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-essay: The Cartesian Harpsichord -book review: Early Keyboard Instruments in European Museums -essay: Couchet/Blanchet/Taskin Review: Edward Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord.
THE CARTESIAN HARPSICHORD. This is part of an article I wrote for Continuo magazine. They decided they didn't want it ("too educated"), so I thought I'd slip it in here, and see what readers have to say. It's a somewhat divergent way of arguing in favor of the eighteenth-century French harpsichord for the seventeeth-century French harpsichord music, wandering through opera, literature, and general cultural criticism. Let me know what you think. Historians tend to date the birth of the Modern, by which they mean something like secular individualism and attendant angsts, in 1789. It's a convenient break, but by that point the Modern seems really to have achieved adolescence (and in or about December 1910 arrived at middle age); other historians look farther back for the birth, and find it with Descartes. The seventeenth century was a transition period with various parallels to the twentieth, including a long series of wars culminating in an unsettled combination of conservatism and new, deeper understandings. Separating the strands making that combination would be silly and reductive, but I'll try to unravel one or two in hopes of throwing a generalized light. It seems to me that midway through the seventeenth century in France several tendencies came together and began forming almost a depth psychology. In the arts of the time may be found a challenge to established forms, a sense of reality more fluid and more personal (less stereotyped) than in the Renaissance, and - as a result, paradoxically, of the Cartesian rational but isolated and self-validating individual (itself a concept owing much to the Copernican decentralization of man) - as a result, that is, of science - a new irrationalism, even at times a demony. No one was comfortable with these things: after the political upheavals of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Fronde, Thirty-Years War, conservatism was too attractive. But the conservatism aided the turn away from the political realm and its convulsions - only to find, in the private realm, different and more unsettling conditions made of the intimate and the frightful. There is a favored conception of the seventeenth century as a "gutsy" age, swashbuckling, libertine; filled with heavy furniture, leather costumes, and big moustaches. The sword was mightier than the pen, and much more frequently employed. Harpsichords, therefore, should be suitably pungent and harsh: mulled ale and wenches. To me this seems a misreading: it has more to do with Dumas than with Racine and Louis Couperin. I would venture that Versailles was not La Rochelle, and that Porthos never whistled airs from Lully. It's an easy misprision: it's simply a crude version of what may be found, which is a passionateness and strength of emotion, at times violent, new in Western culture and at odds with the neo-classical virtues of restraint. The emphasis in portrayals of this emotionalism is sometimes on the extroversion and melodrama, but always, even at its wildest (say, in Charpentier's Médée), firmly rooted in a new sense of inwardness, psychology, the inner meanings in character which cause the outward gestures. I risk incoherence with this, but if I stick to the most obvious aspects of this new sensibility of interiority I might be able to make sense. The theater is a good place to look. Certainly there's a movement from the political concerns of early Corneille in 1636 (Le Cid) to the depths of character development in Racine in 1677 (Phèdre). But these subjects are beyond my exegetical skills (although Gordon Pocock's Corneille and Racine: Problems of Tragic Form has been a valuable guide. And my exploration seems to have started with George Steiner's discussions of the culpable violence in Western culture. He tends to date the trend from the French Revolution). I'll look at something easier instead - opera - Atys, music by Lully and book by Philippe Quinault (1676), and Médée, (1693), Charpentier and Thomas Corneille (Pierre Corneille's younger and less talented brother). Interestingly enough, both these operas have been championed by William Christie and Jean-Marie Villégier. Both the texts are similar. Both attend to the irrational, which in its very extremity is an easy and obvious way into this subject of interiority. They are not copied from Classical Greece: they update the characters and situations. They are both rather poor as literature, with a heavy reliance on irony which never achieves the level of tragic irony, a tendency towards hyperbole, and an inability to turn the clichès of the time into suggestions of depth (something Racine excelled at). Médée lacks unity of structure: it breaks evenly into two parts divided in the middle of Act III when Médée becomes certain of Jason's perfidy. The first half is divertissement and the second half is melodrama with special effects; none of it is tragedy. Atys also has a pivotal third act but the two halves are better united, mostly through some ironic foreshadowing in Atys' "indifférence", but suffers from characters less well established than in Médée, and melodramatic, even comic, plot devices (Lully's music is more responsive to the characters than is Quinault's theater). But most importantly, both these works take as themes a powerful love which is perversely destructive (the euphemism for which seems to be "transgressive" these days) and the resulting loss of innocence into hatred. We could nod knowingly over the interest in perverse love and loss of innocence at the court of Versailles, but I think the problem goes further. There are special-effect Monstres in Médée and there is an off-stage sea serpent at the end of Phèdre: these are the creatures of the psyche. The theater was steadily supplied with melodramas and the age was intensely pious: there is almost an indulgence in the emotions here. Monsters and melodramas were new in those days - found in isolated figures like Bosch earlier, increasingly frequent thereafter, culminating in Gothicism a century later. In 1674, at the end of Racine's Iphigénie, Ulysse is reticent about the irrational ("An astonished soldier said..."); in 1676, in Atys, there is a rather unconvincing goddess, a dream sequence used as an excuse for the corps de ballet, and at the end a mad scene out of Otway. In 1677, at the end of Phèdre, a "monstre furieux" holds vivid sway over Theramenes' speech of seventy lines. By 1693, in Médée, demons overwhelm the stage and bring the final scene to ruin with a wildly convincing witch. There's a similar progression in the depth of portrayal of women, from the rhetorical Cléopâtre in Corneille's Rodogune (1644/45), through the loneliness, outrage, repentance ("How easy it is to love a miscreant after having punished him") of Cybele lost in the courtly entertainment of Atys, the deep sadness ("Mon mal vient de plus loin") and fury of Phèdre, and finally the sinister psychology of Médée's indecisiveness and then her unleashing of the destructiveness of the unconscious. (One might note a curious parallel