Many historical references point to the clavichord as a superior teaching instrument for the other keyboard instruments, but was the pedal clavichord equally valued by organists in their teaching? Were pedal clavichords just inexpensive practice instruments (an opinion voiced many times in the twentieth-century literature) or were they used in the same way that the eighteenth-century manual clavichords were, as study instruments and even performance instruments in their own right?

Juxtaposing J. S. Bach’s Clavier technique with the pedal clavichord is a speculative endeavor at best, because so little information survives about both Bach’s keyboard instruments and his teaching technique. One could be forgiven for asking, “Why try it at all?” We cannot prove conclusively that Bach had a pedal clavichord, although that is what his first biographer tells us. Nor can we prove that the pedal clavichord played a role in his teaching, although at least two of his students used them that way. We have some historical instruments that we can assume no longer play the way they did when they were new, and we have some written sources that describe how they should be played if they still worked.

This book is about a dialectical process between the historical material (both written and built) and information gleaned from a copy of one of the surviving instruments, involving my personal experience as a builder, teacher, and player. The structure of the book reflects this process. Part One presents the pedal clavichord in its historical context, using the tools of musicology, and also gives a brief history of the reconstruction of my first copy of the instrument, built under the direction of John Barnes, the Curator Emeritus of the Russell Collection of Keyboards Instruments at the University of Edinburgh. Part Two describes the teaching experiments with the instrument, and necessarily involves more of the personal than is common in a work of musical scholarship. The two halves of the book are divided for the sake of clarity, but in reality, the experience of such a process is more intertwined, not least through the presence of some additional historical information in the second half of the book (such as evidence, in chapter 8, suggesting that organ teachers regularly taught their students at home on pedal clavichords).