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URBINO. A new centre of the highest significance to Italian stringed-keyboard instrument design and construction.

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N.B.:  Grant O'Brien holds the copyright on all of the material on this web-page, none of which may be copied, reproduced, nor published in any form without his written permission:  grant.obrien@claviantica.com

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First Part:  The RCM clavicytherium.

©Grant O’Brien, Edinburgh, July, 2025

A front view of the RCM0001 instrument.

Anonymous clavicytherium, Urbino, c. 1471.

Royal College of Music, London, Cat. No. RCM0001.

Preface – How is it possible to determine where an instrument was built?

          Before delving into the important and highly-interesting topic of stringed-keyboard instrument building in Urbino, it is first of all necessary to understand how it is possible to determine where an instrument is actually made.  Initially it would seem almost impossible to determine where an instrument was made, and even more difficult to determine who made it.  However, during the historical period early keyboard instruments – harpsichords, virginals, spinets and clavichords – were made by many different makers in many different countries and centres throughout Europe.  Clearly these instruments were built in many different national and regional styles using different string scalings, different lateral string spacings, different materials, etc.  These different styles are well documented, and this provides at least an initial starting point, and a first clue as to the maker and the centre where it was made.  The decoration of the instrument might also provides a clue to the maker’s identity, although clearly a decorator may have worked for a number of different makers, or the instrument may have been re-decorated a second or a third time after it was originally made, making the identity of the maker of one particular instrument unclear, or at best, highly dubious.  So, although the building style and the style of the decoration can be of great help in identifying the maker of a particular instrument, these features on their own are not enough in themselves to tie down the builder to one particular centre or maker with any real certainty.

          So what other features of an instrument can be used to identify the builder of an instrument with confidence and security.  By far the most important additional feature of an instrument that can be used here is the size of the unit of measurement used in its design and construction.  Virtually all historical instruments were made subject to the rules of the local guild, and the guild regulations.  The guilds were responsible for standardizing the products made in each of the centres and in its local guilds.  So the clearest way for the guilds to do this was to control the size of the unit of measurement used by each of the members of the guild.  This then ensured that the amount of grain in a bushel was the same for all of the members of the guild, and this ensured that a customer knew that he would always get exactly the same amount of grain, no matter which merchant he bought it from.  Similarly, the amount of cloth in a yard of material, the amount of beer in a pint, the amount of wood in a given-sized plank was the same for each person selling their products under the guild regulations, so that the customer could then be assured that he wasn’t being cheated. 

          Since the instruments under study were built according to the guild rules, this therefore means that if we can discover the size of the unit of measurement used to design and build them, this can also be used initially to determine where an instrument was made so that, if the size of the unit of measurement can be determined reliably, this can then be used to tie down he maker and designer of the instrument.  What is of critical importance to this process, of course, is that we also need to know what the actual sizes of the units of measurement were in each country, province, state and centre during the historical period.  It then remains only to determine the size of the unit of measurement from the design and construct the instrument, and then to look up the centre of construction in a table of the sizes of the units used throughout Europe.  Fortunately, there is a plethora of books on metrology that do just that!  So if the size of the unit of measurement used can first of all be found or calculated, then the centre in which the instrument was built can be determined with confidence.  Therefore, in order to utilise this method, the author has made up a spread-sheet for Italy, with 2,468 entries giving the sizes of the units of measurement in current use in the various centres in Italy during the historical period.  Similar spreadsheets have been tabulated by the author for many of the other countries in Western Europe.

The above material is only the Preface of a new book by the author.

The complete contents of this book are due to be published soon.  But obviously this cannot yet be published here because of copyright complications.