David Kinsela - Fundamentum - The Birth Of Keyboard Repertoire (2002) [FLAC]

Fundamentum - The Birth of Keyboard Repertoire
Anon., De Vitry, Ileborgh, Paumann
Played on the gold-strung Evans clavicytherium.

Fundamentum presents the oldest surviving music for two-hand keyboard, beginning c1359 with the Robertsbridge Fragment (six pieces lasting seventeen minutes) and continuing up to c1450 with Conrad Paumann's Fundamentum Organisandi (seven pieces lasting fourteen minutes, plus the sixteen-minute construct Ascensus et descensus).
In between are eighteen pieces from Germany, Poland, Austria, Holland and England lasting thirty minutes. Hitherto regarded as for organ, most of this repertoire proves to have been intended for string keyboard whether chekker, clavichord, clavicymbalum or clavicytherium.
Less than a quarter has been excluded, and most of this is crude or garbled although some requires pedals (which point to clavichord as much as to organ). The instrument used here is a copy of the sole surviving medieval string keyboard, a clavicytherium or vertical clavicymbalum built around 1470 in Ulm and conserved in London.


The copy was commissioned by David Kinsela in 1986 from David Evans of Henley-on-Thames.
Completed in 1991 with strings of brass, it was later restrung in gold in accordance with forgotten Renaissance practice following trials in Sydney.

Fundamentum encapsulates the transition of Western culture from Middle Ages to Renaissance.

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Notes :
The 28-page booklet provides a general introduction to the keyboard and its tuning, along with a detailed account of the first appearance in history of the first string keyboard, the chekker, during the captivity in London of King John of France between 1356 and 1360. Contemporary drawings are reproduced of the capture of King John by the Black Prince, and of the chekker, clavichord and clavicymbalum. Fundamentum includes all the music that survives for the chekker and clavicymbalum, and it provides for the first time an overview of the birth of the string keyboard.

Midway through the program, in the 1430s, occurred the momentous shift in keyboard tuning from Pythagorean Tuning to Mean-tone Temperament. The basis of tuning was no longer pure fifths but pure thirds. This enabled the use at the keyboard of common chords, and the development of tonal harmony. Fundamentum presents almost all that survives of two-hand Pythagorean music, and also the earliest surviving Mean-tone music. The technical sense of ‘mean-tone’ is that D is the mean half-way between C and E, which was tuned for over two centuries as a pure third. All tunings ever since have retained the consonant third, including modern Equal Temperament.

The introduction of consonant thirds in the 1430s is the most fundamental shift in the history of keyboard music. From this time, the string-keyboard began to dominate musical composition in Europe. Its early repertoire mirrors the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, from chivalry to humanism, from the expression of mysticism to that of individual sensibility.