Grove's dictionary of music and musicians

C^
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634 SPINET SPINET
tuned an octave higher.' Of this small instrument
there are specimens in nearly all museums ;
the Italian name for it being Ottavina ' ' (also
' Spinetta di Serenata '). We iind them fixed in
the bent sides of the long harpsichords, in two
remarkable specimens ; one of which, by Hans
Ruokers,^is preserved in the Kunst-und-Gewerbe
Museum, Berlin (there is a painting of a similar
double instrument inside the Hd) ; the other is in
the Maison Plantin, Antwerp, and was made as
late as 1734-35, by Joannes Josephus Coenen
at Ruremonde in Holland. In rectangular
instruments the octave one was removable, as
it was in those double instruments mentioned
under Ruokers (p. 183), so that it could be
played in another part of the room.
According to Mersenne, who treats of the
spinet as the principal keyed instrument {Hwrmonie,
1636, liv. 3, p. 101, etc.), there were three
sizes : one of 2 feet,
J tuned to the octave of the
' ton de chapelle ' (which was about a toiie
higher than our old Philharmonic ' ' or high
concert pitch) ; one of 3^ feet, tuned to a
fifth above the same pitch ; and the large
5 -feet ones, tuned in unison to it. We shall
refer to his octave spinet in another paragraph.
The compass of the Oltavine was usually from
E to C, tlu'ee octaves and a sixth (a) ; of the
larger 16th-century Italian spinette, four octaves
and a semitone, from E to F (6). The French
epinettes of the 1 7th century were usually deeper,
having four octaves and a semitone from B
to C (c).
The reason for this semitonal beginning of the
keyboard is obscure unless the lowest keys were
used for ' short octave ' measure, an idea which
suggested itself simultaneously to the writer
and to Professor A. Kraus, whose conviction is
very strong as to the extended practice of the
short octave arrangement. The Flemish picture
of St. Cecilia, in Holyrood Palace, shows unmistakably
a short octave organ keyboard as early
as 1484.2
Fortunately, we are not left to such suggestion
for the spinet short octave. Mersenne, in
a passage which has hitherto escaped 'notice
(Harmonie, liv. 3, p. 107), describing his own
spinet, which, according to him, was one of the
1 See ante, p. 165, No. 5.
2 Hubert, or Jan Van Byck'a St. Cecilia, in tlie famous Mystic
'
Lamb,' may be referred to here although appertaining to the organ
and not the spinet, as a valuable note by the way. The original
painting, now at Berlin, was probably painted before 1426 and certainly
before 1432. The painter's minute accuracy is unquestionable.
It contains a chromatic keyboard like the oldest Italinn, with boxwood
naturals and black sharps. The compass begins in the lines
at the half-tone E. There is no Indication of a * short-octave,' but
there is one key by itself, convenient to the player's left hand;
above this key there is a latchct acting as a catch, which may be
intended to hold it down as a pedal. D is the probable note, and
we have in Van Eyck's organ, it seems to us, the same compass,
but an octave lower, as is the German Fositif of the next century
at South KensinetMja—viz. n, E, then three chromatic octaves from
P, and finally Pf, G, A. There is no bottom-rail to the keyboard,
nor iB there In the painting at Holyrood.
smallest in use, says :
'
The longest string has
little more than a foot length between the two
bridges. It has only thirty-one steps in the
keyboard, and as many strings over the soundboard,
so that there are five keys hid on account
of the perspective (referring to the drawing)
to wit, three principals and two chromatics
("feintes"), of which the first is cut in two ;
but these chromatics serve to go down to the
third and fourth below the first step, or C sol,
'
in notation ^ order to arrive at the
i
third octave, for the eighteen principal steps
only make an eighteenth ; that is to say, a
foui'th over two octaves.' Here is the clearest
confirmation of short -octave measure in the
spinet, the same as in the organ, both keyboards,
a