Spinet
A spinet is a smaller type of harpsichord or other keyboard instrument, such as a piano or organ. In the wider modern usage, a spinet is a cheaper and more compact version of the full-size original, ie, generally, a small upright piano or, less commonly, an organ, used primarily in the home.
Spinets as harpsichords
When the term spinet is used to designate a harpsichord, typically what is meant is the bentside spinet, described in this section. For other uses, see below.
The bentside spinet shares most of its characteristics with the full-size instrument, including action, soundboard, and case construction. What primarily distinguishes the spinet is the angle of its strings: whereas in a full-size harpsichord, the strings are at a 90 degree angle to the keyboard (that is, they are parallel to the player's gaze); and in a virginals they are parallel to the keyboard, in a spinet the strings are at an angle of about 30 degrees to the keyboard, going toward the right.
The case of a bentside spinet is approximately triangular. The side on the right is usually bent concavely (hence the name of the instrument), curving away from the player toward the right rear corner. The longest side is adjacent to and parallel with the bass strings, going from the right rear corner to a location on the player's left. The front side of the spinet contains the keyboard. Typically, there are very short sides at the right rear and on the left, connecting the bentside to the long side and the long side to the front. (Note that the spinet in the illustration has no such piece on its left corner.)
The other major aspect of spinet design is that the strings are arranged in pairs. The gap between the two strings of a pair is about four millimetres, and the wider gap between pairs is about ten. The jacks (which pluck the strings (see harpsichord) are arranged in pairs as well, placed in the wider gap. They face in opposite directions, plucking the adjacent string on either side of the wider gap. The fact that half of the gaps are four millimetres instead of ten makes it possible to crowd more strings together into a smaller case.
The disadvantage of the paired design is that it generally limits the spinet to a single choir of strings, at eight-foot pitch. In a full-size harpsichord, the registers that guide the jacks can be shifted slightly to one side, permitting the player to control whether or not that particular set of strings is sounded. This is impossible in a spinet, due to the alternating orientation of the jacks.
The angling of the strings also had consequences for tone quality: generally, it was not possible to make the plucking points as close to the nut as in a regular harpsichord. Thus spinets normally had a slightly different tone quality, with fewer higher harmonics. Spinets also had smaller soundboards than regular harpsichords, and normally had a weaker sound. For these reasons, the spinet was normally only a domestic instrument, purchased to save money and conserve domestic space.
History
Harpsichord historian Frank Hubbard wrote in 1967, "the earliest [bentside] spinet known to me was made by Hieronymus de Zentis in 1631. It is quite possible that Zentis was the inventor of the type so widely copied in other countries." He further notes that the spinet in France was sometimes called the épinette à l'italienne, supporting an Italian origin.
The spinet was later developed into the spinettone ("big spinet") by Bartolomeo Cristofori, the inventor of the piano. The spinettone incorporated multiple choirs of strings, and was a local success among the musicians of the Medici court (Montanari 2002).
Spinets are occasionally made today, sometimes from kits, and serve the same purpose they always have, of saving money and space.
Other uses of "spinet" for harpsichords
The pentagonal spinet was not a spinet in the sense given above, but rather a virginals; its strings were parallel to the keyboard. Typically, the pentagonal spinet was more compact than other types of virginals, as the pentagon shape arose from lopping off the corners of the original rectangular virginal design.
More generally, the word spinet was not always very sharply defined in former times, particularly in its French and Italian cognate forms épinette and spinetta. Thus, for example, when Bartolomeo Cristofori invented a new kind of virginals in 1688, he called it the "spinetta ovale", "oval spinet".
Nomenclature
In earlier times when English spelling was less standardized, "spinet" was sometimes spelled "spinnet" or "spinnit". "Spinet" is standard today.
Spinet derives from the Italian spinetta, which in 17th century Italian was a word used generally for all quilled instruments, especially what in Elizabethan/Jacobean English is called a virginals. The specific Italian word for a virginals is spinetta a tabola. Likewise, the French derivation from spinetta, épinette, is specifically what the virginals is called in French, although the word is also used for any other small quilled instrument, whether a small harpsichord or a clavichord.
A dumb spinet is a manichord or "clavichord or clarichord," according to the 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary.
Spinets as pianos
The spinet piano, manufactured from the 1930s until recent times, was a culmination of a trend among manufacturers to make pianos smaller and cheaper. It served the purpose of making pianos available for a low price, for owners who had little space for a piano. Many spinet pianos still exist today, left over from their period of manufacture.
The defining characteristic of the spinet was its drop action (sometimes call indirect blow action). In this device, the keys did not engage the action directly; rather they pulled upward on rods called "stickers", which in turn pulled upward on levers located below the level of the keyboard, which in turn engaged the action. The stickers were sufficiently long that the hammer heads (the highest part of the action) ended up at roughly the same vertical level as the keyboard.
Thanks to the drop action, spinet pianos could be made very small; the top of a spinet rose only a few inches above the level of the keyboard itself. However, the cost in quality was considerable. According to piano authority Larry Fine (reference below) the stickers were "often noisy and troublesome". Moreover, to make room for them, the keys had to be made shorter, resulting in "very poor leverage" (Fine) and thus a poor sense of touch and control for the player. Lastly, the very short strings of the spinet resulted in a narrow range of harmonics and thus in poor tone quality.
The spinet was also the bane of piano technicians. Concerning the difficulty of servicing them, Fine writes "Spinets .. are very difficult to service because even the smallest repair requiring removal of the action becomes a major ordeal. Each of the connecting stickers has to be disconnected and tied up to the action and all the keys have to be removed from the piano before the action can be lifted out."
History
According to piano historian Arthur Loesser (reference below), the first spinet piano was offered to the public in May 1935, by an American manufacturer Loesser does not identify. The instrument was initially a success, being the only kind of piano that many people could afford in the depths of the Great Depression. (According to Loesser, the price could be less than $300, "about twenty-five percent lower than ... a small upright of 1924.") Loesser notes that the spinet was not entirely new, as very small pianos had been manufactured at various times in the 19th century.
The discontinuation of spinet manufacture around the turn of the 21st century is perhaps attributable to the rise of the electronic piano, which competed very effectively with spinets in price. Unlike with better-quality pianos, the spinet could not compete with electronic instruments by offering superior touch or tone quality.
Spinets as organs
For information on this instrument, see spinet organ.
References
Harpsichord spinet
- Hubbard, Frank (1967) Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; ISBN 0-674-88845-6.
- Montanari, Giuliana (2002) "The oval spinets and Grind Prince Ferdinando de' Medici's collection of quilled instruments," in La spinetta del 1690/The 1690 Oval Spinet, edited by Gabriele Rossi-Rognoni, (Sillabe for the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence). Offers some information on the spinettone.
- The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (pay site on-line, and in many libraries) offers detailed coverage of the harpsichord spinet; see under "Spinet".
Piano spinet
- Fine, Larry (2001) The Piano Book (4th ed. Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts: Brookside Press, 2001; ISBN 1-929145-01-2)
- Loesser, Arthur [1954] (1991). Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History. New York: Dover Publications. Originally New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954.