(Fr. archiquier, eschaquier, eschiquier; Ger. Schachtbrett; Lat. scacarum, scacatorum; Sp. eschaquer, scaquer).
The earliest term used in archives and other writings to denote a string keyboard instrument. Its exact meaning is still the subject of debate and research, but it is probable that most references are to a clavichord. There appears to be no Italian equivalent of the name; Farmer suggested that it is derived from the Arabic ‘al-shaqira’ and tentatively identified this as a virginal, but there is no supporting evidence. Some writers identified the chekker as an upright harpsichord (i.e. a Clavicytherium), since a letter written to Juan I of Aragon in 1388 referred to ‘an instrument seeming like organs, that sounds with strings’, but the instrument was not named. Galpin (Grove4, suppl.) believed that the Dulce melos described by Arnaut de Zwolle (c1440) was identical with the chekker. However, instruments with hammer action, such as the dulce melos, appear to have been rare, whereas the name ‘chekker’ appears frequently, and there is no evidence to support this identification. Galpin further suggested that the chekker’s name was derived from the fact that the action was ‘checked’, in the sense that the motion of its keys was stopped by a fixed rail; this is unconvincing and could in any case apply to a clavichord, a harpsichord or a virginal. These suggestions can therefore be disregarded.
Documentary evidence reveals only that ‘chekker’ denoted a string keyboard instrument. Ripin, who thoroughly examined all the known documents, believed that he had found direct evidence for identifying the clavichord with the ‘chekker’: a sentence in a French court account book for 1448 refers to the purchase of ‘un eschiquier ou manicordion’. However, the possibility that the scribe may have been ignorant of the exact usage of ‘manicordian’ and ‘chekker’ obliges us, as Page has argued, to be cautious in concluding that the two names were synonymous. Page further argued that it is a fundamental misconception to suppose that chekker denoted a particular instrument with its own special action, since terminology at that time was likely to have been imprecise. Although Page may be correct in this view, it is hardly verifiable. As evidence, Page described how Arnaut’s ‘clavichordium’ could denote tangent, hammer or plucking action. Meeùs, however, has suggested that Arnaut could have been using the name ‘clavichordium’ in a didactic or illustrative way. Thus, when he wrote that the clavichord could be ‘transformed’ into a dulce melos or virginal by changing the action, it must be understood that he was not proposing an actual modification, because that would have been technically impossible. The ‘clavichordium’ was the instrument named (with other instruments in terms of it) simply because it was familiar to the reader.
In a pragmatic attempt to cut through the difficulties Meeùs argued that since ‘chekker’ is the earliest known name for a string keyboard instrument, the very first string keyboard instrument must have been denoted by that name. Since the earliest reference to the chekker is 1360 and there is evidence for the clavichord around the middle of the 14th century but none for the harpischord until about 1390 it seems probable, but not proven, that only the clavichord could have been intended. Arnaut’s treatise of around 1440 provides the first reference to an instrument identifiable as the virginal, and the first clavicytherium reference is around 1460. Thus, the clavichord appears to have been indicated by the early usage of ‘chekker’.
In discussing the derivation of the name ‘chekker’, Ripin suggested that it was derived from ‘exchequer’, the medieval counting-board consisting of squares laid out on a table. Meeùs also made a persuasive case in support of this derivation of the name. The title-page of Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica (1503) shows a woman operating a counting frame (an exchequer) and she appears at first glance to be playing a clavichord. The four or five lines on the rectangular board give it a sufficiently close resemblance to a clavichord for it to be conceivable that the name ‘exchequer’ might have been applied to a keyboard instrument. The possibility is hard to dismiss, and the natural alliance between the two would seem to be confirmed by Mersenne, who even as late as 1648 used the Latin ‘abacus’ (the modern English word for ‘exchequer’) for ‘keyboard’. If we admit this derivation, however, we allow the possibility that any keyboard instrument, including the organ could have been called a ‘chekker’, whereas some of the documentary evidence clearly specifies a string keyboard instrument.
A further issue raised by this derivation, however, is whether we should infer from the shape of the exchequer that the chekker also had a rectangular form. If this were the case, then it would appear to strengthen the argument that the chekker must be a clavichord, since most known early clavichords have a rectangular case. Of the 26 known 15th-century representations of rectangular instruments, at least 20 are probably of clavichords, although it is not always possible to identify the instrument with certainty.
Grove4, suppl. (F.W. Galpin)
H.G. Farmer: ‘The Canon and Eschaquiel of the Arabs’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1926), 239–56
E.M. Ripin: ‘Towards an Identificaton of the Chekker’, GSJ, xxviii (1975), 11–25
C. Page: ‘The Myth of the Chekker’, EMc, vii (1979), 482–9
T. Knighton: ‘Another Chekker Reference’, EMc, viii (1980), 375 only
M. Meeùs: ‘The “Chekker”’, Organ Yearbook, xvi (1985), 5–25
E. Segerman: ‘Fascination with the Chekker is Alive and Well’, FoMRHI Quarterly, no.69 (1992), 42–3
DENZIL WRAIGHT