E. Krähmer - Variations op. 18, Csakan and Piano-forte

Nathalie Houtman, csakan, (Csakan Guido Hulsens in Ab, after Johann Ziegler (Vienna c. 1815)
 Raphaël Collignon, piano-forte (1833, era Pleyel)

Score  Note that the csakan is a transposing instrument in Ab.   A really fun piece.

Hate Mail

My goal is to point out that Bernie or Bust - in the face of its one and only flip side, 

THE ALTERNATIVE IS TRUMP!  

- is insane.

Csakan Do

One of the unfortunate things about that most well ... well, most often played of musical instruments, the humble recorder, is that the most famous and influential player from the 1960s and 70s sold the world on the idea that in order to play with varying dynamics that it was OK to play the thing sometimes painfully out of tune.  I could never stand hearing his many, ubiquitous recordings, some made with otherwise very fine musicians.  How they could stand to hear music played intentionally out of tune - and some of his recordings almost achieve the atonality of some of the most famously bad singers in history - I don't know.  THE THING CAN BE PLAYED VERY WELL AND IN TUNE.

When the very late development of the recorder, the csakan, began to be revived, it, unfortunately, was also often played seriously out of tune.  Which is unfortunate because, as players like Michala Petri showed, even the plain old recorder it didn't have to be a choice of playing in tune or playing with different dynamic levels if you used alternate fingerings to achieve different dynamics.

The most renowned player of the csakan was Ernest Krähmer (1795-1837), who was famous for his ability to play the instrument at a wide variety of dynamic levels.   He also wrote some of its most significant music.

One of the better players I've heard  playing the instrument on recordings is  Rubens Küffer who often plays with the romantic period guitarist Max Riccio, "The Biedermeiers".

Rubens Küffer gives a demonstration of his development of different dynamic levels on the instrument using alternative fingerings, with Krähmer's 18th study for solo csakan.

And here is another with,  explanation in Portugese with subtitles in on the  the 17th study.

Here is a recording of The Biedermeiers playing   Variations sur l'air "Gestern Abend war Vetter Michel da" by Carl Scheindienst.  

I have to confess, I know how annoyed it makes some people I love to annoy when someone, well, when I present unusual music and not so often heard from musical instruments into the discussion.  But it is interesting, especially to people who play a recorder or romantic era guitars or anyone who's interested in trying music by composers they'd never heard of before.  And this music was very popular in its time, in the same period when the more well known Viennese composers were active.  Beethoven may have played a csakan, he seems to have owned one in the form of a walking stick.  Flute walking sticks were, for some reason endearingly popular.  He must have been aware of it.   

Let me ask, how many of us knew that someone named Wenzeslaus Matiegka wrote a trio for csakan, viola and guitar?  I'd never heard of him until last night. 

If They Gave A Pulitzer For U.S. Civics Education Canadian Samantha Bee Would Have It Nailed

In this segment alone, she's done more for telling Americans how their political system REALLY works than all the rest of the media combined. 

Her show is one of the few good things that have happened so far this year.  

The Slogan That Holds Donald Trump Replacing Several Supreme Court Members Is a "Scare Tactic" Is Chilling

I have been a bit fixated on the folly of the Bernie or Busters, eight years of George W. Bush sort of sticks with you, especially as most of his worst policies are still with us.   And the role that Ralph Nader played in his installation, with the support of the same left which now is declaring "Bernie or Bust" is also something I'm never going to forget.   The publications and media shows and institutions and companies that are promoting that 1st world luxury - most of them relatively safe and affluent - have already earned my enmity.   If their crop of folly goes on to produce the Trump presidency, they will have earned eternal blame, derision and rejection for the rest of our lives. 

Having been extremely critical of the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt in the past few years, with good reason, I've got to give credit where it is due.   She wrote one of the best short columns about why Bernie Sanders isn't the white knight who his most ardent supporters and his campaign sell him as being.   He's a white, male left-wing politician of his generation, a kind of quasi-Marxist economics fixated leftist whose views of even those issues weren't informed by the lives, experience and thoughts of women and members of racial minorities.  