with this interest in the loneliness and destructiveness of women in Hemingway, Rider Haggard, and the "double-crossing dames" of the hard-bitten school. Likewise the frequent recourse to melodrama). The only saving grace of Thomas Corneille's demons is that they are mediated by Charpentier's music. But the problem of making them palatable to a courtly audience, which strongly concerned Racine (a key to his plays is the equivocation between denial and acceptance, hiding and showing) and earlier caused Corneille's retirement from the stage, is no longer urgent. They've become accepted. They were called up by a new sensibility, a new interest in sensibility, which was the reverse side of the new Cartesianism. We are turning here from the sense of unity in the medieval belief of "God made me, therefore I am" through the solipsism of the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am", towards the Romantic sensibility of "I feel, therefore I am". There is a new idea here of aesthetic and ontological validation by personal emotion. It looks forward to the Romantic, not back to the Renaissance. The crucial shift is the Cartesian individualism and secularism. It has roots that go back much earlier, but a deeper plunge to find the monstres occurred with the new solipsism: the sense of depth psychology in Racine, the justification by emotion, the taste for the ebb and flow of passion, are wholly new. On one side of that shift is classical drama. Everybody since Hegel has been saying that in classical drama the hero is passive: he is a victim of fate and a plaything of the gods; the catharsis is to come of watching him be beaten down by adverse destiny. This is Atys. His sleep is indicative. With the Cartesian shift the hero becomes an individual capable of action, and the purpose of a tragedy is no longer cleansing by pity and terror but instead the indulgence of intense passion. This is Médée. It is the start of the Modern sensibility, and a door was opened to an emphasis on the isolated individual and his fears, longings, "transgressions", and passions: the creatures of his psyche. Quinault, certainly not avant-gard in 1676, in fact rather late, tentatively approached this in Atys, hedged in by classical strictures on aesthetics and courtly strictures on taste. Thomas Corneille, writing in 1793 with the example of Racine's Phèdre solidly behind him, could do better at expressing the new emphasis. It was Pierre Corneille and Racine, working in the more immediate form of tragic drama and unable to hide their heroes and heroines behind musical entertainments, who created the avant-gard and addressed the largest challenges. Critical taste was shifting away from classicism but courtly taste was wavering between morality, decorum, galanterie, and titillation. The critics made the shift a little easier: Corneille moved away from formal declamation and towards a naturalism of speech with the help of the Neo-Classical concept of vraisemblance. This is an ambiguous concept, gradually drawing away from the unrealistic declamatory set-piece towards a more naturalistic dialogue. This process of moving away from declamation is important: in a sense it is what allows the new emotionalism. The astonishing thing about Corneille and Racine, and even about the speech in Médée where she is caught between love of her children and hatred of their father, is how well these lines can be spoken. The set-pieces in Racine, a slightly artificial form and already out of fashion in his time, have no artificiality, are direct expressions of emotion, and may be spoken and not declaimed by any actor, "if only," writes the translator R.C. Knight, "he has a good voice." And Knight adds, "The emotion is all there, in the verse, waiting to receive simple and respectful utterance." This was something new. By it the intense passions and the questionable monstres could be presented to an audience which both wanted them and wanted to hide from them. They hid behind grace and beauty. The speeches in Racine are beautiful, and violent. It's a paradox worth noting, and germane to my point, that alongside this beauty and conversability of Racine's lines, this nod to courtly taste, this last-ditch attempt to retain grace in the arts - elsewhere frequently reduced to galanterie and pietism, to mere gracefulness - is to be found the beginning of the loss of that grace. The destruction of innocence in Médée is prophetic. The fascination with monstres is similar to the modern equation between strength of passion and violence. The sinister beauty of Médée's "prayer", "Dieu du Cocyte", makes one's hair stand on end like nothing in opera until The Turn of the Screw: Charpentier, like Britten, was familiar with both tenderness and fury. This was not a "gutsy" age filled with mousquetaires, it was a frightened and fascinated age filled with new individuals enchanted in every sense by the subtle forces they were beginning to discern. "In the deep caves, what monsters shall I find?" Creon asks in his mad scene in Médée, and it is a line which could stand for that age and for ours. Very well, but what has this to do with harpsichords? Every student of the seventeenth century, even every amateur (like myself), knows that all this is to be found in Racine et cie. But I'd like to observe that without having to approach the euphemistic, something similar is to be found in Louis Couperin and the style brisé. It's been pointed out before: Davitt Moroney writes in the notes to his Couperin recording that he continues to be astonished by "the virtuosity of the emotional content." And he goes on to quote Pascal, witness of these changes: "cette superbe puissance ennemie de la raison... l'imagination dispose de tout, elle fait la beauté." And indeed, imagination is another term for this new emotionalism. One could say that tonality was invented to express this: modulation serves this purpose in the style brisé as in Schubert. Suspensions are the counterpart of the new idea in the theater of suspense (which brought the tragedians so perilously close to melodrama), an issue much discussed in Pierre Corneille's prose. The naturalism ("la naïve peinture" - Corneille) which began to break down the formality of declamation in the theater is present in the harpsichord music - the character pieces - starting to be published in the 1660s and '70s. Harpsichord music was surely not the arena for the irrational, but certainly a good place for the new intimacy, warmth, and simplicity, much as (legend has it) Racine coached his players; a place for the free expression of various emotions, as in the unmeasured prelude; or for unpredictable emotional shifting held firmly in control, as in a chaconne; or just the sheer unsettled quality of music in which everything happens off the beat and everything is dotted, in which chords are arpeggiated or held into suspension, in which a musical gesture may be written over shiftin harmonic ground. My drift is probably becoming obvious. An Italian harpsichord is declamatory and speaks in a dry, clear, and formal way: it expresses a Renaissance sensibility. The seventeenth-century French harpsichords were Italianate. But the music being written for them speaks warmly, sensually, and with a new depth of emotion: speaks the