Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

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which it was taught in the Landowska school; whether without this early disci-
pline, I could have developed some of the skills that have since served me so
well, especially now that more and more I have succeeded in turning them to
the service of music.
The experience of ensemble playing and the years of sonatas with Alexander
Schneider did more than anything else to crack my former armor-plated style
of harpsichord playing. I became vastly more conscious of melodic articula-
tions; I began to realize what constituted the give-and-take and the fl exibilities
of ensemble playing, and hence, of all polyphonic music. I practiced Bach cello
suites in order to sensitize my left hand, and the infl uence of Alexanian had
me thinking more consciously than ever about harmonic infl ections, about the
negotiation of melodic intervals, and of changing note value. But I had not
yet translated them into harpsichord terms, nor did I yet fully understand the
role of silence as quite as important to music as that of sound (so much was I
preoccupied with covering up the unwanted gaps). Above all, I had not real-
ized the rhythmic limitations of legato as a non-infl ecting instrument. I failed
to recognize that without inner modifi cation, a legato has no possibility of gen-
erating activity; it can only continue activity previously set to action by détaché.
A legato can never leap, it can only slither and slide. My playing was known for
its fi ne legato, but in my innate vocal feeling and under the infl uence of string
playing, I was continually taking approaches that were unidiomatic to the harp-
sichord, and as I later discovered, unnecessary.
All during the years with Schneider I kept my feet on the 8-foot pedal (harp-
sichords in those days nearly all had pedals and leather plectra) so that in slow
movements I could taper harmonic resolutions at cadenzas, or in the case of
the Mozart sonatas, I kept my foot on both 8- and 4-foot pedals at once, so as to
be able to control the balance of sound, especially in order to avoid the shrill-
ness of the 4-foot in the higher registers. Now I have ceased to play Mozart
on the harpsichord and it no longer enters my head to try to taper harmonic
resolutions. I prepare the phrase as a whole so that the resolution will naturally
fall into the proper proportion. This involves a subtle manipulation of détaché
that most listeners and imitative pupils think is legato.
The legato version of my struggles toward rendering the harpsichord a
musical instrument persisted well into the late 50s. It was encouraged by the
instruments I was then using, since with them any excessive gradation toward
détaché had a tendency to manifest itself more in parasite sounds than in musi-
cal results. My liberation out of this style of playing had two causes. One was
my concentration on solo playing, on applying to it much that I had learned
in ensemble playing but with an increasing distance from the actual infl u-
ences of, or the necessity of having to cope with, string playing. The other
was the emergence of the Boston school of harpsichord making. Not only
was I enabled little by little to throw overboard the whole accumulation of
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