As early as the year 1400 claviers had appeared whose strings were plucked by quills attached to jacks at the end of the key levers.  To this group belonged the virginal, or virginals, the clavicembalo, the harpsichord, or clavecin, and the spinet.  Stops were added, as in the organ, that varied effects might be produced, and a second keyboard was often placed above the first.  The case was either rectangular, or followed the outlines of the harp, a progenitor of this clavier type.  It was often highly ornamented, and handsomely mounted.  Each string from the first had its due length and was tuned to its proper note.

The secular music principle of the sixteenth century that called into active being the orchestra led also to a desire for richer musical expression in home and social life than the fashionable lute afforded, and the clavier advanced in favor.  In France, by 1530, the dance, that promoter of pure instrumental music, was freely transcribed for the clavier.  Little more than a century later, Jean Baptiste Lully (1633-1687) extensively employed the instrument in the orchestration of his operas, and wrote solo dances for it.

Francois Couperin (1668-1733), now well-nigh forgotten, although once mentioned in the same breath with Moliere, wrote the pioneer clavier instruction book.  In it he directs scholars how to avoid a harsh tone, and how to form a legato style.  He advises parents to select teachers on whom implicit reliance may be placed, and teachers to keep the claviers of beginners under lock and key that there may be no practicing without supervision.  His suggestions deserve consideration to-day.

He was the first to encourage professional clavier-playing among women.  His daughter Marguerite was the first woman appointed official court clavier player.  He composed for the clavier little picture tunes, designed to depict sentiments, moods, phases of character and scenes from life.  He fashioned many charming turns of expression, introduced an occasional tempo rubato, foreshadowed the intellectual element in music and laid the corner-stone of modern piano-playing.  Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) continued Couperin’s work.

What is generally recognized as the first period of clavier-virtuosity begins with the Neapolitan Domenico Scarlatti (1683-1757), and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the German of Germans.  The style of Scarlatti is peculiarly the product of Italian love of beautiful tone, and what he wrote, though without depth of motive, kept well in view the technical possibilities of the harpsichord.  His “Cat’s Fugue,” and his one movement sonatas still appear on concert programmes.  In a collection of thirty sonatas he explained his purpose in these words:  “Amateur, or professor, whoever thou art, seek not in these compositions for any profound feeling.  They are only a frolic of art, meant to increase thy confidence in the clavier.”