After the tenth century the development of the monochord seems to have begun in earnest.  Two or more strings of equal length are now divided and set in motion by flat metal wedges, attached to the key levers, and called tangents, because they touched the strings.  In response to the demand for increased range, as many as twenty keys were brought to act on a few strings, commanding often three octaves.  Guido d’Arezzo, the famous sight-reading music teacher of the eleventh century, advised his pupils to “exercise the hand in the use of the monochord,” showing his knowledge of the keyboard.  The keyed monochord gained the name clavichord.  Its box-like case was first placed on a table, later on its own stand, and increased in elegance.  Not until the eighteenth century was each key provided with a separate string.

No unimped triumphal progress can be claimed for the various claviers or keyboard instruments that came into use.  Dance music found in them a congenial field, thus causing many serious-minded people to regard them as dangerous tempters to vanity and folly.  In the year 1529, Pietro Bembo, a grave theoretician, wrote to his daughter Helena, at her convent school:  “As to your request to be allowed to learn the clavier, I answer that you cannot yet, owing to your youth, understand that playing is only suited for volatile, frivolous women; whereas I desire you to be the most lovable maiden in the world.  Also, it would bring you but little pleasure or renown if you should play badly; while to play well you would be obliged to devote ten or twelve years to practice, without being able to think of anything else.  Consider a moment whether this would become you.  If your friends wish you to play in order to give them pleasure, tell them you do not desire to make yourself ridiculous in their eyes, and be content with your books and your domestic occupations.”

A different view was entertained in England during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, where claviers were in vogue styled virginals, because, as an ancient chronicle explained, “virgins do most commonly play on them.”  The virginal was usually of oblong shape, often resembling a lady’s workbox.  With the Virgin Queen it was a prime favorite, although not named expressly for her as the flattering fashion of the time led many to assume.  If she actually did justice to some of the airs with variations in the “Queen Elizabeth Virginal Book,” she must indeed have been proficient on the instrument.  Quaint Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814) declares, in his “History of Music,” that no performer of his day could play them without at least a month’s practice.

The clavier gave promise of its destined career in the Elizabethan age.  Shakespeare immortalized it, and William Byrd (1546-1623) became the first clavier master.  He and Dr. John Bull (1563-1628), says Oscar Bie, in his great work on “The Clavier and Its Masters,” “represent the two types which run through the entire history of the clavier.  Byrd was the more intimate, delicate, spiritual intellect; Bull the untamed genius, the brilliant executant, the less exquisitely refined artist.  It is significant that these two types stand together on the threshold of clavier art.”  Bull had gained his degree at Oxford, the founding of whose chair of music is popularly attributed to Alfred the Great.