Short Octave - Music Written Specifically For Short-octave Instruments

Music Written Specifically For Short-octave Instruments

While the short octave seems primarily to have been an economy measure, it does have the advantage that the player's left hand can in certain cases span a greater number of notes. The composer Peter Philips wrote a pavane in which the left hand plays many parallel tenths. This is a considerable stretch for many players, and become even harder when (as in Philips's pavane), there sometimes other notes included in the chord. Of this piece harpsichord scholar Edward Kottick writes, "The sensuality of effortlessly achieving tenths is so strong, so delightful, that one cannot really claim to know the piece unless it has been played on a short-octave keyboard."

A composer who wrote music conveniently playable only on a broken-octave instrument was Joseph Haydn, whose early work for keyboard was intended for harpsichord, not piano. As Gerlach (2007) points out, Haydn's "Capriccio in G on the folk song 'Acht Sauschneider müssen sein'", H. XVII:1 (1765) is evidently is written for a harpsichord employing the Viennese bass octave. The work terminates in a chord in which the player's left hand must cover a low G, the G an octave above it, and the B two notes higher still. On orthodox keyboards this would be an impossible stretch for most players, but as on the Viennese bass octave it would have been easy to play, with the fingers depressing keys that visually appeared as D/G/B (see diagram above).

When Haydn's Capriccio was published by Artaria in the 1780s, the Viennese bass octave had mostly disappeared (indeed, the harpsichord itself was becoming obsolete). The publisher accordingly included alternative notes for the places where the original version could be played only on a short octave instrument, presumably to accommodate the needs of purchasers who owned a harpsichord or piano with the ordinary chromatic bass octave.