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:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)