way the eighteenth-century French instrument came into being for. Technically, music made up of chordal progressions and suspensions would want an instrument with greater sustain than the drier Italianate; emotionally, the richness and fullness of the sound of a larger instrument (if suitably built and voiced) would correspond to a greater warmth. The writing for the bass is a good indication. The French almost always use the bass for puncuation, rarely trying to blend it seamlessly into a general counterpoint. (Bach, in turn, rarely reaches for the bass - although there might be something metaphysical in his yearning descant). An instrument that provides a strong bass will have a larger bass soundboard area and a heavier bass bridge than the Italianate. The seventeenth-century French music is lacking when played on the dryer, thinner, less luxuriant sound of the south European instrument. Tellingly, Chambonnières owned a Flemish harpsichord. The seventeenth-century French harpsichord will not serve the aesthetics of the time as well as a larger instrument. This would be one reason why French harpsichord making fell into disarray after the 1660s. Earlier in the century the century the French instruments are fairly uniform. But as Chambonnières and Couperin started publishing the makers turned to the Flemish instruments, variously and, it seems, gropingly using aspects of a design that makes a less declamatory, more personal sound. The 1667 Anon in the Boston Museum has Flemish-style ribbing in an otherwise Italianate design; the 1683 Dufour in the Shrine to Music Museum has an iron scaling along with transverse ribbing. By the 90s makers ceased these experiments altogether, threw out the indigenous design which simply couldn't give what was being asked, and turned full attention to the Flemish. (Perhaps it was out of envy and frustration that they used the term ravalement, "demolition"). Eventually makers produced instruments that spoke the way the composers had been speaking from the start. If we ask about a composer's intentions we are asking aesthetic questions as much as historical ones. Composers are writing beyond the available instruments all the time. Both Rameau's invention of batteries and Scarlatti's technique prophesied the demise of the harpsichord. Piano makers had to scramble to catch up to the "Hammerklavier", and then scramble some more when Liszt started wrecking pianos on stage. Makers who are also composers, like Quantz, are full of innovations. In our own time, Philip Glass' need for arpeggios faster and louder than the human hand is capable of is aiding the demise of the piano. Only the human voice seems to remain. A few suggestions about voicing may be squeezed out of this new aesthetic of emotion. An intimate, warm sound would require a longer, gentler quill. Right enough, the close pairs of strings on an eighteenth-century French instrument are as close as possible (indicating, along with quill length, angled dampers), leaving the maximum amount of room. But a quill as long as allowed (and one needn't use all the available room for the back 8') is going to be weak and willowly - unless one remembers the stiffness of crow. These two things fall in place together, and any instrument, even a fairly mediocre one, given a long, stiff quill (by which I don't mean an unvoiced one) will begin to sound warm, even lush, and certainly will begin to address the ear and the hands in a satisfying way. There is no need, for this music, to design an instrument intended to be voiced harshly and aggressively, nor is there any reason to produce an instrument which merely rustles and has no particular "feel" to the touch. Not noise, but resonance is wanted: efficiency between touch and sound. An instrument designed and built to sound rich, and quilled to sound rich, will serve the emotions of the music, the demands of an audience, and the comfort of the player. It's this quality of speaking - something between declamation and ordinary conversation, this quality of only requiring a good voice - which I think a French harpsichord should have. Thus the Cartesian harpsichord. The more I look at this subject the longer it gets. There are several more essays hiding in here - a particularly interesting one is on the problem of reconciling passion and decorum ("Only connect..."). Racine's attempt to find a balance finally led, in Phèdre, to kicking over the traces: Hippolyte is an example of the destructiveness and dishonesty of strong emotion avoided. The somewhat comic ironies in Act I of Atys are based on the same idea. And the chaconne, particularly in the great laments of Monteverdi and Purcell, or in Charpentier's Stances du Cid, is an example of that balance strained to precariousness. Another essay could be on the shift in the role of the artist: from the artist as craftsman to the artist as trafficker in the implements of the unknown psyche, leading to Kant's definition of a genius as someone who hasn't a clue what he's doing, to the Romantic concept of "inspiration", and to the Modernist role of the artist pour épater. Or there could be one on what all this owes to Monteverdi, who was Italian and never wrote harpsichord music - a back-handed proof of my argument. (Frescobaldi was known for his craftsmanship: it took Froberger to render Frescobaldi's music to the new sensibility). Or one could write a moral essay asking serious questions about an epoch gateposted by two operas, L'Incoronazione di Poppea (1642) and Médée (1693), depicting the triumph of evil and destructiveness. But I originally wanted to be brief and already more than one lance lies splintered. I've been carrying
the following short essay as part of my handout sheets at exhibitions
(the "opinions" page), and have had a suggestion that I should
put it on my web site. It's a précis of a longer essay which so
far exists only as a jumble of notes. My intention was to write a follow-up
on the Cartesian Harpsichord essay, moving into the 18th century and Immanuel
Kant; the working title is "Dampers and the Moral Law." There's
no Kant in the précis, but the sharp-witted will make a connection
between the mentions of dampers and of la sensibilité. I don't like dry harpsichords.
A dry instrument, a sound that is primarily attack, is merely exciting.
It lacks fullness, sophistication of response. Many people prefer this,
and for the space of two or three paragraphs I shall pick a quarrel with
them. For some pre-eighteenth century instruments I will cede the point
but retain my preferences. Even the Flemish instruments should not be
as dry as we tend to make them, and the Italian instruments, after all,
come of a vocal tradition. For the eighteenth-century instruments, and
most obviously the French, I will argue that we have had our ears stopped
up by the development of the Blanchet-derived designs during the 1960s.
We were taught that the Blanchet sound is the true French sound: nasal
and dry, Flemish instruments writ large, and all French instruments have
to sound that way. The justification for this, I imagine, was that French
organs had a preponderance of reed stops and that the Blanchet family
was respected in its time. Also, perhaps, that Rousseau complained that
French music sounded nasal and Italian did not.
