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December 3, 2015
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Autobiography of a clavichord: As told to Larry Palmer

I am known as “Number Nine”—a moniker bestowed on me because of my position in the handwritten logbook of instruments built by dedicated craftsmen of the Chickering Piano Company. This select group comprising the Early Music Department of the Massachusetts firm was led by Arnold Dolmetsch, a great visionary who supervised the building of all 34 of us clavichord siblings during that first decade of the 20th century. As clavichords go, I am big-boned: a large girl of five full octaves with a polished, unblemished mahogany body set on four sturdy legs. From 1906 until the 1911 financial depression made it necessary for Chickering to discontinue the building of such fascinating examples of past keyboards and bowed instruments, Dolmetsch and his skilled workers produced approximately 100 instruments—the first of their types to be constructed in the United States in modern times. 

Most of my fellow musical instruments would refer to their purchasers as “owners,” but in my more than 100 years of existence I have learned that these caretakers might be described more accurately as “keepers” since our longevity has proven to be more enduring than theirs! The first of my four keepers purchased me for $200 on November 1, 1906, and I was delivered to 14 Harris Street in Cambridge, where I began my active musical life with Miss Mary Phillips Webster. My mistress loved me dearly and took painstaking care of my needs: dusting, polishing, tuning, and best of all, playing gently on my delicate keys. In 1908 our family was increased by the addition of a large mahogany (with boxwood inserts) Dolmetsch-Chickering double-manual harpsichord—Number 52 in the logbook, and Miss Mary, an excellent pianist who had made her professional concert debut in 1884, continued her explorations of pre-Beethoven music with both of us, gradually giving pride of place to my louder younger brother, whose birthday, like J. S. Bach’s, occurred on March 21. Number 52 was particularly happy with his special connection to “ancient” music’s foremost representative.

Miss Webster (cited by Keeper Number Three as the first woman to study music at Radcliffe College), taught music theory and history privately from her home, as well as at the Perkins School for the Blind, where she headed the girls’ music division for three years. Later, during my years with her, she served on the music faculty of the Milton Academy. Politically active in the women’s movement to obtain voting rights, she was well known in New England as a lecturer, a published composer, and author. Our household was often a gathering place not unlike the French salons, and I became very accustomed to enjoying the gentle wit and intellectual bravura of the academic world: an ambiance that has continued to comfort and amuse me throughout the rest of my softly voiced life.

In 1917 (I think it was) Miss Webster’s harpsichord was returned to Chickering, who resold it to Smith College. Like many maiden ladies, Miss Mary never mentioned her actual age to me, but as is typical for musical folk, her love for this divine art kept her youthful in spirit. But, as she became elderly and housebound, my dear mistress continued the downsizing of her earthly belongings, so a few years later, I, like my harpsichord brother, was passed on to a second keeper, the young academic named Austin Warren (1899–1986). Young Warren took good care of me during his graduate student days at Harvard and Princeton, but he was far from the proficient musician that my dear Miss Mary had been. When he left Massachusetts in 1939 after thirteen years of teaching at Boston University to take a position as professor of English at the University of Iowa, he passed me on to his devoted friend, another younger professor, Wallace Fowlie (1908–98). Fowlie’s encomium to me in his 1977 book Journal of Rehearsals continues to cause me to blush and even to intensify my capacity for “Bebung” (the German term for one of the unique abilities that we clavichords have: the production of a gentle vibrato completely through finger pressure—since our tone producer, a brass tangent, actually touches our strings directly, the application of slight pressure causes them to go sharp, while the lessening of the pressure brings the string back to pitch—something that big brother harpsichord has never been capable of doing, to my great delight and his despair!).

But I digress! Wallace Fowlie, my dear third keeper, rented his first single-occupancy apartment at the beginning of 1940 while teaching at Bennington College. This domicile was in Old Bennington, and my presence in this, his first truly private space, led to my being described in his journal as the “one precious object of my possessions.” I also remember, with great nostalgia, the visit to Wallace’s home by the young harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who had been engaged to teach at Bennington during one semester. Dr. Fowlie asked RK if he could take some clavichord lessons with him, to which the skeptical Kirkpatrick fired back, “Do you own a clavichord?” It was Kirkpatrick who received the larger surprise when Fowlie replied that he did, indeed, possess a clavichord built by Dolmetsch as his ninth early instrument for Chickering. Kirkpatrick responded, “I had wondered where No. 9 was. You have one of the best clavichords—quite possibly the longest in the country.” 

Demanding a visit to see the instrument, RK touched me, tuned me carefully, and then sat down to play the first prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Entranced, he continued with the fugue, and, Fowlie reports, ultimately played most of the entire first book of the WTC during his visit. What glorious music we made together: it was definitely the acme of my artistic life thus far! 

