Fascinating. I built a clavichord from a kit, based on an instrument from about 1690, which has a short octave - nobody used C#, D# or F# in the lowest octave in the music of the time, which avoided using keys with lots of sharps or flats because they used mean tone tuning, which sounds very sweet in simple keys and very sour in complicated keys. But this is the first time I've seen an instrument with broken octave. There must have been musicians at the time who wanted to add the missing notes, but were used to the advantages of the short octave and didn't want to do without them.
Fascinating. I built a clavichord from a kit, based on an instrument from about 1690, which has a short octave - nobody used C#, D# or F# in the lowest octave in the music of the time, which avoided using keys with lots of sharps or flats because they used mean tone tuning, which sounds very sweet in simple keys and very sour in complicated keys. But this is the first time I've seen an instrument with broken octave. There must have been musicians at the time who wanted to add the missing notes, but were used to the advantages of the short octave and didn't want to do without them.