This collection of letters to and from the eminent harpsichordist, scholar, and early-music pioneer Ralph Kirkpatrick provides a portrait of the musician from the beginning of his career in Paris in the 1930s to its end in the early 1980s. This collection of letters to and from the eminent harpsichordist, scholar, and early-music pioneer Ralph Kirkpatrick provides a portrait of the musician from the beginning of his career in Paris in the 1930s to its end in the early 1980s, offering new insights into his work and scholarship. The volume contains letters from Europe to his family as well as correspondence with harpsichord makers, performers, and composers, including Nadia Boulanger, Alexander Schneider, John Kirkpatrick, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, John Challis, Kenneth Gilbert, Serge Koussevitzky, and Vincent Persichetti. In addition, two former students of Kirkpatrick, the guitarist Eliot Fisk and the harpsichordist Mark Kroll, write about their experiences studying with Kirkpatrick in a foreword and an afterword. The volume also includes a bibliography of publications by and about the musician, as well as a discography. MeredithKirkpatrick is a librarian and bibliographer at Boston University and is the niece of Ralph Kirkpatrick.

This book sets forth the provocative theories of a musician who has been called the outstanding harpsichordist of this century. The late Ralph Kirkpatrick reveals here his approach to a deeper comprehension of music, showing how his methods are applied to the preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier of J.S. Bach. "This book is brilliant and important."--Clavier "All keyboardists performing classical repertoire can greatly benefit from Kirkpatrick's scholarship, dry wit, and stubborn dedication."--Keyboard "That Mr. Kirkpatrick's extraordinarily perceptive mind knew the subject matter thoroughly is beyond dispute. . . Valuable insights into the analysis, teaching and performance of all Western music, especially Bach's monumental Well-Tempered Clavier."--Arthur Lawrence, The American Organist "We are fortunate to have this book by Ralph Kirkpatrick. . . From it we gain insight into the musical mind of one of the outstanding performers of our century."--The Music Review "The real matter of the book is good old-fashioned musicianship."--Denis Arnold, London Review of Books

"A famous harpsichordist's study of the life, times, and works of one of the greatest composers for his instrument."--Cover.

Presents previously unpublished memoirs (1933-77), lectures, and essays by the eminent harpsichordist and scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s “lyrical and haunting” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) reflection on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn’t seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach’s music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer’s greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood. He describes the joys of mastering some of the piano pieces, the frustrations that plague his understanding of others, the technical challenges they pose, and the surpassing beauty of the melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint that distinguish them. While exploring Bach’s compositions he sketches a cultural history of playing the piano in the twentieth century. And he raises two questions that become increasingly interrelated, not unlike a contrapuntal passage in one of the variations itself: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being?

W. Dean Sutcliffe investigates one of the greatest yet least understood repertories of Western keyboard music: the 555 keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Scarlatti occupies a position of solitary splendour in musical history. The sources of his style are often obscure and his immediate influence is difficult to discern. Further, the lack of hard documentary evidence has hindered musicological activity. Dr Sutcliffe offers not just a thorough reconsideration of the historical factors that have contributed to Scarlatti's position, but also sustained engagement with the music, offering both individual readings and broader commentary of an unprecedented kind. A principal task of this book is to remove the composer from his critical ghetto (however honourable) and redefine his image. In so doing it will reflect on the historiographical difficulties involved in understanding eighteenth-century musical style.

"Because Domenico Scarlatti left almost no personal records and because his brilliant and erratic keyboard style has never been entirely understood, he has suffered a neglect unsurpassed in the literature of music for a composer of his stature. Now after two hundred years he finds in this first full-length biography his greatest opportunity to become known. This rediscovery of Scarlatti gains special significance from the fact that it has been made by a celebrated harpsichordist to satisfy his own need for a fuller understanding of a favorite composer. 'At all times,' writes Ralph Kirkpatrick, 'my interest has been that of a performer of Scarlatti who wishes to leave no source of information or enlightenment untouched that might affect a conception of his music.' Through his discoveries, the known facts of Scarlatti's life have been more than tripled. Through his reconstruction of the background of events, persons, and places, so penetrating an insight is gained into the composer's career that the point of view seems to be Scarlatti's and the bare outlines of biography afforded by the documents are filled in as if by a contemporary hand. The second half of the book is an illuminating study of Scarlatti's 555 sonatas, most of them the astonishing harvest of the last few years of his life and his finest achievement. The last chapter on the performance of the sonata bears the authority of the writer's almost unique position as both a scholar and a world-famous performing artist."--Dust jacket.

Isolde Ahlgrimm (1914-1995), was an important pioneer in the revival of Baroque and Classical keyboard instruments in her native city, Vienna, and later, throughout Europe and the United States. Ahlgrimm's performances of Baroque music represented a radical departure from the distinctly twentieth-century interpretations by the much more famous Wanda Landowska and her followers. Peter Watchorn provides an engaging study of Ahlgrimm, and argues that her contribution to the harpsichord and fortepiano revival was pivotal, and that her use of period instruments and the inspiration she instilled in younger musicians, including Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, has been almost entirely overlooked by the wider musical world.