in search of scarlatti’s harpsichord ❧ 137
harpsichords didn’t expect their stops to be drawn on and off. Is it possible
that the Scarlatti harpsichord was a permanently one-color instrument that
had the miraculous possibility of singing uncoupled 8-foot registers in the way
that almost no modern harpsichord does and of serving also as a tutti instru-
ment at the same time? This I throw up as a hypothesis followed by at least
three question marks, but it has been present in my mind for some time.
One can easily sum up perfectly specifi cally the practices as a player that I,
at least in my search for Scarlatti, have gradually eliminated or almost elimi-
nated. One of the fi rst things to go was the echo effects. Practically none of
them remain. The repeated phrases of Scarlatti, I discovered, are designed to
be heard as long phrases and not as short phrases. The structure of the piece
suffers terribly if echo dynamics are imposed. The kind of slowing articulations
represented in Longo’s edition and perpetuated, I may say, in many of my ear-
lier performances—here a thick legato, there a staccato, mainly aimed at short
fragments within phrases—have given way to a much longer conception of the
shaping of phrases, mainly to the shaping the phrases in terms of an infl ected
détaché, so that one can make breaks but without interrupting continuity in a
phrase, so that one can have both continuity and articulation at the same time.
Reinforcement of inherent crescendos through registration has been totally
dropped. I hung onto it as late as 1956, but it’s now totally gone. I feel that
there are other means to handle these passages. Changes of register between
sections within a single sonata have practically gone. I won’t guarantee that
they won’t recur, but they have not reappeared in pieces that I am currently
playing. And I am less and less inclined to make changes of registration
between pieces. One asks whether perhaps as a performer I am not digging
myself a deep and comfortable grave in this evolution. But what makes me
hope that this is not the case are the means that the player has at his disposi-
tion to counteract the inevitable dullness and monotony of the procedures I
outlined, were they not redeemed by the following devices of the player: the
use of infi nitely varied lengths of détaché; détachés that have the variety of
lengths that consonants of any spoken language have (the spacings before and
after notes that can be as rich and varied as any spacings); interruptions of all
sounds before and after consonants; the enormous possibilities of what one
can call “digital damper pedal”—overlapping with the fi ngers, doing what the
pianists do with the pedal, holding down notes with the fi ngers—because, in
most keyboard literature up to the end of the eighteenth century, most of what
needs to be held down, if it’s desired to be held down, lies under the hand.
One has very little need of a damper pedal.
Perhaps the most signifi cant and recent discovery is that of the avoidance
of simultaneous releases of notes; to lift all the notes of a chord at exactly the
same time is to subject all voices that are inherently different in their sound in
duration to the same treatment. It is an anti-orchestral effect, it’s an anti-choral
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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