Introduction

Ralph Kirkpatrick (RK), eminent harpsichordist and scholar, was one of the
most infl uential fi gures in the revival of the harpsichord in the twentieth cen-
tury. He was also an important fi gure in the reevaluation of Baroque perfor-
mance practices that began in the 1930s and 1940s. He performed not only
on the harpsichord but also on the clavichord and fortepiano. He played
the modern piano for pleasure and occasionally in performance and record-
ings. He can be heard playing piano in a recording of the Stravinsky Septet
(Columbia, 1956) and in a reissue of a recording of Mozart concertos, K.
413 and K. 491 (EMI, 2006). He was known especially for his performances
of Bach and Scarlatti, but he also performed and recorded music by, among
others, Byrd, Couperin, Mozart, Purcell, and Rameau. Kirkpatrick was also
very involved with contemporary music. As early as 1934, he was performing
the Falla harpsichord concerto in New York; in the late 1930s and early 1940s,
he was playing contemporary pieces by Otto Luening, Ernst Lévy, Robert
McBride, and Virgil Thomson. He also performed works by composers such as
Elliott Carter, Darius Milhaud, Walter Piston, and Quincy Porter, and a num-
ber of works were written specifi cally for him, including Carter’s Double Concerto
for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961) and Cowell’s Set of
Four for Harpsichord (or Piano) (1960). In January 1961, he performed an entire
program of twentieth-century harpsichord music at Berkeley that included
pieces by Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Frederick Delius, Ernst Lévy, Peter
Mieg, Halsey Stevens, Vincent Persichetti, Douglas Allanbrook, Mel Powell,
and David Kraehenbuehl. The concert was recorded for later release on the
Music & Arts label (1997).
Kirkpatrick was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, a small town west of
Boston, into an academic family. He began studying piano at a young age
with his mother and others, and he continued his piano studies in Cambridge
while he was attending Harvard. He performed on the piano with a number
of groups while at Harvard. His later assessment of his early years as a piano
student was that he had a technical fl uency, but was not at all disciplined. The
teacher with whom he studied in Cambridge eventually dismissed him as a stu-
dent because of his lack of discipline; RK credited this experience as the begin-
ning of the intense focus with which he conducted his work from then on.
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