Bernie is a traditional leftist for whom feminism is a distraction.

Why didn’t Bernie get me? Well, there’s electability: I just don’t believe Americans are ready for a 74-year-old self-described socialist with a long far-left CV who would raise their taxes by quite a lot. By the time the Republicans got finished with him, he’d be the love child of Rosa Luxemburg and the Ayatollah Khomeini, and then it’s hello, President Trump. There’s the question, too, of how much Bernie could actually accomplish. Would he make an effective president, as I think Hillary will—all the more so now that she’s been forced to see that a significant part of the Democratic electorate is to her left?

Part of the answer is simpler, though: Bernie didn’t ask for my vote. Oh, you can go to his website and find a page of boilerplate setting out his general commitments to women’s rights: He’s in favor of equal pay, reproductive rights, the ERA, the Violence Against Women Act, childcare for all, and so on—a laundry list, indeed, of the causes dear to the heart of those often derided by his supporters as bourgeois feminists content with incremental change. I am aware, too, that Bernie has a good voting record on those issues in Congress. But there’s a difference between someone who votes the right way, and someone who introduces legislation and champions the issue. He never convinced me that gender issues, specifically the persistent subordination of women in every area of life, were of much concern to him. There were all those little tells. Pooh-poohing Planned Parenthood and NARAL as “establishment” when he didn’t get their endorsement. Arguing for parental leave because it allows a new mother “to stay home and bond with her baby” instead of as something that benefits fathers as well, and something that women need in order to work and advance on the job. Doubling down on the idiotic quip by his surrogate, Killer Mike (“A uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president of the United States”), with the pseudo-lofty pledge “No one has ever heard me say, ‘Hey guys, let’s stand together, vote for a man.’ I would never do that, never have.” Is there a word for someone whose entitlement is so vast, so deep, so historically embedded, and so unconscious it includes the belief that they got where they are by a resolute devotion to fair play? It’s not reassuring that his senior campaign staff, like his long-time political inner circle, is almost entirely white and male.

And she points out, he also doesn't really get people of color.

 

At 74, you are who you are. Bernie is a traditional class-based leftist for whom feminism is a distraction. Abortion, as he told Rolling Stone, is a “social issue.” Women’s mental and physical health, their economic survival, their ability to determine the shape of their own lives as men do, is a social issue? The clear implication is that reproductive rights (like guns and LGBT rights, which he mentions in the same breath) are secondary considerations, impediments to winning broad support for his populist economic proposals. I can go to the comment sections of AlterNet—or The Nation—and get that view any day from the bros, but I really thought we’d be further along with a white man who wants to lead a movement in a party that is majority female and over a third people of color. (And that’s just registered members—in 2012, 46 percent of people who voted Democratic were people of color.)

After Indiana, the GOP looks more likely than ever to nominate a racist, xenophobic misogynist of staggering crudeness and mendacity. If elected, Trump would consult with the conservative Heritage Foundation on Supreme Court nominations. We could well lose what remains of a century of progress for women, workers, LGBT people, and people of color, including the right to vote itself.

Trump understands very well that racism and sexism are crucial components of the nationalistic insurgence he wants to lead; he appeals openly to some of the darkest impulses in our political id. It is more than disturbing that Bernie pays so little attention to these dangers. He’s changed the debate within the Democratic Party by showing that millions of voters want more than incremental, technocratic tinkering with growing inequality. For that, I’m grateful. But when it comes to dealing with the Republicans in November, I don’t think Bernie gets the awful reality we’re facing. Hillary does.

I think that Hillary Clinton does get it and I am convinced that many of Bernie Sanders' supporters really don't get it or they really don't care.   Young people who are used to the benefits of the legislation of the past century and unaware of the history of how their rights were won seem to believe they can't go away, even as they see them being taken away by the Berger, Rehnquist and Roberts courts.   The lines I hear from callow young Bernie Sanders fans that warning about the consequences of Donald Trump replacing several Supreme Court members, that it's a "scare tactic" is chilling.   For young women to say that, for women of any age to say that is especially troubling.  