. . Review: Edward Kottick and George Lucktenberg, Early Keyboard Instruments in European Museums. (Indiana University Press, 276 pages, with glossary and index of makers. $35.) A version of this review was originally printed in The Boston Early Music Newsletter. I never saw a copy of that, and have no idea how it reads. But the early music world is a world of the urtext - so here's one -- For seventeen years Edward Kottick and George Lucktenberg conducted tours to the major and minor collections of antique keyboard instruments in Europe. A wide variety of interested amateurs, professionals, and scholars went with them, and as the tours gained in popularity the itineraries expanded. The result was that few people knew more about what was where, what was interesting about it, and how to go about seeing it, than Messrs Kottick and Lucktenberg. All that information has now been distilled into an engaging and thorough book which any harpsichord or early piano enthusiast, whether or not he's planning a trip to Europe, would find fascinating. Early Keyboard Instruments in European Museums (hereafter known as "the book"; the object itself is less unwieldy than its title, and may easily be packed into a suitcase) broadly covers all aspects of early keyboards except organs: harpsichords and their relations, clavichords, pianos up through the nineteenth century, and the effluvia of a musical age (geigenwerken, claviorgana, etc.), to say nothing of various mystery instruments. Even without including private collections it necessarily suffers from brevity, while trying its level best to be more than merely an invitation to visit, and to give as much as it possibly can. The book is full of nuggets of knowledge. There are various oddments noted by the guides - a Gräbner played by Mozart in Prague, several harpsichords associated with Handel (which may be an English industry, like inns associated with Queen Elizabeth), a piano associated with Dvoràk, the information that Clementi tended to choose a harpsichord for concert performances rather than a piano. Interesting annecdotes about fraud ancient and modern (Meitke, Taskin, Franciolini) are related. The oldest extant harpsichords are described (three clavicytheria). A few construction details are discussed, and the glossary tells you everything you need to know about jargon and arcana, including giraffes and nags-heads; also including down-striking actions, the tangentenflugel, and the euphonicon (these are all funky pianos). The introduction clearly states the book's purpose. The authors write "...the reader should consider this book a snapshot of the holdings of institutions, rather than a scholarly catalogue or comprehensive overview." And they state their intention is "to guide and inform, rather than present technical details best found in catalogues and scholarly studies." In fact the book goes beyond its stated intentions, and this is either a bonus or a frustration. Many technical details are presented. But they're like last summer's vacation snapshots that somehow didn't get more of Uncle Harry than a tanned arm or an inscrutable sunglassed gaze. They don't form a sufficient picture. You need another book, and that book is the new Boalch; if you buy Boalch, you don't get information about decoration, pianos, and the all-important addresses and opening hours. You need both, and I urge you to get both. But in directing themselves to the interested amateur more than to the professional - in providing snapshots - Kottick and Lucktenberg slant their book towards the most easily attracting aspect of early instruments: the visual. I could be brought to agree that a more technical book would be intimidating to those who want to learn more about the original instruments themselves. But inevitably this slant perpetrates one of the banes of the instrument-making world, the fact that frequently people seem most impressed by the visual aspect of a musical instrument, that they will judge an instrument by how it looks, that they will lose sight of the fact that a fine furniture maker is not necessarily a fine musical instrument maker. The nature of this book doesn't exclude more musical information than general remarks about disposition and range, or phrases like "fine-sounding" or "burst of sound". Some comments might have been made on things like the differences in sound between the 1769 Taskin and the Goermans/Taskin right beside it in the Russell Collection, or on the effect of the south-German expanding gap, or on quite what a tangent-piano really sounds like. The museum visitor who isn't a professional maker or scholar will rarely get a chance to hear one of the old instruments (and should wait to be invited to play), and some specifics could ease that silence a little. But we are well provided with snapshots: the book has over a hundred photographs. Many are clear and well-lighted, from museum catalogues or postcards. Some are impressive, like the two-page spread of two pianos in Stuttgart. Some are a little amateurish, done by the authors, with poor depth of focus or in bad lighting. Kottick and Lucktenberg are better writers than photographers - but the rest of us with our fuzzy shots of bentsides that seemed interesting at the time can feel a little better. One photograph is miscaptioned: on page 99 a "1693 virginal by Bartolomeo Cristofori" is actually a 1700 spinet with an 8' and a 4'. The description in the text of the 1693 virginal, a brilliant, unique, and confusing design, cries out for a photo. It's in places like this that the book whets one's appetite, makes one want to pop over to Europe and have a look. The pages on Cristofori, 97-100, bring the reader to a strong realization of that maker's inventiveness and brilliance: he produced a wide variety of unique and successful designs. One awkward photo, of a fascinating south German harpsichord crammed into what looks like a back room of a warehouse in Budapest, says much about how these instruments are sometimes stored. The reports I've gathered indicate that central-European collections are given little if any curatorial attention, but the infamous jumble of instruments, keyboards, and bits and pieces in storerooms at the Brussels Conservatoire suggests that it's a wider problem. What can overworked and underfunded (in east Europe, practically unfunded) curators do with a worm-eaten box by an otherwise unknown maker when they have far too little room? I once found a lovely little Flemish keyboard sitting by itself on the floor in a storeroom in the Brussels Conservatoire, long orphaned and with nobody to care for it. I felt like taking it home with me. On the other hand, some facilities are state-of-the-art, like the Nuremberg restoration shop or (in spite of some criticisms I've heard) the new Paris Musèe de la Musique, and the situation in Brussels may well be better with their new Musèe Instrumental. This book could play a role in bringing official attention to the less fortunate, through increased tourist traffic. Kottick and Luctenberg's job here is as tour guides, and they do not go into depth of detail. Nonetheless they've produced a book easy for even the stay-at-home to become absorbed in. For those travelling farther than their armchairs this book is a must. It should be mentioned, for those intending to visit collections, that curators and their assistants can be helplessly and chronically overworked - they have so much to take care of - and while they generally happily welcome visitors there is a limited amount of attention that can be expected of them. With Early Keyboard Instrument in hand the visitor will be able to relieve some of that burden, while learning more than the placards will tell, and gathering all the uggets of knowledge from enjoyable guides. -Autumn 1997. essay:
The Cartesian Harpsichord
. . COUCHET/BLANCHET/TASKIN - AS INTERPRETED BY ROBERT HICKS This is another part of the same article for Continuo magazine, after some editting. It recounts the process of developing an instrument design from the study of an antique instrument. "Here's an interesting instrument," I said to myself. I was looking through William Dowd's essay on the extent Blanchet and Taskin harpsichords in the first volume of Howard Schott's Hubbard Memorial series. This was several years ago, and that interest has slowly worked its way around to a completed instrument from my shop which a number of performers have said good things about. Dowd was describing the Couchet-Blanchet-Taskin (1680-1758-1781) in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and he wrote, "The nuts bow away from the gap." Aside from the sheer unusualness of this, my interest was caught by the fact that I'm rather fond of deep-plucking-point instruments. There are those who call plucking point the soul of a harpsichord design. This may be valid, if a soul can be precisely located. A close plucking point produces a nasal sound, a deep one produces a sweeter, plainer sound. It's the difference between a front 8' and a back 8'. People with guitars can perform plucking-point experiments to their hearts' content. Incorporated into a full design, plucking point will help determine an instrument's character. Factors influencing
plucking point include bridge position, and whether the string-band is
closer to the cheek or the spine, but nut position is a clear and simple
indication. The nut is straight, for instance, on the Smithsonian Stehlin,
and it curves Pinblock on a Stehlin copy: nuts are straight. I went off to Boston
and Darcy Kuronen rolled out the Couchet for me, and I spent an afternoon
with it. It has, in fact, a tone on the back 8' that approaches a virginal's
tone. But it has a somewhat disappointing bass, so my interest diminished
a bit, and I focused instead on examining the original jacks and taking
measurements of a generally useful kind. But months later I woke up one
morning convinced that the bass was simply too short. I climbed out of
bed, looked at the numbers, and found that when compared to the Taskin
or the Stehlin, the bottom-most string was two-and-a-half inches shorter.
