introduction ❧ 7
that I found there. There was an illuminating essay on Scarlatti, written in
1983 in anticipation of the tercentenary of Scarlatti’s birth, that I had hoped to
include, but within the text of that essay RK indicated that he would not want
it published in permanent form in a book, and I have honored that request.
The material included in this book will surely be of interest to music scholars,
performers, students, and others interested in the career of Ralph Kirkpatrick.
I have excluded material in the memoirs, lectures, and essays that had already
been published. Kirkpatrick addressed some of the same topics in several of
his published works, most particularly in “Fifty Years of Harpsichord Playing,”^5
but not at the same depth, length, or specifi city as in the unpublished works.
There is occasional overlap in the unpublished material about aspects of his
career, but not enough to warrant excluding any of the material. A bibliog-
raphy of his published works is included at the end of the book so that com-
parisons can be made between the unpublished material and any publications
that deal with similar or related topics. The discography serves to remind us
of the wide dissemination of RK’s art as a performer; many of his recordings
are still available in various formats. Ralph Kirkpatrick was instrumental in
reviving interest in the harpsichord and the clavichord and the music written
for them by, among others, Scarlatti, Bach, Couperin, and Rameau. He prob-
ably could not have imagined, when he began his career in the 1930s, that he
would leave such an important legacy in terms of performances, recordings,
and written works. He still exerts a strong infl uence on young harpsichord-
ists such as Mahan Esfahani, who has spoken in interviews on the BBC and
elsewhere about his admiration for Ralph Kirkpatrick and of his importance
as a musician and scholar. To Esfahani, the fact that Kirkpatrick was an impor-
tant fi gure in the early years of the historical performance movement does not
mean that his infl uence on the musicians of today was somehow less important
than that of fi gures active in the latter years of the movement. As he stated in
an interview with the BBC, some musicians “operate on a higher level than
trends. . . . Kirkpatrick is that—he is universal.”^6
Note to Readers
The original texts consist of typewritten pages, some easier to decipher than
others because a number of them have handwritten annotations. The mem-
oirs, refl ections, and some of the essays were presumably dictated to a secretary.
- Ralph Kirkpatrick. “Fifty Years of Harpsichord Playing.” Early Music 11 no. 1
(January 1983): 31–41.
- BBC Radio 3, Music Matters, January 31, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/
programmes/b050sglz.
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