Foreword
The fi rst Boston Early Music Festival, in 1981, opened with a concert by Ralph
Kirkpatrick, which was destined to be his last public performance in Boston.
Four years later, in Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music, Joel Cohen
and Herb Snitzer, in reference to this event, paid a thoughtful tribute—which
still rings true today—to this great musician:
Those who make early music today know of someone like Arnold Dolmetsch
from books and articles, and from the musical ways of his students and dis-
ciples. Much closer to us are those masters, now departed, whom we listened
to and/or studied with in our formative years—those formidable personali-
ties who gave concerts, made disk recordings, and taught classes during the
middle third of the twentieth century.
Kirkpatrick, who taught at Yale for many years, was such a formative fi g-
ure. Because he was a genuine scholar—his work on the keyboard music of
Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) remains authoritative—but mostly because
he was a real musician who thought intensively about real musical problems,
he became one of the most widely admired and respected performers of his
generation.^1
One could say more, indeed much more, about the ways in which
Kirkpatrick, both as musician and personality, was a one-of-a-kind, larger-than-
life fi gure in his time. But Cohen and Snitzer’s purpose in writing their book
was primarily to speak of a later stage in the revival of early music, and their
remarks concerning Kirkpatrick in their chapter on the earlier twentieth cen-
tury pay him due homage within that context.
In the more than thirty years that have passed since those remarks were
written, those who are moved and captivated by the same repertoire to which
Ralph Kirkpatrick devoted his life are now likely to have had their musical
tastes for this repertoire formed by performers who rose to prominence within
the movement toward performance on early instruments, a movement that
fi rst caught international attention in the 1960s and 1970s and is now fi rmly
- Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 23.
Kirkpatrick.indd viiKirkpatrick.indd vii 2/8/2017 9:56:09 AM 2 / 8 / 2017 9 : 56 : 09 AM