In 1680 Joannes Couchet
built an in-between-sized single-manual harpsichord. Couchet's work has
been reconstructed in John Koster's catalogue of the Boston Museum's instruments:
the original of this instrument, perhaps one of Couchet's last, was built
to be pitched a semitone above reference. Thus a short scale (string length),
becoming extremely short towards the bass, and thus, it seems, a very
deeply curving bentside. This bentside is crucial: more on it anon. In 1758 the Blanchet shop performed a ravalement (one of the meanings of which is "demolition") on the 1680 without actually changing the case very much. The front was extended to include two keyboards; otherwise a five-octave French double was squeezed into the small Flemish case. The scaling would have been very short throughout, but Blanchet used an extra-wide (Flemish instead of French) register spacing, drifting the string-spacing towards the spine and hence getting a bit of advantage in string-length. It was effective: if one lines up the top mortises in a 1769 register and a 1758 register, by tenor c the Blanchet is at a string a full half-step lower and longer. Alas, he began to run out of space, and as he approached the spine he had to revert to a slightly narrower, French spacing. No matter - shorter quills are appropriate in the bass. In 1781 Pascal Taskin did some serious demolition. He gutted the framing, cut down the top of the spine, removed the nuts, widened the gap. His new framing was quite stout, the new spine was nearly twice as thick as Couchet's, and the gap was designed to carry a fourth register for a peau de buffle. While we're looking at this - with the considerable help of John Koster's technical drawing, which reconstructs the state of the case as Taskin left it - we can note Taskin's solution for a cocked cheek. He seems simply to have planed the cheek straight, and put a new molding in. By Taskin's time the various experiments with case framing that one finds in eighteenth-century French instruments seem to have run their courses. A large number of instruments prior to mid-century or so are very lightly framed, perhaps taking their designs from Flemish framing. There's a balance to be found between resonance and rigid structure. A great many makers today, faced with customers who are used to the solidity of pianos and coffee tables, err on the side of too much structure (as it were) and reduce the resonance to a dignified rustle. In the early eighteenth century the tendency was the other way, and very lightly-framed, resonant instruments were made. Over the years these instruments began to show some case deflection. Probably they began early on, and nobody minded too much: they would twist a little, and stop. But Taskin seems to have minded. He would rebuild and change a lightly-framed case, setting precedent for the modern coffee tables. But Taskin was a genius: he could make a stout instrument at no cost to the resonance. Can we? Sometimes, if we follow his directions. It was mentioned that Taskin removed the nuts on the 1680. The ones he put back on are the ones there today, "bowed away from the gap." Like Blanchet's wider than standard string spacing, this was an attempt to maximize string length in tight circumstances. That deep bend to the bentside had the effect of pushing the bridge position so far forward that it was inevitable that the nut position would be shifted forward too. Let's pause while we're looking at these irregularities. We have an accumulation of non-standard specs here: irregular register spacing (and therefore keyend spacing), irregular nut-pinning (and therefore tuning pin placement). Scaling is completely off. The nuts seem to have been positioned freehand. There have been various theories among builders that the antique instruments were built using measuring sticks and standard templates. The regularities of the 1769, for instance, allow room for such speculation, but the irregularities of this instrument, along with the fact that various styles of ravalement were commonly done on various styles of instruments, tend to make it dubious. If Blanchet had, say, a standard middle-c length upon which all was based he would've been set adrift here. If he measured bridge- or nut-pin positions from the spine he would've had to have compensated heavily as he went. He would have positioned each tuning pin empirically from each nut pin, since no standard template follows this set-up. The work done by Blanchet and by Taskin here seems completely ad lib. What could be hazarded is a theory that they knew what they were doing so well that they could wing it with success; they fudged as knowledgeably as they could and followed that fudge through consistently. Elsewhere they may have used templates; record of such exists; but I tend to suspect empiricism in most situations. Indeed one doesn't find in the antiques the super-meticulousness that is found in these post-William-Morris days when craftsmanship is an anti-industrial-revolution, anti-efficiency statement. In the antiques there's a sense of doing the job quickly and well, what one may call a reasonable perfection. If the cheek on the 1680/1781 is planed lower than the spine, or there are different moldings all around, what matter? Today our work is cleaner, but this is not the sine qua non of musical instrument making. Music is. Back to the 1781. Even with Taskin's reverse nuts - the best that could be done under the circumstances - the scaling is short. The bass is I simply had to redraw longer. But I found on examination of the drawing (and subsequently on reading John Koster's chapter) that the treble half of the scaling, with the exception of the top four or five string-pairs, is a 440 scaling: a half-step too short. This was my opening. I could shift the keyboards down a half-step (and with Taskin's reconstructed spine they were off-center by a half-inch: I need simply center them), and gain a good scaling in the treble without losing the important plucking points. Then I could design in an extra string-pair in the bass (while keeping the top strings for a transposed-position f"'), while extending the bass of the bridge to a decent string-length. And I could hope for the best with the tenor. The tenor fell out three-quarters of an inch short, more or less. Not too bad, and in fact the tenor is one of the strong points of the completed instrument. I gave the tenor and bass extra soundboard room when I started looking again at that bentside, and I left the tenor of the bridge heavier than usual. Whether all this adds up to a good tenor or is irrelevant in the face of good luck would be a fine conundrum. Good luck, of course, depends on knowing what one is doing - but "knowing what one is doing" can be of limited usefulness. I tend to believe that all statements about harpsichord design are liable to be as true as their opposites. We think we know what we're doing and we certainly talk as if we do, but many of the joys are in what we don't know. As I built this instrument in the grand ravalement tradition I ran up against further oddities. Because the tuning pins are so close to the nuts which curve towards them, I ended up angling them back at a rakish angle: the string should leave the tuning pin at a right angle to minimise work-fatigue at that point and to avoid pulling up the pin. I decided the upper-manual sharps were rather short, which looks cute but clutzy, so at the last minute I tablesawed an angled cut across the bottom of my nameboard, allowing a little extra room. I lengthened the tail and cheek somewhat, and positioned the bentside so that it follows a curve a little more French than Flemish, without losing the slightly quicker-speaking quality of a smaller soundboard area. I chose my materials to complement the essential musical design. The final product is an instrument which enhances