Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

on harpsichords and their transport ❧ 85
recede within the past ten or fi fteen. Let me explain. The harpsichord may
best be considered as standing midway between the guitar and the organ.
On the one hand, it may have the simplicity of the plucked stringed instru-
ment, whether with single or double strings, and participate in the traditions
of construction dominated by lute and violin making. On the other hand, as it
doubles keyboards, multiplies registers, and introduces stop-knobs and pedals,
it begins to participate in the traditions of organ building. The earlier associa-
tions with guitar or lute dominated harpsichord building until well beyond the
beginning of the eighteenth century, although many of the organ-like intro-
ductions of additional keyboards and registers had long since taken place. But
by the middle of the eighteenth century, the use of these organ-like features
associated itself with an aesthetic that demanded a more infl ectible instru-
ment, so that contemporaneously with organ swell boxes, varied and colorful
orchestration, and a desire of composers for more frequent and easier nuance,
the harpsichord was encouraged to elaborate its organ-like gadgetry, and the
old purity of unison stringing was delivered over to the early piano. From
William Byrd to Scarlatti, nearly all the best literature for the harpsichord was
composed for a relatively simple instrument over which gadgetry had not yet
gained ascendancy, and their texts on a good harpsichord are so composed as
not to require nor even to tolerate elaborate registrations.
But it was the gadgetry of the late harpsichord that enabled the earli-
est proponents of its revival to make propaganda for it as against the piano;
two keyboards instead of one, six to eight pedals instead of two or three! Not
to mention all the additional hand-stops which, in later instruments, were
available to regulate varying degrees of inaudibility. Even the Dolmetsch-
Chickerings had their six pedals. It is strange that the fi rst step in what one
may now consider one of the major aberrations in the twentieth-century harp-
sichord world was initiated by Dolmetsch himself when he added the 16-foot
register to two of his Chickering instruments. (I still own one of them.) Not
long thereafter, Pleyel added the 16-foot with an inscription on the jack-rail
to the effect that this register had been introduced at the request of Wanda
Landowska. There is much to be said for the musical effect of doubling basses
an octave lower, but what orchestrator would ever so double the violas and
fi rst and second violins if not with the express intention of producing impen-
etrable mud? At least on the organ and on the few surviving gadget-equipped
old German harpsichords, the obscurity produced by the 16-foot is mitigated
by the addition of registers containing higher partials. At any rate, evidence is
now fairly complete that the best harpsichord composers were not concerned
with the 16-foot at all. To piano-dominated ears, however, the 16-foot added an
agreeable thickness of texture, and it was universally overlooked that the intro-
duction of this register inevitably brought about degeneration in the quality of
the 8-foot basses.
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