90 ❧ chapter five
harpsichords made from kits of good design that are far superior to many a
custom-built instrument.
It seems in retrospect that at least eighty percent of my career has been
devoted to struggling with bad harpsichords. Is it conceivable that I could have
refused to play any of them at all? I think the answer is no, but I nevertheless
have twinges of conscience when I recall certain performances on particularly
dreadful harpsichords in halls where perfectly good Steinways or Bösendorfers
had been relegated to the back of the stage. Yet there was a certain discipline
which I felt I had no right to shirk, the discipline of extracting music from
sources that were in many ways least likely to produce it. I learned resources
of concentration, of phrasing, of control of attacks and duration of notes, of
compensatory balances, that I might never have learned had I played only on
beautiful instruments. Many of my attempts to communicate music through
a medium that was neither communicative nor musical quite naturally failed,
but not infrequently there was an intensity and concentration in the effort I
was obliged to make that produced positive results.
Recently I played a recital and a concerto in the most ideal surroundings imag-
inable, visually and acoustically one of the fi nest gems of European Baroque. But
I found there a harpsichord of local manufacture whose every key, from begin-
ning to end of both performances, I depressed with a silent curse. The instru-
ment was the absolute antithesis of all that visually and acoustically I had around
me. Yet someone whom I did not know, and who I suppose had never heard me
before, wrote an account of the concert which described with uncanny accuracy
and appreciativeness precisely what I was trying to achieve.
In my relationships with harpsichord makers, I was dealing either with work-
men of limited background and intellect who had no conception of the pur-
poses for which they were building harpsichords, or I was dealing with men
with a certain intellectual training and culture who had no understanding of
what they were building in terms of craftsmanship and effi ciency of function.
This long and unhappy period came to an end with the emergence of the
Boston school of harpsichord making.
I fi rst met Frank Hubbard and William Dowd while they were both grad-
uate students at Harvard. They were educated, cultivated men with whom I
could talk as equals, but I expected little more from them than from the aver-
age enthusiastic amateur until they both left Harvard separately and seriously
began to train themselves as craftsmen. Their subsequent partnership began
the kind of revolution in harpsichord building for which I had hitherto hoped
in vain. Frank Hubbard’s research and his book Three Centuries of Harpsichord
Making^3 reestablished fi rm contact with the traditions of the eighteenth cen-
- Frank Hubbard, Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1965, reprint 1992).
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