the characteristic sweetness of the original with the Franco-Flemish qualities of strength, richness of bass, and smoothness. It has done well in recitals by Christophe Rousset, Bonnie Choi, Hedi Salanki, and Tamara Loring. It is now owned by Eastman student Leta Huang, and is maturing well. What started as idle musing some years ago has ended up a well-regarded instrument. We are diligent in our homework, we understand a design as well as we are able; we grapple with its weaknesses and hold inviolate its virtues. We then make something which we hope in two hundred years will sound as good or better. I'd like to add a few remarks about what I discovered installing a peau de buffle. One of the objections to a peau de buffle is that the extra register in the gap requires the other registers to be narrowed and the contrast in 8' plucking points diminished. To be sure, some makers squeeze four registers into a three-register gap. But one of the things Taskin always did when installing a peau de buffle was widen the gap. The 1680/1781 Couchet has about a three-and-a-half register gap: 75mm, and the 1769 is 67mm, making the 1680/1781 short by about 14mm of four 1769 registers. Fourteen millimeters, save in the high treble, is not so much loss of contrast that voicing can't take care of it. Another thing that Taskin did when installing a peau de buffle was repin the bridges so that the strings lost their bass toe-in and instead crossed the gap at right angles. Apparently this was done so as not to crowd the peau de buffle jacks in the bass, leaving either no plectrum length in the bass or too long a plectrum everywhere else. As Frank Hubbard pointed out, volume in a peau de buffle is a function almost entirely of plectrum length. Too long and the plectrum doesn't pluck, it simply brushes the string and acts as its own damper. The shorter the better: best is with the jacks right up to the 4' strings. I used the softest leather I could find, something very spongy. Anything harder loses the characteristic gentleness and loud-and-soft. It's an easy material to voice: after angle-cutting the plectrum to length one just simply mushes it down with a fingertip until it's no longer too loud. If it's too quiet, on the other hand, it has to be replaced. Since the soft leather is so vulnerable I find that installing it from the front is best, wedging it into the mortise using the tip of a small jeweler's screwdriver and avoiding the plucking end. They don't seem to pull out forward - Alan Austin, meticulous jack-maker, made my jacks with square straight-sided mortises, but the leather is fuzzy enough and I jam enough of it in that it stays put. Unexpectedly, despite the fuzziness I don't get hangers (which are jacks hanging by their plectra). The other objection to a peau de buffle is unevenness. This I can't gainsay. It changes with playing; it seems to change without being played. Sometimes a register adjustment can clean up much unevenness (as with ordinary quilling); other times a plectrum that has faded into oblivion has to be replaced. I suspect that, given routine crow-replacement, eighteenth-century harpsichordists thought nothing of a little leather-replacement too. It's a pretty thing with a lovely effect at times. No music may have been written expressly for it, but by the time it was invented there was plenty of harpsichord music around that it could be used for. It seems to have been popular - various other makers copied Taskin's invention. That it's a maintenance problem may well be for the best: if we are forced to care for our harpsichords, work with them on their terms, we will be rewarded with years of comfortable playability. Review: Edward Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord. Includes endnotes, bibliography, and index. Indiana University Press. $75. Professor Edward Kottick, one of the most published authors of non-scholarly books in the harpsichord field, has given us the compendium of his knowledge of the harpsichord’s history. Here is a book that seems promising. In recent years book-length studies have been in sharply focused detail, the products of careful research. Shorter papers have been generally of sophisticated importance. The level of research has been approaching a builder’s degree of close examination of the instruments. But from my own point of view – that of someone with a strong and abiding interest in harpsichord design – this has proven to be a most disappointing book. I can’t help but wonder what reader this book is intended for. Kottick’s method is to give a breezy run-through of extant instruments appropriate to each chapter heading, and give for each the dates, dispositions, and ranges, as Boalch does. As he does this he’ll pause to consider some exemplar, either representative or outstanding for its decoration. He’ll try to quickly notice, if there aren’t too many, each of a maker’s surviving works; sometimes he can do this for an entire nation or style; early on, he does it for entire periods. The most interesting chapter is the one on early Italians, and it’s also the second longest both in pages and in notes (the longest is the compilation chapter on eighteenth-century Germanic and Scandinavian instruments): this would seem to be because the bulk of recent research has been done here. Chapters on styles where there has not been heavy amounts of recent research, like eighteenth-century French, tend to be perfunctory, but there are out-of-the-way corners noticed that have not been noticed in other large books (save very briefly in Russell), like Ireland or Hungary or Sweden. Kottick makes it clear early on that “harpsichord” is meant here to mean flügel plucking instruments: he’ll occasionally describe virginals or spinets, and clavichords and organs are left out. Cristofori’s piano action is looked into, and he gives potted descriptions of the lautenwerk and the tangentenflügel. Most of this book is potted. The opening pages are deceptive. After a charming dedication to his wife, Kottick musters four pages of Contents, four small-print pages of a list of illustrations, a page and a half of acknowledgements, a five and a half page introduction, and then – he begins at the beginning, anno 1356. This looks like it’s going to be a thorough-going and detailed book. But it’s not. There’s something elusive about this book, having to do with its place and its purpose. Kottick crams six hundred years – taking us on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – into four hundred and seventy pages, and at an average of less than one page per year it’s a tight squeeze. Kottick works in categories rather than brass tacks, and as a result it’s ultimately the instruments themselves that elude us. On a first page-through, this is a coffee-table book. It’s a book for those, like Alice, who want books that have pictures: it’s loaded with them. As a coffee-table book it’s a masterfully produced object: good paper without being too heavy for the large number of pages; good color plates; the pages laid out with an expert eye and well balanced; numerous nicely chosen details like chapter initials reminiscent of eighteenth-century copperplate, or a spine decoration which is an abstraction of a stringband lay-out. The measurements are all in feet and inches. The photographs are a little spotty; when they’re good they’re very good, and many of them will be recognized from museum postcards and catalogues. The Collesse photo on page 276 wears its source on its sleeve. But some of them are obviously from snapshots; there are a couple (page 288 and 307) that include a nose that may well be George Lucktenberg’s; the photo on page 277 of a Silbermann spinet looks like a negative. There are boxes scattered throughout, separate from the main text, carrying blurbs of related material or anecdotes or conundrums, and there’s much entertaining