Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

on recording ❧ 65
for the Haydn Society with a chamber orchestra conducted by Alexander
Schneider. The fi rst two movements produced acceptable “takes” on fi rst being
played through, but in the triplet variations of the third movement, I missed
the last note. But, of the splices I’ve accumulated in subsequent recordings, I
can scarcely bear to think.
My recording of a Mozart album in 1952 for Peter Bartók took place
directly under a skylight in the Washington Irving High School in New York.
The weather was uncertain, and the recapitulation of the fi rst movement of
the Mozart B-fl at Sonata [K. 570] was announced by a burst of thunder that
perfectly simulated the drumroll that ushers in the recapitulation of many a
symphony. I urged the engineer to leave it on the record but he insisted on
splicing it out. Had this occurred in another time, or had someone knocked
over a music stand, I might have later been able to assert that it was the sound
of a distant bombardment. Finally, when water from the skylight began to pour
directly into my “Mozart piano,” the session had to be adjourned until an all-
clear could be declared.
In the same year, when recording the harpsichord portions of Bach’s
Clavier-Übung for the Haydn Society, I discovered that neither the intervals
between thunderstorms nor remoteness from city traffi c assures the absence
from a recording session of unwanted sounds. In the peaceful, smiling coun-
tryside, birds and insects were to take over and recording had to be arranged
for those small hours of the morning while most of them slept.
The microphone is an instrument for which I have no affection whatever.
Like an unblinking eye, like a stolid-faced interlocutor who never replies,
unsmiling, unmoved, it takes all and gives nothing. I have sometimes tried to
pretend that it does not exist and to conjure up an imaginary audience, but
such tactics seldom succeed in dispelling a consciousness of its implacable and
unforgiving presence. If one is obliged, however, to alternate recording and lis-
tening to playbacks, as is frequently the case, the presence of the microphone
can hardly be imagined away. Sometimes I feel that the best way to approach
a recording is squarely to admit the limitations of recording techniques and
to try to make some artistic use of their inevitable distortions of harpsichord
and clavichord sound. But the success of such an undertaking can at fi rst be
judged only in relation to the playbacks heard in the control room or in the
recording studio, where what the performer hears is all too likely to bear little
resemblance to what will ultimately be heard after the recording is transferred
to a disc, pressed, played on equipment which itself introduces additional dis-
tortions and limitations amidst surroundings which have nothing to do with
the acoustical circumstances under which he has produced and judged the
recorded performances in the fi rst place.
I still believe in the spontaneity and freshness of fi rst “takes,” but there
are elements which work very well in live performances and which lose their
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