At this point, with him poised to serve as an active, intentional spoiler or, now that he has continued with the tactics of attacking Hillary Clinton, as one even if he goes through the motion of supporting her, I'm not sure Bernie Sanders is willing to face the consequences of what he really has done.   If his window to make that pivot is still there, it's almost entirely closed now.  With talk about his "movement" continuing and the Green grifters looking to absorb his "movement" into yet another Green spoiler disaster, it might already be too late.  

Mercedes Sosa - La Maza

                                  

Song by Silvio Rodriguez 

I can't find a good translation into English.   If you know of one I'd really like to have it.    

Warnings Of What Could Be Our Reality Beginning Next Year

Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. 

But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.

Traudl Junge:  One of Hitler's secretaries, interviewed when she was an old woman.

The White Rose Society Call To Resistance 

A Call to All Germans!  

The war is approaching its destined end. As in the year 1918, the German government is trying to focus attention exclusively on the growing threat of submarine warfare, while in the East the armies are constantly in retreat and invasion in imminent in the West. Mobilization in the United States has not yet 
reached its clima, but already it exceeds anything that the world has ever seen. It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss. Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions goes beyond all measure. Retribution comes closer and closer.  

But what are the German people doing? They will not see and will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin. Victory at any price! is inscribed on their banner. "I will fight to the last man," says Hitler-but in the meantime the war has already been lost.  

Germans! Do you and your children want to suffer the same fate that befell the Jews? Do you want to be judged by the same standards are your traducers? Are we to be forever a nation which is hated and warejected by all mankind? No. Dissociate yourselves from National Socialist gangsterism. Prove by your deeds that you think otherwise. A new war of liberation is about to begin. The better part of the nation will fight on our side. Cast off the cloak of indifference you have wrapped around you. Make the decision before it is too late. Do not believe the National Socialist propaganda which has driven the fear of Bolshevism into your bones. Do not believe that Germany's welfare is linked to the victory of national Socialism for good or ill. A criminal regime cannot achieve a German victory. Separate yourselves in time from everything connected with National Socialism. In the aftermath a terrible but just judgment will be meted out to those who stayed in hiding, who were cowardly and hesitant.  

What can we learn from the outcome of this war-this war that never was a national war?  

The imperialist ideology of force, from whatever side it comes, must be shattered for all time. A one sided Prussian militarism must never again be allowed to assume power. Only in large-scale cooperation among the nations of Europe can the ground be prepared for reconstruction. Centralized hegemony, such as the Prussian state has tried to exercise in Germany and in Europe, must be cut down at its inception. The Germany of the future must be a federal state. At this juncture only a sound federal system can imbue a weakened Europe with a new life. The workers must be liberated from their condition of down trodden slavery under National Socialism. The illusory structure of autonomous national industry must disappear. Every nation and each man have a right to the goods of the whole world!  

Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of violence-these will be the bases of the New Europe.  

Support the resistance. Distribute the leaflets!

The Opportunistic Use Of Democratic Process

You may have heard on the news that the Maine Democratic Convention delegates voted overwhelmingly to get rid of super-delegates and that they also voted to make the five super-delegates from my state vote proportionally for Bernie Sanders whereas most of them have already pledged as supporting Hillary Clinton.

Of course the mantra is that super-delegates are anti-democratic, which is, to some extent, true but a moot point.  There are whole chunks of the nominating systems across the country which are anti-democratic, not to mention the entire process of electing a president under the rules set up by the constitution.  As Samantha Bee noted, given that their nomination process got down to a choice between Donald Trump and Ted Cruise,  a lot of Republicans would be willing to give a much cherished part of their anatomy to have  super-delegates this year.   Super-delegates were instituted as a means of having a strong Democratic nominee after the stinking un-democratic nomination procedures gave us a series of losing and weak candidates for President.  As an aside, it is really telling that it takes a Canadian to tell Americans about how screwed up the nomination process is.  