material here. All this is attractive to the average coffee-tabler. But it also begins to wear thin. Many of the photographs show only exterior decoration, the least interesting aspect of a musical instrument. The captions can become irritating. The caption to the color plate of the Yale Taskin reads “The famous 1770 harpsichord by Pascal Taskin demonstrates the powerful appearance of the late French double. The external decoration is nineteenth century.” This doesn’t add up. A nineteenth-century exterior, which is what the photo shows, does not tell us about the appearance of the late French double. Many of the captions are more suited to an advertising brochure (“…beautiful...”, “…ornate…”, “…one of the finest examples to be found…”), although interestingly the ones in earlier chapters are more straightforward – they don’t start getting gushy until about a third of the way through. There are three ways of reading this book; in effect there’s a division of labor between its parts. One can page through looking at the pictures, taking in the captions, glancing at the boxed-in nuggets of knowledge. Much of the book’s production is geared to this. One can then read the text straight through, referring to the pictures when the text requires but ignoring the captions, and not bothering to follow up with the notes. This is a fairly breezy way through, and will give an amateur a pleasing surfeit of vague knowledge. Or one can hunker down with this book and read it right – which means continually flipping a wad of pages back to read the endnotes. It’s part of this book’s attractive amateur-oriented presentation to refuse footnotes, causing the serious reader trouble with multiple bookmarks; but this is the most valuable way to read this book, for it is in the notes that the detailed material is presented. But it’s not so much presented as indicated, and that this results in not very much more than a surfeit of vague knowledge is a failing. Kottick’s History ultimately fails as a serious work and collapses to the level of the amateur reader even while it builds a scholarly apparatus. The text itself, when we come to that, turns out to be a digest of other people’s papers and articles, and there’s a preponderance of references to John Koster. It’s almost as if Kottick drew from nearly one source, and that not a primary source (the instruments themselves). Much the same handling is done with Boalch, a source of lesser accuracy. We would accept this in a high school term paper; we would be dissatisfied with it in a college term paper; we would be disgruntled with it in a book. Kottick, then, has produced a popularizing reduction of other people’s research, some of it up to date, some of it not. One of Kottick’s purposes seems to be to proclaim the triumph of a new category, or non-category designed to by-pass categories but which is then used as a category, the “International Style”. Kottick argues in his introduction that much of the old research is outdated: we are to be given a précis of the new ideas. The shade of Frank Hubbard is occasionally raised to be chastised for negligence; John Barnes figures hardly at all, save for a limerick that is explained in an endnote. Their old categories have been eroded by discoveries of instruments that won’t be shoe-horned. But is the new system in fact better than the old division by nationality? Koster is quoted in defense of the International Style: “…a group of somewhat variable local traditions that drew upon a gene pool originating from a Gothic lineage.” This is useful for taxonomy and other academic pleasures, but it is not useful for a builder, hence not for a buyer. A list of characteristics is assembled, many of which are Italianate. But the argument is that to call them so suggests that the early German instruments evolved from Italy, which despite clear evidence seems false: the argument is that the Gothic is not Italian (not entirely true). But the list of characteristics ends up nearly all-inclusive. Page 157: sides assembled either on or around the bottom; bentside curves varied from deep to shallow; tails and bass-end of bridges either mitered or rounded. What else could each of these be? This is like astrology: throw enough traits together and you can say anything you need to. But we’re working with a somewhat more precise science here, and inevitably the International description has to be hedged and qualified. International – in the German style. International – done by a Frenchman. Why does Kottick categorize a particular maker’s use of a grab-bag of traits instead of just giving name, date, place of origin, and a technical description? David Jensen’s endpaper drawing of an International Style harpsichord shows four or five different styles of framing: a harpsichord by committee, an academic confabulation. This is academic in the worst sense of the term. Studies have to be organized somehow, but they do not have to be over-organized. It’s as if we lumped together a horse, a zebra, a camel, and an antelope, and produced a category called International Horse. Perhaps a mule should be involved, too. But this is a Common Reader – indicated by its coffee-tablisms – not to be judged for originality or depth, but for its quality of abridgment. How well does Kottick condense? A builder’s point of view would suggest he condenses too well: too many technical details are left out. For scantlings, for instance, he will talk about thin, intermediate, or thick. The text is on that level of information. The brass tacks are found in the endnotes – and even there the tacks are short and brass-plated; better ones are in the cited papers themselves, i.e., elsewhere. The bibliography, in fact, cannot be overpraised: a builder will find important leads there. From a coffee-tabler’s point of view, Kottick doesn’t compress enough. There’s a welter of details (many – from a builder’s point of view – of superficial characteristics, or of decoration, or of partial information) tedious to slog through, requiring too much professional knowledge (while being only tantalizing to a professional), and not adding up to a coffee-tabler’s simple picture (because – pace categories, and to the confoundment of condensation – there isn’t one). The text is too crammed with information for the coffee-table reader, and with only bits and pieces for the professional. Too often a crossover attempt ends up falling between two chairs. A better coffee-table book on this subject has been done in French: its photographs are more sumptuous. Kottick’s text is more valuable and has the advantage of being in the one language Americans understand, but it is a tourist’s jaunt with hired guides. We can pleasantly spend an idle hour with this book or frustratingly spend a seriously-inquiring hour. There are, in fact, some reasons why a builder should have this and read it. Since it covers so many instruments he could profitably wander through it looking for something intriguing to build, and then go off and do real research. He can entertain himself with the endnote accounts of disputes in academia. And he can keep himself current with the latest little bit of knowledge that customers will turn up with. What is this History trying to do? On the face of it, it’s a pretty book for the musically- inclined livingroom. Kottick wants to go beyond that, and provides an overview of academic studies. But the average reader is not going to care much about the taxonomic arcana of case moldings, while both the average builder and even the average paper-writer are going to find these kinds of things barely entry-level. And the average harpsichord buyer will find just enough here to make a fool out of himself. So Kottick tries to go beyond that, too, but the imperious demands of the coffeetable render this next step into notes, and endnotes at that, where there just isn’t