Harpsichord in America: A Twentieth-Century Revival

by Larry Palmer

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253208408
• ISBN13: 9780253208408
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.8" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

The scoop

Behind the harpsichord's return to the stage, after a century of obscurity, there are the wonderfully eccentric people who made it happen. It's a wonderful story, and Palmer tells it well, balancing the narrative with humor, supporting documents and photos. For anyone with even a passing interest in the instrument, it's great bedtime reading. The subject is far more complex than a simple tale, and it's inevitable that a small book like this would focus on the main personalities at some detriment to those Palmer considered less pivotal, a little arbitraily. It is also significant that he is more interested in performers before 1950 than in later figures, or the builders who made it possible. Most harpsichord enthusiasts have perhaps read so much on the amazing story of how the instrument-building know-how of centuries was lost and then gradually rediscovered, that a little attention is due to the personalities, beginning with Dolmetsch and Landowska, whom the public associated with each phase of the revival. Although published in 1989, Palmer's view has a retro slant, as when he mentions the suitability to all sorts of music, "including Boogie Woogie", and even leaves out crossover use by Keith Jarrett and The Beatles, but then again, we all know that. Still, an effort has been made to at least quickly summarize the later years, including "Kits, records and all that jazz", the title of a chapter, and the final "The harpsichord lives". An inexpensive and most enjoyable book dealing with a period most of us are too young to have experienced first hand.