Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

88 ❧ chapter five
All of the packing cases required at least three persons to extract the harp-
sichord and to set it up on its legs once it was assembled. Perhaps I should
have instituted an International Society of Amateur Harpsichord Movers. This
society would have crossed every conceivable barrier of class, race, or occupa-
tion. It would have included college presidents, stagehands, students, fellow
musicians, surgeons, European aristocrats whose surnames evoke a thousand
years of history, common clergymen, and passersby picked off the street. When
all is fi nally set up and its lid is open, I am often obliged to give an impromptu
performance on a travel-shaken instrument that is ferociously out of tune.
After concerts, once visitors have been greeted, autographs signed, questions
answered, and stray bits of the harpsichord and its packing material collected
from backstage, and I have climbed dirty and tired out of the case where I have
been stowing away legs and trestles, it is not uncommon that someone sings a
fragment of the burial service as the harpsichord is lowered into its box and
the lid closed on the remains.
It was thanks to the Railway Express Agency that for many years I could play
so many concerts all over the United States in a short space of time. My sub-
sequent experiences with air and motor transport have been disastrous, and
accompanied by monumental displays of irresponsibility. I often spent hours on
the telephone locating the instrument, and on a few occasions it arrived only
long after the audience had already assembled. Yet I cannot recall more than
half-a-dozen instances when it actually failed to arrive in time for a concert.
It is true that I once lost a harpsichord for over a month between Columbus,
Ohio, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, when transportation was beginning to go
to pieces, but fortunately I was in Europe at the time and did not need it any-
way. There have been times when I have two and even three harpsichords on
the road at once, leapfrogging each other in order to overcome diffi culties of
geography and date.
Sometimes it was not the harpsichord but I who arrived just in the nick of
time for a concert. I can recall a grueling trip from New York to Chicago after
the decline of the railroads when a blizzard stopped air travel and the Pullman
which I had booked was replaced by an unheated coach in which I sat up all
night, only able to escape at Buffalo the next morning for a plane to Chicago.
After crossing the city through fi fteen-foot drifts of snow, I arrived at the con-
cert barely in time to unpack and tune the harpsichord in the presence of the
audience. Only one or two other concerts in my life have I been obliged to
begin in a comparable state of fatigue. These are the circumstances that make
one understand the differences between being able to play beautifully as an
amateur at home and being able to play convincingly as a professional under
the worst circumstances imaginable.
In these years of touring, the utilization of empty spaces in the harpsi-
chord shipping case assumed a certain importance. Into them were stowed
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