action

…1720s, the mechanism, or “action,” differs somewhat from that described and pictured by Maffei; however, rather than merely representing an earlier phase of Cristofori’s work, Maffei’s diagram may be in error. In the surviving instruments a pivoted piece of wood is set into the key. The pivoted piece (which…

…small firms building highly refined tracker-action instruments have proliferated. Increasingly, their organs adopt tuning systems other than equal temperament, pitches higher or lower than usual, short-octave keyboards, and other retrospective features that allow performers to re-create organ music of the 16th through 18th centuries in ways that would have been…

…experimented with a variety of actions (mechanisms whereby the finger’s pressure is transmitted to a padded hammer and thence imparted to the strings), using different action designs for his smaller and largest grand pianos. The imperial grand, his largest size, had the extraordinary compass of eight octaves; later, it was…