BOOK REVIEW
Anne Bond
A Guide to the Harpsichord
Amadeus Press paper ISBN 1
57467 063 8 £12.99
Amazon
UK £11.20
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US $14.36
BBC Sunday afternoon concerts in the 1930's were notable for the regular
performances of Bach cantatas and other sacred, or at least serious music,
of a devout and religious kind. In those Reithian days of broadcasting the
ordinary listener would probably switch off and twiddle the radio tuning
dial until he found some lighter kind of popular music from the Continent.
The more cultured and informed listener however, might pursue the series
of concerts for weeks on end, and thus become aware of what must at that
time have been a fascinating and newly-discovered kind of music:that of the
Baroque age.
Of course, we had long been used to Handel and the one great choral work
that even the man-in-the-street might whistle or hum excerpts from, but the
annual performance at Christmas, in the local church or chapel, would invariably
be accompanied on the organ; even if it were a more important occasion in
the local public hall with a scratch orchestra, it would have had the "additional
accompaniments by Mozart", or even the further accretions to the score added
by that worthy Victorian academic Ebenezer Prout. In none of these "modern"
performances would the sound of the harpsichord have been heard. The BBC
performances were, at that time, probably alone in re-creating the authentic
sound of the baroque orchestra in Britain. One of the mainstays of the baroque
sound was that of the harpsichord, yet since the rise of romantic music in
the nineteenth century, it had largely come to be regarded as quaint and
even archaic.
But times have changed, and for several decades now we have come to recognise
and re-value the harpsichord, raising it once more to its rightful place.
No longer is it the accepted way to perform baroque instrumental music by
omitting the essential element of the harpsichord continuo, or worse still
replacing it anachronistically with the piano. Despite the fact that several
distinguished pianists in recent years have advocated the piano as a "better"
alternative, this is not now, fortunately, the most generally accepted way
of performing baroque and other early music.
This book by Ann Bond, although by no means the only one to have appeared
in recent times, is cetainly one of the best and the most compelling in its
advocacy. It begins by setting the early music scene, its historical significance
and the contribution it has made to a re-awakening and a re-appraisal of
the whole ethos of earlier periods of musical history. There follows a lucid
description of the idiosyncratic mechanics, excellently illustrated by the
author's husband, Peter Bond, along with an absorbing account of harpsichord
building in the past, the varying characteristics of different national styles:
Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and English. The author then discusses
the factors that made for the instrument's eclipse -
the radically changing musical styles - and its present-day re-birth.
A large, and obviously important section of Ann Bond's treatise deals with
the player's approach to technique in performance: problems for the beginner,
and more sophisticated aspects for the experienced player; one of the latter
concerning itself especially with the matter of touch, a consideration probably
not suspected by those whose keyboard experience has been naively restricted
to the piano. There are enlightening examples from a variety of original
pieces, illustrating aspects of rhetoric, rubato and other expressive means
of making performance sound convincing. There follow quite exhaustive chapters
on national styles, each one thoroughly explored. Comments on the popular
dance forms - Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and so on - along with
an explanation of ornamentation, an essential part of the very nature of
the harpsichord. One of the most interesting, and indeed revealing parts
of this book, concerns the intricate and subtle nature of tuning and temperament;
this might be a revelation to many readers. It is rounded off with advice
about care and maintenance. Finally a chapter is devoted to twentieth-century
music for the harpsichord, and useful information about furthering an
enthusiast's interests.
This is a capital book, informative in the best sense of the word; its literary
style lucid. There is not a dull or tedious sentence, one of the best books
I have read on a musical subject.
Arthur Butterworth