The great irony of their vote against super-delegates at the Convention this weekend,  is that if Maine didn't do presidential nominations in that most anti-democratic part of the process, caucuses, it's not a foregone conclusion that most of those Bernie Sanders delegates would have been at the Maine State Convention and it's almost certain that Bernie Sanders wouldn't have gotten as big a percentage of the caucus vote as he had.  This year the biggest beneficiary of the most anti-democratic part of the process has been Bernie Sanders.   Certainly in Maine and other caucus states. 

I might be in favor of getting rid of the super-delegate system, in a future election IF IT IS PART OF A TOTAL REFORM OF THE PROCESS.  The thing I'd start with would be to get rid of caucuses in favor of primaries in all states, AND IF WE GOT RID OF OPEN PRIMARIES AND CAUCUSES.  I will repeat that up until the day of the Maine caucus I wasn't particularly worried about the presence of an independent, Bernie Sanders in the Democratic contest for the nomination.  It was hearing his supporters at the caucus,  many of whom obviously never had been registered Democrats and many of whom clearly intended to drop the party affiliation if their candidate didn't get the nomination.  After the experience of 2000 and 2004 the most certain way to get my guard up it is hearing alleged leftists openly, at a Democratic caucus, talk about how they will vote for the Green Party candidate if they didn't get their way in the Democratic nomination.

No party necessarily owes people who are not serious and real supporters of it a chance to nominate someone to carry the most important nomination.   The excuse for open primaries is that they are paid for by the government and should be open to all.  Well, they are open to all, if people want to put up a candidate for some other party, they can, they can do that.   They could, I would imagine, through some mechanism put a dozen "independent" candidates on a ballot.  I wouldn't have any problem with a rule saying that any "independent" candidate that got above a threshold level of support in a primary could appear on the ballot, though not as the candidate of the Democratic Party.   Though that threshold should place the in serious contention to win a majority of the votes in the general election.   We've had enough experience to show that allowing never-could-win spoilers on the ballot is a disaster for democracy, not an expression of its health. 

It is especially funny, this year, to have all those Jill Stein fans of futility and guaranteed to be ignored symbolism pushing the line that the process this year is anti-democratic.  In the wake of the Maine Caucus, I went to the Green Party website and looked around.   One of the things I found was the clearly miffed declaration of the Colorado Greens that they would not endorse Bernie Sanders as encouraged by the Oklahoma Greens.  Among the other reasons given was that Green Party rules wouldn't allow them to retain their affiliation if they did that. 

Additionally, we are affiliated with the Green Party of the United states. One of the requirements of accreditation with GPUS is that we must support only the presidential nominee from our national party. We do not intend to do anything but that. We have five different presidential candidates, and from among them, we will choose our nominee at our national convention in Houston on August 3-7, 2016. Colorado will send five delegates to that convention. At present, Dr. Jill Stein is recognized as the front runner, but the other four candidates are also very thoughtful and forward thinking, much more than anything the Democratic slate has to offer.

Notice that last sentence which is as clear a sign of the delusion that comprises the thinking of the Greens.  There is one thing that none of their candidates for president offers, any chance in hell of winning the election, becoming president and putting any laws or policies into effect.  That three decades into the quasi-existence of the Green Party, for them to figure that someone who gets some attention in the minor venues of the lefty media is offering anything except their own ego-pleasing publicity is a crack pot.   Yet such people were also allowed to vote as Democrats in this years Maine Caucus when they obviously had no loyalty to the party or respect for the overall choice of Democratic voters across the country.   

Hate Mail

Oh, yeah, I see you posted that comment on a very important post Duncan did about whether or not it's cheeze whiz or provolone on Philly cheese stake.   I don't know where he gets these original ideas for blog posts.  Maybe he saw how easy that makes  it on yours. You've been repeating the common received talking points for decades.

Ben Weber - Concert Aria After Solomon, Op. 29

Bethany Beardslee, soprano
orchestra conducted by Frank Brieff in 1953

I love Ben Weber's music.  It should be performed more often.  

