Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

on harpsichords and their transport ❧ 91
tury and their antecedents. First together and later separately, they produced
instruments which left me far more occupied with expounding their beauties
than with concealing their defects and which had a profound and benefi cent
infl uence on my own style of playing. Here at last were instruments and instru-
ment makers with whom I could stand on equal footing and who offered me
constant challenges.
The example set by Hubbard and Dowd has been followed by an increasing
number of minor makers with varying degrees of success. Within the aura of
the Boston school, cults have fl ourished and dwindled, but what is important
about their exasperating little pedantries is that they concern something that
can be called a real harpsichord. At least one other harpsichord maker, Martin
Skowroneck of Bremen, quite independently of Hubbard and Dowd, has
shown remarkable serendipity in opposing to the all-pervasive German Bach
model a conception of the harpsichord that ran parallel to that of Hubbard
and Dowd, and, in some cases, antedated their own development. A few other
builders are working along parallel lines. It is notoriously easier in literature
to describe evil than good, and if I have devoted what may seem inordinate
space to airing my opinions of bad harpsichords, it is because good harpsi-
chords are best described by playing them, almost as if one took their existence
for granted!
But the fact remains that even a good harpsichord is a profoundly unmusi-
cal instrument. Its insensitivities have to be beaten into submission. Perhaps
the effort and the searching it has provoked in me have made me a far better
musician and performer than if I had stuck to the piano.
But even with the really bad harpsichords out of the way, the present popu-
larity of the instrument has its dangers. Pianists have been intimidated into
underestimating the musical qualities of their own instruments and have for-
gotten that much of the revival of the harpsichord and its popularity is due to
the stagnation into which piano building has fallen in the last one hundred
years, and to defects that could have been eliminated but which, in fact, have
obliged keyboard players to look elsewhere, often driving them straight into
the domain of harpsichords that themselves are far inferior to the pianos they
have left behind.
No one seems to realize that the resistances of the harpsichord to music are
just as great as those of the piano, and that if one chooses to play harpsichord
music on the harpsichord, the best reason for it is not that the harpsichord
is always more suitable, but at least that the player is struggling with the same
defects with which the composer himself had to struggle, and that his style of
keyboard writing was twice as much infl uenced by the shortcomings of these
instruments as by their advantages.
Instrumentalists are reputed to love their instruments. I live in terror that
the next time a dear little blue-haired lady comes into my green room with
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