You can see why I (as a modest middle-aged lady) would be moved to redness (or a darker mahogany) by these words. If I had my own copy of Fowlie’s wonderful volume (and if I could read it), I would surely pore over the special words about me on page 101 and concentrate even more on the ensuing description of the metaphysical effect my quiet musical tones had on my keeper, on the special aura of the room in which I resided, and on his abilities to play and hear more accurately the lovely notes that issued from my resonant sound cavity. 

Being family to Dr. Fowlie, a distinguished scholar of the French language and its literature, who eventually moved on to spend the major part of his teaching career at Duke University, I became especially nostalgic for my French-born maker Arnold Dolmetsch. Especially at Christmas time I would tremble with longing to have someone—anyone—play my favorites among the old French Noëls as a reminder of such delightful holiday music-making during my younger days.

And while he is not a speaker of French (or even a very good reader of that Gallic language) my fourth, and current, keeper (who writes these columns for The Diapason) has made certain that I occasionally get to make music with very proficient executants stroking my keys and stretching (and releasing) my strings. Dr. Fowlie’s “most precious possession” arrived at the Harpsichord Clearing House in 1992, and since “keeper four” had previously requested the opportunity to bid on the next Dolmetsch-Chickering clavichord to come through the HCH, he was not very pleased to learn, upon inquiry, that I was already “spoken for.” Responding with righteous fury, my present keeper caused a reconsideration of the prior sale and after some soothing and needed “spa-time” with a firm of furniture restorers who uphold the stellar reputation of New England’s craftspersons and their ability to clean and repair antiques, I was transported to my second southern home, Texas.

The clavichord specialist Virginia Pleasants, nearly as old as I, played a splendid recital on me during a joint conference of Southeastern and Midwestern Historical Keyboard Societies in Fort Worth and Dallas in 1998. What a pleasure to have such a sensitive specialist bring out wonderful music from my innards. But it surely must be that my most glorious Texas moment thus far was my 100th-birthday concert on October 27, 2006, when another splendid clavichordist, Gregory Crowell, joined Keeper Four in a program that culminated in J. S. Bach’s Concerto in C Minor for Two Keyboards, BWV 1060, played in partnership with my new younger brother at my Dallas home, a newly-acquired 1939 clavichord by John Challis. What a fun evening that was! And one overflowing with historic synchronicity—for Challis, in 1939, was not long-returned to Ypsilanti, Michigan, following his apprenticeship in Haselmere, UK, with my own maker, Arnold Dolmetsch. So we two instruments, separated by a generational 33 years, are both products of the USA, and both of us continue to survive and benefit from the skillful craftsmanship of these builders from those pioneering years of the early instrument revival.

This Christmas season we will be three clavichords at home, having welcomed Keeper Four’s “other” clavichord, returned from its longtime residency in his university office. This, the first he had acquired of us delicate, quiet keyboards, was a German portable instrument (“Reiseklavichord”) made by the Passau builder, his friend Kurt Sperrhake. It was a remarkable light-weight instrument whose prototype was originally designed for Isolde Ahlgrimm, the much-travelled Austrian artist who needed a carry-on instrument for practicing during her many concert tours. Late at night on Christmas Eve, when all should be sleeping, perhaps we will all break forth in Christmas arrangements by LeBègue, Edwin McLean, or J. William Greene, and express our communal wishes for other visitors to come and play us—preferably those who specialize in artistic clavichording. In our letter to Santa we’re specifically pushing for Massachusetts resident Judith Conrad, whom we hear is particularly adept at both playing and singing (just a hint to Keeper if he should read this).

As the oldest playable instrument in the house (yes, I know that I’m stored just in front of a 1797 Kirckman
fortepiano, but that one is not playable) I continue to keep the other clavichords in line. And, covered by warm layers of protective padding, I provide a soft, safe sleeping “shelf” for my oft-dozing companion, the indoor cat Mewsetta, who occasionally shares her resting place with feline number one, Walph Vaughan Williams. I am totally certain that Miss Mary Webster, Professors Austin Warren, Wallace Fowlie, and Keeper Four will all rest more comfortably knowing that all is under control and flourishing. (But I do wonder, quietly—with enhanced bebung—who will be my eventual Keeper Number Five?) ν

 

Sources 

Campbell, Margaret. Dolmetsch: the man and his work. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1975.

Dolmetsch, Mabel. Personal Recollections of Arnold Dolmetsch. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958; reprinted by DaCapo Press, 1980.

Fowlie, Wallace. Journal of Rehearsals. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977.

MacCracken, Thomas G. “The Dolmetsch-Chickering Viols.” Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, volume 48 (2013–14), pp. 25–66.

Palmer, Larry. Harpsichord in America: A Twentieth-Century Revival. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Second paperback Midland Book edition, 1993.

Personal correspondence with Richard Troeger, Thomas MacCracken, and Peter Brownlee, fellow aficionados of Arnold Dolmetsch and his remarkable legacy.

Comments or news items for these pages are always welcome. Address them to [email protected] or, via post, to 10125 Cromwell Drive, Dallas, Texas 75229.

 

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