one molds according to the gestures intended by pushing gently but firmly.  The key, not to make a pun, is the word intended.  The clavichord, in my view, is an intention training instrument.  The problem with most pianos, harpsichords and organs, whether mechanical or electronic, is that the sound emitted is prefabricated, which almost always encourages a kind of mindlessness in the people who play them...a sort of "let your fingers to the walking" unintentional "note punching" behavior.  The effect of such note-punching is not at all musical, but forced, insensitive, crass, and cretinous.  

       The clavichord, it seems, is the only remedy against this tendency towards "diarrhea of the fingers" because as soon as you unintentionally touch a note on a superior clavichord, the clavichord spits that note back at you in no uncertain terms.  That spitting or chucking only occurs on the best instruments.  Avoiding that effect  requires total attention and intention to have the note, and only the note you want to sound without the spit-back.  Allow your mind to wander even for a second and the clavichord spits your unintended notes back at you.  This is the reason why the clavichord was essential for training keyboardists, for longer than the piano has been an established fact.  It behooves us to remember that some the greatest composers from 1600 to about 1820 got their initiation into the realm of musical thought by learning to play on clavichords as children.

       If the touch is too squishy, because the instrument is either understrung or the keys are improperly balanced, the sound wanders wildly out of tune.  If the touch is too firm because the tangents are contacting the string too close to the hitchpins, or the balance points are too far forward, or the string tension is too high, then the notes can't be played without "chucking" or "spitting".  This kind of touch is very off-putting. The ideal touch is one that trains the mind into a condition of total attentiveness and intentionality...however, if the player fails to intend every single note played, the keys should "chuck" or "spit" the sound back into the finger, but if the player diligently attends to and intends every note, then the keys need never spit or chuck.  This is the reason why a good clavichord is the ideal instrument for learning to improvise...one's total state of mind is reflected back to the player.  Thus, every keyboard player who has not mastered the craft of playing a real clavichord ought not consider oneself as a master keyboardist, however competently one has learned to note punch on other keyboard instruments, unless of course the business of intending and singing every note has been mastered without the benefit of such a clavichord, which sometimes though rarely happens.

       I have focused on the issue of touch because the purpose of the clavichord and its touch are inextricably linked.  The other half of the purpose is the sound.  The most serious problem related to creating the sound is to maximize the tone whilst minimizing the impact noise of the clavichord tangent when it hits the string.  The impact noise can in many instances overpower the tone of each note.  Once the maker solves the problem of impact noise, the next problem to solve is how to get each and every note have a focused, singing, blooming, and deeply resonant sound.  If the sound is too focused it turns thin and bright.  If the sound isn't focused enough the pitch becomes indistinct and dull.  A singing tone is an essential quality in the sound of a clavichord, but too sustained a sound turns mushy in fast passage work and a too dry sound doesn't feel like the instrument is singing.  Bloom in a musical instrument is the same thing as inflection in human speech.  Clavichords devoid of bloom sounds like so much useless furniture.  Finally, resonance is the culprit behind impact noise.  The more deeply resonant the sound is the louder the impact noise tends to be.  The trick is knowing how to optimize the depth and resonance of the sound and minimize the impact noise at the same time.

        The central problem with making clavichords is that they require as much time to properly make as it takes to build a single manual harpsichord, but most players are unwilling to pay for a clavichord what they willingly will spend for a single manual harpsichord.  The rationale being that you can use a harpsichord for playing continuo that can mean paid work, while the clavichord is mainly for the solitary player.  The result is that makers who build clavichords rarely are appropriately compensated for the work of making one.   Because my acoustical technology students are now making clavichords, I suggest that anyone interested in having a clavichord such as I might make for them instead order instruments from them.

What follows here was my response to an email asking me about bebung. Since it may have some usefulness to others I am offering it here more to stimulate thought about these and other matters than to produce guruistic pronouncements, however the tone of my email response might sound. So I say in advance, if you don’t agree with what I have written then I invite you to totally ignore completely all I have to say on the subject of Clavichords, their quality, their purpose, and their function.

I am no musicologist but it is my experience that there is almost nothing written in the entire literature by famous composers/players from before 1800 on the subject of bebung.  As far as I know CPE Bach really  only mentions it in passing when he discusses ornament notation and indicates the use of bebung by placing 3 dots (...) above the note on which one is to use bebung.

