136 ❧ chapter thirteen
would have made less allowance for the use of pedals for backing off certain
registers away from the strings to produce half-sounds—because it has also
become clear that a properly voiced harpsichord, and a really good instru-
ment, functions on a number of different levels at once. It can be both loud
and soft. It can be both delicate and vigorous.
So that if one asks, where do we stand now, I think we stand on the thresh-
old of the following hypothesis—that the Scarlatti harpsichord with its dou-
ble choirs and one manual, if constructed in such a way as I said in the book,
already to have sonorous basses and singing trebles, to have the possibility of
whispering and of roaring, to have the possibility of pronouncing vowels but
also consonants—if such an instrument comes into existence, it will appear to
be even closer to the tradition of the double-strung early piano. It will be fur-
ther and further away from the organ-dominated notion of the harpsichord,
represented in that German instrument I played here last week; it will be much
closer to a kind of keyboard guitar. One can see in the progression from cer-
tain of the earliest Scarlatti sonatas to the latest that Scarlatti himself began as
more of an organist then he ended.
But the manner in which Scarlatti drops voices, thickens and thins textures,
makes only impressionistic suggestions of full polyphony, is much more related
to the tradition of lute and guitar than it is to anything as straightforward and
literal as the organ. This becomes abundantly clear, I might say parenthetically,
in efforts ever since the eighteenth century at transcribing Scarlatti for orches-
tra. The necessity of fi lling up Scarlatti’s thin cadences, the necessity of making
conventional resolutions of inner parts in ways that Scarlatti never does, falsi-
fi es the entire texture. One need only look at Avison’s^8 transcriptions of the
1740s and come down through a whole series of them to our own day to see
this. It’s paradoxical because one is tempted all the time to imagine the orches-
tration of Scarlatti—and I think it can be done, but it would have to be done
with modern pointillistic techniques of orchestration. In many ways, I think
Webern might have done a superb job, as he did with Bach.
One other thought in this progression toward austerity occurs to me. The
early piano, the two-strung piano, usually didn’t have any—or at least the
Italians didn’t have any—provision for a una corda.^9 It used two strings all
the time. There is a certain amount of evidence that a large number of Italian
- Charles Avison, Twelve Concertos in Seven Parts for Four Violins, One Alto Viola, a
Violoncello, and a Thorough Bass: Done from Two Books of Lessons for the Harpsichord
Composed by Domenico Scarlatti (1744; reprint, Huntingdon, UK: King’s Music,
ca. 1980).
- Left or “soft pedal” on the piano or a direction to play with this pedal
depressed. In pianos of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
pedal caused the hammers to strike only one string throughout the range of
the instrument.
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