bach and keyboard instruments ❧ 127
in carrying power. To a certain extent it did. Whether what carried was what
one wanted to have carried is an open question. For years I did all sorts of
registrations based not only on this kind of sound but on the presence of
pedals which permitted much more frequent and rapid changes of registra-
tion than anything that’s possible here. It seems more and more unlikely that
even idiomatic composers in the eighteenth century cared that much about
harpsichord registration, and the amount of quick changing that was pos-
sible in the classic days (let’s say before 1750) with pedals must have been
very little; and its desirability when it was present, for much of the harpsi-
chord literature, is more than questionable. I think one of the things that
gave the headway to the 16-foot stop was the prevalence in modern concert
harpsichords and in the mass-produced instruments of Germany of 8-foots
which simply weren’t good enough to be used by themselves. They were like
8-foots on many nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century organs in
which everything simply folds out below middle C. They count on the rein-
forcement from the pedal, which in idiomatic organ writing is what they get,
but when everything has to be played on the manual, the absence of decent
basses makes itself felt. The result was that, with much fanfare in the year of
my birth, a 16-foot was incorporated into the Pleyel harpsichord, with a note
on the jackrail to that effect. I have often been tempted to put a note on the
jackrail of a subsequent harpsichord that the 16-foot had been removed. And
the average mass-production German instruments, which have even worse
basses, for years had 16-foot stops on their smallest models, even on the ones
that were only so long, so the accumulation of mud was considerable.
Now there is one place in which the 16-foot might make sense. It’s a three-
manual instrument, and the 16-foot is controlled on the lowest of the three
manuals. This means that, if you had a hand free and the part-writing was
such, you could reinforce the basses without making all the top parts so cum-
bersome. In other words, you could do very much what goes on at the organ.
Sixteen-foot pitch is reserved for the pedals and stays in the domain of the
counterpaces [counterpoint?] where it belongs. But instead here, of course,
you have the entire orchestra being doubled—fi rst violins, second violins, vio-
las, all taken down an octave lower along with the cellos—and no sane com-
poser has ever been known to orchestrate that way.
I would like to go back a little in time—not very far back—because I’m
going to take the French Overture here as an example. My last of two record-
ings was made on a classic German mass-production harpsichord with a 16-foot
reinforcing all sorts of things because the 8-foot basses were not adequate;
much less simple concepts for registration that I would use nowadays. I will
take this concept and try to apply it to the French Overture at this instrument and
we’ll see where we get. I’m going to fi rst experiment with the colors, and deci-
sions about the colors, of various parts of the French Overture.
Kirkpatrick.indd 127Kirkpatrick.indd 127 2/8/2017 9:58:13 AM 2 / 8 / 2017 9 : 58 : 13 AM
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
#1