The reason I suspect that the use of bebung, the vibrato effect produced on a note by pressing down/release/down/release/down rapidly, was not widely used was that the clavichord makers never were able to learn how to manage the proportions of all the parts of an instrument needed to create the best possible sound on a clavichord and still allow an obvious bebung to be made naturally (without undue pressure).  The science behind the making of a clavichord to sound full, resonant, focused, intense, immediate, clear in pitch, and possessing a large dynamic range involves a phenomenon called the Hill Effect (termed by other makers because I was the one who connected that effect to the the underlying cause, ie., the application of proportional tuning to the parts of an instrument) defined as a stiffening of the strings on an instrument on which all the parts have been relationally tuned.  On a clavichord that exhibits the Hill effect (what I prefer to call by my original term for the effect: Distortion Resistance Effect) or Distortion Resistance Effect when all parts are tuned into a single set of relationships, including soundboard, bridge, liners, bottom, lid, keys, etc. the Distortion Resistance Effect exists in direct proportion to the degree of purity of the tuning.  This is what generates the Distortion Resistance Effect which in turn causes the strings to feel extremely stiff and resistant to pressure so that the strings resist being distorted and thereby produce the quality of clarity of pitch in the tuning and stability of pitch when a note is pressed.  The better the clavichord the more stable the pitch is when playing the instrument.  The worse the clavichord is the more unstable the pitch is and as a result the player has to compensate for the instability of pitch by maximizing pitch stability exclusively by constantly controlling the pressure applied to each and every note thus consuming 100% of the players attention just trying to avoid the squishy pitch produced by inferior clavichords. 

Clavichords that exhibit squishy pitch are to be avoided if possible.  Then, even then, on clavichords that suffer from I like to call “squishy pitchitis”, the use of bebung is so irritating that one never feels justified in using the effect because the player spends all his or her time just managing to avoid making a squishy pitch sound on every note.  Such clavichords are only useful for creating the affects of complaining and whining because that is what invariably comes out no matter what affect the player is aiming for.  Such clavichords sound whining  and complaining the way a spoiled rotten child whines and complains when not getting their way for everything.

The first thing you want to do is stop using bebung if doing it make your hands, fingers and wrists sore from doing so.  That tells me that you are doing something very wrong technically.  

There is only one correct technique for playing all keyboard instruments and that is the most natural touch which when applied uses the least amount of muscle tension, energy, and weight distribution to get the job of drawing (not pushing or punching) the keys downwards accomplished, and which once that action has been accomplished immediately relaxes (to avoid all excess pressure needed to hold a note down) by releasing muscle tension and shifting to a weight only means of holding notes down until the weight is release and the key returns to a rest position ready to play the next time that note is needed.  Any violation of this technique is plainly wrong because it eventually produces medical issues for the player in some form or other...carpal tunnel syndrome being the worst.  In every case where problems are experienced, excess tension in the armature right down to the smallest muscle groups will invariably be the cause.  Motto: remove utterly ALL excess tension in the entire body to allow the maximum freedom of controlled or managed intention to reign free. 

To generate a bebung without excess tension, try rotating only on the tip of the finger after the key has reached bottom with a solid contact of the finger with the string, using only the weight of the finger, palm, wrist and forearm by moving those parts in a rotary action starting in the shoulder and upper arm.

Another problem that clavichord players must address and manage is that of using a touch that is unvarying in volume thus making the clavichord sound merely like a bad or inferior harpsichord.  Complaining about the type of playing that doesn’t exploit the possibility of loud and soft might appear to be an odd complaint, but indeed that is how most keyboardists play on the clavichord, irrespective of whether or not the clavichord being played can actually be played using a total dynamic range from pppp to ffff and everything in between.  Since the singluar reason to play clavichords for most clavichordists is to have the possibility of loud and soft, you would think that everyone drawn to play the clavichord would focus on and master the technique.  The truth is the opposite.  All you have to do to disprove my comment is to go online and listen to all the YouTube videos of people playing the clavichord and you can hear for yourself that this is how people play the clavichord. Few if any players play with the full dynamic range the clavichord offers.

My analysis for why this is the case is that few if any clavichord players understand the function or purpose for which the clavichord exists.  That main function and purpose is to train musical intention.  When it comes to the aspect of quality relating to clavichords, those that most encourage players to pay attention to the sound that is being produced and carefully remove every extraneous sound being generated are the very best.  This means that the amount of distortion resistance in the instrument needs to be enough to create an easily produced stable pitch and eliminates as much as possible a squishy pitch, needs to produce a solid beautiful sound without the annoying presence of chucking, chattering, or spitting that occur when the player is not intending every single note being played, needs to produce a full range of loud and softs with relative ease and needs to change color by the slightest modification of touch thus fulfilling the intention of the player.  Such an instrument, as it happens, also fulfills its purpose of encouraging keyboardists to become life long improvisers.

This last property of a great clavichord, that of encouraging the player to improvise is perhaps the first and most important of functions.  But, most clavichords, whatever their quality rarely are put to the best use for which a clavichord is really meant to fulfill.  This sad reality is the result of how keyboard players are trained by the typical academically trained teacher, that is, by methods that stress learning literature over improvisation, in short, by discouraging students from inventing or making up their own music.

Again, if anything that I have written causes pain or isn't working for you, abandon it like the plague.