the opportunity for important work. This is a book that refers to, which is a simplistic definition of reference. Kottick’s History is a good place to start: anyone who stops here will miss too much. In his French eighteenth-century chapter, for instance, Kottick gives us Blanchet and Taskin and then turns his back on Paris with a quick list of other makers followed by the remark that “…it would be beyond the scope of this book to attempt to enumerate and describe their instruments, which, all in all, were not very different from those coming from the Blanchet, Taskin, Hemsch, and Germain shops.” This is false, and it is false because Kottick is once again working too broadly. We’re left to assume that something like the 1769 is a fair representation of the eighteenth-century French double. But is it? Aye – if you dismiss that it broke with the Blanchet designs, and if you ignore the fact that Hemsch or Stehlin were each doing what Taskin did years before him, and if you forget about the very different but near-dated Dedeban, and if you don’t remark that none of the extant Blanchet or Taskin instruments bear close resemblance to one another. These are all radically different in soundboard lay-out and in construction details, and hence in sound, but in his pursuit of the broadly obvious, like decoration, or the nearly trivially academic, like how moldings are cut, this is the type of thing Kottick short-changes us on. There was an evolution to the eighteenth-century French double almost unparalleled in the history of the harpsichord – but this is indeed “beyond the scope of this book”. Similarly, his contention that all Italians basically sounded alike through their development can be defeated by the instruments themselves. Come, let us look at a soundboard. Kottick tells us whether or not it has flowers, how pretty its rose is, whether it’s cyprus or fir. If we’re lucky he’ll mention a little about the ribs. On occasion he’ll eavesdrop on the controversies around scaling. On selected examples he’ll give us an idea about the bridges. This is not negligible. If we try the scholarly papers we’ll often be told things that have to do with taxonomy, with academic filing systems, like incised or applied moldings or the position of the rose hole. Good to know. But what makes this thing sound the way it does? We need to be given an idea about soundboard topographies; we need to know bridge heights and hitchpinrail heights, downbearing and sidebearing; we need to be able to juxtapose this with precise information about the ribbing; we need percentages for plucking points; we need string sizes; we need string afterlengths – we need to know what’s going on. I suspect that the problem here is that what Kottick is trying to do need no longer be done. The Frank Hubbard days of the overview are gone. For Hubbard in 1965, every antique was terra incognita, every detail a discovery, and everything he found was important to everyone concerned. We know these things now. We have passed beyond the broad view and have entered the more detailed locales: books on clavichords, on Portuguese instruments; O’Brien’s work on the Ruckers tradition; Koster’s detailed accounts of the Boston Museum instruments; beyond those, even tighter focused investigations in papers. This is the realm of discovery now, and Kottick isn’t there, he’s merely telling us a little about it. But even better than these scholarly brass tacks are the antique instruments themselves, their designs, their construction, the problems that they solve, the kinds of sounds they produce, the actions that respond to one kind of music but not to another. The true studies of the instruments are done by those who understand the designs with a builder’s eye and a musician’s ear. There is importance there for the professional and for the amateur who wishes to educate himself. But this importance is missing in this History. At length there’s a section on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mostly anecdotal after the first few pages where it arrives at the limit of Boalch. It ends with a section on the history of kits. Also included is a compact disc of a variety of ancient and modern instruments, mostly ancient, with widely diverging recording techniques and so spotty in quality that it ill serves its examples. Kottick makes no reference to this disc in his book, and it seems like an afterthought. And then we come to the short glossary, the bibliography that cannot be praised too highly, and the endnotes that hopefully we’ve read. So, then, who is this book for? An answer is indicated in the price, the color plates, the bulk of the discussions on decoration, and the occasional references to original owners “of high station”. A builder could spend some time paging through looking for ideas for his next instrument, but not find the particulars. A scholar will have read all this already, and in greater depth. An instrument buyer could get in trouble. A high school or college student, coming new to the harpsichord, would be impressed by the seeming feast of information and not be in a position to know it’s mostly hors d’oeuvres. It has something for everyone, and not much for anyone. The single most valuable thing about this book is its indication to other sources: au fond, it is a seventy-five dollar annotated bibliography. * * * Sprinkled throughout Kottick’s book are some funny little gaffes and proofreader’s errors. In the bibliography, Birkett and Jurgens should be Birkett and Jurgenson. The photograph of the Desruisseau, page 172, is backwards. In an endnote remark about German virginals similar to the “Duke of Cleves” virginal, Kottick writes “…their left-hand bridges, and hence their plucking points, are fairly close to their jacks.” This says that their plucking points are fairly close to their jacks, and gosh, I hope so. I’m even a little worried about this “fairly.” In note 103 on page 488 Kottick gives us a line about “a kindred mystery of a kindred nature”, which honestly sounds like a line from a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. (He’s also capable of speaking of the “Couchet cachet”). Antonius Moors is claimed on page 31 to have flourished from 1514 to 1652, surely a record among makers. But on page 500, note 11, Kottick lists, among his sources on Cristofori, Sutherland 1998-99 and Sutherland 2215 - suggesting that David Sutherland is planning on flourishing even beyond the precedent set by Antonius Moors. And note 19 on the same page suggests that Denzil Wraight is shooting for 2229. I wish them the best of luck. And finally, if one really wants to be pedantic and useless, out-academe academia, one could point out that on page 36, twelve lines from the bottom, there’s a colon that really ought to be a semi-colon. It might, of course, be an International Comma. --March 2004. |
Robert
Hicks Harpsichords
314 Hall Road, Lincoln, Vermont. 05443
802
453 3996... robert@hicksharpsichords.com
towards the gap on the 1769 Taskin. The Stehlin design produces a sweet sound;
the Taskin design produces a sound with a cutting edge. (The fact that
the original 1769 Taskin has one of the sweetest sounds among harpsichords
is a great mystery; in any case, all the copies have a sharp-edged sound
as the design says they should. I should add that I've never heard any
two eighteenth-century harpsichords that sound alike, regardless of their
plucking points. Mysteries abound; the soul of even a harpsichord is ineffable.)
I include both the Stehlin and the Taskin designs as my standard offerings,
one for the music room, one for the concert stage. But I'm attracted to
the kindlier sound, and wanted to use the Couchet-Blanchet-Taskin. Little
did I anticipate the work ahead of me!
A simple matter to redesign! Interest revived; I returned to the Boston Museum;
Darcy Kuronen was again helpful. I looked closer.