Action
The action of these small instruments is known as the "English single" and is unusually simple (for instance, it is far simpler than the original piano action as invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori.) It consists of a small "sticker" simply pushing up on a hammer, while a rod passing through the hitch pin plank lifted up a damper lever hinged from a rail attached to the spine. The action is illustrated below.
Action parts:
- key; the portion pressed by the player is on the far right
- jack; a wire with leather stud on top, known by the workmen as the "old man's head"
- whalebone rear guide, projects from the end of the key, works in a groove to keep the key steady
- hammer; strikes the string to produce sound
- whalebone jack, called the mopstick
- damper; when in lowered position stops the sound of the string
- whalebone damper spring
Read more about this topic: Johannes Zumpe
Famous quotes containing the word action:
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)
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—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)