Performance Practice Review Volume 6 Article 2 Number 1 Spring The imbC alo Cromatico and Other Italian Keyboard Instruments with Ninteen or More Division to the Octave (Surviving Specimens and Documentary Evidence) Christopher Stembridge Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr Part of the Music Practice Commons Stembridge, Christopher (1993) "The imbC alo Cromatico and Other Italian Keyboard Instruments with Ninteen or More Division to the Octave (Surviving Specimens and Documentary Evidence)," Performance Practice Review: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 2. DOI: 10.5642/ perfpr.199306.01.02 Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol6/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Claremont at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Performance Practice Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Early-Baroque Keyboard Instruments The Cimbalo cromatico and Other Italian Keyboard Instruments with Nineteen or More Divisions to the Octave (Surviving Specimens and Documentary Evidence) Christopher Stembridge In an earlier article1 it was demonstrated that the cimbalo cromatico was an instrument with nineteen divisions to the octave. Although no such instrument is known to have survived, one harpsichord and a keyboard from another instrument, while subsequently altered, show clear traces of having had 19 keys per octave in the middle range. The concept was further developed to produce instruments with 24, 28, 31, 3, and even 60 keys per octave. With the exception of Trasuntino's 1606 Clavemusicum Omni- tonum, none of these survives; documentary evidence, however, shows that they were related to the cimbalo cromatico, as this article attempts to demonstrate.