Covenental Economics: How God Wants Us to Treat the Other - Dr. Walter Brueggemann

April 10, 2016

Every time I hear Walter Brueggemann talk about the importance of Sabbath, he makes me feel guilty for posting stuff almost every day.   If not me then I'm sure you people need a break from me.

I love what he says about the subversiveness of the Eucharist in this talk and his criticism of the diminution of the Eucharist from its fullest context.   It seems to me that Christianity gets into trouble whenever it gets away from its Jewish roots in a rejection of the extraction economy for the entirely better alternative he talks about in this piece.   As he points out, the Bible says the same thing about Jews who get away from those same roots.

See Also: The Disease of Being Busy  BY OMID SAFI

Boulevard (from IMAGO) 1963 Alwin Nikolais Dance Theatre

.
Dancers - Simonetta Bucci, Karen Safrit, Stephanie Scopelitus, Donna Scro, Joelle Van Sickle, Kay Andersen, Clarence Brooks, Alberto Del Saz, Eric Dunlap, Peter Kyle

I love this piece but while watching it I suddenly was reminded of the texture and content of some particularly inbred, long-standing online communities.  Only they don't move that much.

Alwin Nikolais was a genius.

Diana Price - Address Given April 24, 2016

Hate Mail From Duncan's Daycare For The Seriously Senescent And The Eternally Adolescent

I don't care.  You're boring.   And isn't it time for you guys to tell each other what you're having for lunch?

Some Early Style Clavichords And The Music They Were Made To Play

Jerry Korsmit, clavichord

The piece is a Magnificat on the Sixth Mode by Conrad Paumann d. 1473, one of the earliest known composers for specifically instrumental keyboard music.  He was a blind organist and lute player - said to have invented the German lute tablature.  He also composed the first treatise on how to ornament and improvise keyboard music, I wrote a paper about it when I was in college, who knows where it is now.

The instrument is made after the drawing and description in the treatise by Arnaut de Zwolle, only the one in the manuscript is a somewhat larger instrument with fewer strings so more of the keys shared a pair of strings.

Here are a group of pieces, the first is Paumann's setting of Mit Ganzen Willen, then an anonymous piece from the Buxheimerbuch Organ Book and a piece by a slightly younger composer, Hans Kotter.

Ernst Stolz, clavichord

Here is Bernard Brauchli playing a Pavana Italiana by the great Spanish keyboard composer Antionio di Cabezon

They're a far cry from the much larger, unfretted instruments of J.S. and C. P. E. Bach's generations, not to mention the even bigger instruments that continued to be made and played into the 19th century.

Here is a concert given by an excellent player, Bruno Forst  on clavichords and virginal that shows the difference in older and later clavichords.

I'm pretty sure the instruments were amplified in the hall, the microphone is close.   He gives some explanations in Spanish.

Platforms Are For Posing Impotently Presidencies Are For Real

According to John Nichols at The Nation the big reason that Bernie Sanders is hell bent on having a "contested convention" is for that stupidest of all election year exercises, getting the party platform written to his liking.   Political writers in magazines of the left have a really silly fixation on party platforms.  Maybe you do that when your job essentially involves writing that will have little to no effect in the real world.  You wonder why Bernie Sanders, an independent who has not, to my knowledge, ever felt the need for a party platform during any other decade of his long career in public office is suddenly so enamored of one.  Platform fights are all about posing for the camera and the audience, maybe that's something that leftish political writers also like about them, they give them something to write about.   I've seen platform fights before, there is no bigger waste of time, effort, resources and good will in the political process.   I have never known of a politician who allegedly ran on one who felt bound by any of its provisions that they wouldn't have supported anyway or who wouldn't abandon planks in it as was necessary or expedient.   Their primary use is made by the opponents of the candidates who need to run away from the thing when it's an unhelpful burden or ballot box poison.  

A far more productive use of any clout which Sanders has gained would be in private negotiations with Clinton over his support, negotiations which will never be made public during the campaign.  Considering that their voting records in the Senate were not all that different, it should be easy to get something accomplished.  But the price of the loser in a nomination battle to have influence is the one thing that Sanders seems to be loath to put up, his full endorsement and support of the person who won the most votes of Democrats.   His continuing on could sour any potential for him to have major influence on the course of her possible presidency.   If he doesn't support her and she wins she will, rightly, conclude that she didn't need his support.   If she loses, it discredits him and his supporters, which would be far worse than if he'd never run in the first place.

The best thing for the left is if it is seen and felt to be a dependable margin of victory for Democrats and a reliable force in both presidential and mid-term elections.  It is the ability to ensure someone's election that gives you influence, not blackmail that you will defeat them.  Unless you prove that you can provide a politician with success, you're not their potential supporters, you're their opposition and they will have to go elsewhere to find support.  If the left had been the reliable margin ensuring election instead of the lunatic, tantrum prone, third-party deluded numbskulls they have too often been, they would have a far greater role in making laws and policies and putting those into effect.

Sanders isn't giving me much reason to be optimistic about what he and his campaign will do, I am afraid there is going to be a lot more reason to wish he'd never made the run in the first place.  But that is up to him and the extent to which HE will convince his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton.  It is his campaign which has whipped up the Hillary haters on the left, many of whom, when you question them, don't know anything about her other than Republican lie-machine talking points.  He is the one who encouraged that, he's a long way from his statement that no one cared about her e-mails.  If he'd kept on that track he'd be in a position to have far more influence on something that really matters, what her administration will be.

Dump the stupid posing on the platform, the platform is a stupid exercise in posturing.  It is more likely to be politically counter-productive than important.  Holding office and making laws is what's important. but you've got to win the election, first.

Update:  If I were going to hire a copy editor I wouldn't start the hunt with an idiot of an Atriot.

Tent - Company 1968 - Nikolais Dance Theatre

Dancers: Murray Louis, Phyllis Lamhut, Carolyn Carlson, Michael Ballard, Emery Hermans, Gale Ormiston, Wanda Pruska, Sara Shelton, Robert Solomon, Jeanette Stoner Tech: Jon Garness, George Gracey, James Van Abbema Recorded in Germany for TV 1969

I assume the music and choreography is by Alwin Nikolais, the music composed on his early model Moog synthesizer.

During the same period, Seawright came to Nik and told him of a young man who had invented and constructed a simplified synthesizer and insisted that Nik visit the electronic fair currently being held in New York. Nik did so and met Robert Moog. He was completely taken by the new machine and after making some suggestions to Moog, (which Moog made), Nik bought the inventor’s first machine, through aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship. All of the Nikolais’s scores from 1963 to 1975 found their sources primarily from that synthesizer.

Bang On Stupy, Stupy Bang On

The range of electroacoustic instruments is extremely wide and can only be surveyed here briefly (more details can be found in the author's article 'Electronic instruments in The New Grove Dictionary of Musicial Instruments, 1984).  Keyboard instruments include electric pianos (with strings, struck reeds, plucked reeds or struck rods, amplified by one of the three main types of transducer), harpsichords and a clavichord (the Clavinet). 

Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century

By Hans-Joachim Braun, International Committee for the History of Technology

Update:

CLAVICHORD, ELECTRIC 

An acoustic clavichord whose sound is amplified by electronic means.  By amplifying the sound of an instrument whose remarkably soft volume level can be obliterated by the sound of the human voice, the clavichord can be projected (by microphone and speaker) to an audience and can therefore be used in halls larger than a recital room. 


Margaret van Dijk: The Harpsichord and Clavichord: An Encyclopedia
edited by Igor Kipnis

I could go on, but I doubt anyone but a total boob would think that the combined wisdom of Stupy and the Eschatots is more credible than the man who wrote the relevant article in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, one of the the standard references in the English Language,  and Dr. Margaret van Dijk.  Though the "brain trust", of course, has no idea about credibility.

See Also:

and, also:

etc.

The clavichord, perhaps even more so than the piano has undergone extensive modification, first in the difference between the fretted forms, in which more than one note is played on some strings, to the unfretted form, in which each set of strings plays one note.  There was the experiment of having the tangents hit the strings at the exact halfway point to increase the volume by having the entire length of the string sounding.  The invention of forms that use electronic amplification is still a clavichord - which the Hohner company that developed the Clavinet said was their original intention.  They didn't expect it to be taken over by popular musicians.

And there have been jazz recordings that use unamplified clavichords, well they used microphones, of course.  Which, of course, will be used in any recording of clavichord music.  I don't think Stupy has more "street cred" or any other kind of cred than Oscar Peterson did:

Update:   Imagine me knowing more about the history of the electric bass than the pops of power pop, himself, the self- coronated   pope of pop.   The electric bass was invented precisely for pop music.  It was certainly not invented as a replacement for the bass viol as its flat bridge prevented it from being bowed.

You know, Stupy, I think your problem is you and the kollege of musical knowledge at Duncan's don't know the difference between electronic and electro-acoustic instruments.  There is a difference.  Anyone who worked in electronic music would know that.  Heck, anyone who thought about it for a few seconds would know that.

Last Update:   I mentioned the intention of the inventor, not what someone else does with something they invent.  If they intended an electric bass to be a replacement for a bass viol they would have given it a curved bridge and fingerboard.

C. P. E Bach Fantasia in f-sharp minor - Different interpretations.

Dora Petry - clavichord

A live performance that makes you want to kill the idiots who had their cell phones on and who coughed loudly, but a fine performance.

Robert Hill, fortepiano

Sofya Melikyan, modern piano

Dmitry Shelkin,  marimba  (Warning, the recording is at a very close, loud volume level, don't use earphones and you might want to turn the volume down.)

All of them are good performances, the one for clavichord is the most idiomatic, I think.

Update:  Oh, and I can almost guarantee you that the clavichord, if it is a new reproduction,  is likely the least expensive of the instruments of that quality and, by far, the smallest of them.  Though it's quite possible if it's an historical instrument it might be more expensive than the marimba.  A fine, concert hall quality Steinway is mighty pricey these days, as is even a fine reproduction fortepiano.

Now We Know How Much Better A Woman Has To Be Than A Man To Get The Job - Infinitely Better

Thinking more about what I wrote late last night,  it is literally true that Hillary Clinton is the most thoroughly vetted candidate for the presidency of the United States in the history of the office.  With many tens of millions of dollars spent BY HER POLITICAL ENEMIES investigating her record in the most minute of detail, looking for any crime they could pin on her, any instance of malfeasance or misfeasance in office, anything they could bring her down with.  AND THREE DECADES INTO THAT EXERCISE THEY HAVE GOT NOTHING BUT THE LIES AND ACCUSATIONS THEY AND THE CORPORATE MEDIA HAVE PUSHED ABOUT HER.  

I would like to see how any of the other candidates in the history of the presidency, how many of the MEN this year would stand up to, literally, decades of the same scrutiny running to the tens of millions of dollars by Republican politicians AND JUDGES and their hired guns such as Ken Starr, the Republican serving media, from the New York Times and Washington Post down to the cabloids and the gutter media such as FOX and Breitbart levels of lying filth.  

That Hillary Clinton is a woman is certainly a factor in why AFTER EXHAUSTIVELY ANSWERING ACCUSATIONS, SOMETIMES TESTIFYING FOR LONG, LONG HOURS BEFORE HOUSE AND SENATE COMMITTEES, PROVIDING HER RECORD FOR THE MOST EXACTING DISSECTION LOOKING FOR ANYTHING TO USE AGAINST HER, she is still having to answer charges of corruption and criminality.   I would like to see the man who has had such a campaign mounted against him,  I don't even think the second most investigated politician, Bill Clinton has had to endure such a test of suitability for office.   I don't think any man in the history of the country ever has had to go through what she has, STILL STANDING AND STILL WILLING TO PUT HERSELF THROUGH IT IN ORDER TO TAKE PUBLIC OFFICE AND SERVE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.