Alastair McAllister is an Australian harpsichord

Harpsichord

A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...

 builder known for his historical integrity, design and workmanship, and for producing modern copies of instruments that closely match their prototypes in sound and touch. At the age of 15, he became inspired by the Baroque after hearing the music of the harpsichord composer Domenico Scarlatti

Domenico Scarlatti

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. He is classified as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style...

. Working closely with his colleague, Mars McMillan, he founded Harpsichord Makers of Melbourne in 1967, in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill, and by the early 1970s he had become a full-time harpsichord builder. McAllister and his colleagues have created instruments patterned after the work of Henri Hemsch

Henri Hemsch

Henri Hemsch, original name Johann Heinrich Hemsch , was a French harpsichord maker of German origin....

, Burkhardt Schudi, Johannes Daniel Dulcken

Dulcken

The Dulcken family were Flemish harpsichord makers of German origin.Joannes Daniel Dulcken was born in Wingeshausen, the son of Georg Ludwig Dulcken . In 1736 he was in Maastricht, but by 1738 he had moved with his wife Susanna Maria Knopffell and their son to Antwerp where they became members of...

, the Ruckers family

Ruckers

The Ruckers family were Flemish harpsichord and virginal makers based in Antwerp in the 16th and 17th century whose influence stretched well into the 18th and to the harpsichord revival of the 20th.The Ruckers family contributed immeasurably to the harpsichord's technical development,...

, Christian Zell

Christian Zell

Christian Zell was a German harpsichord maker.He was probably a pupil of harpsichord maker Michael Mietke. The first mention of him is in 1722 in the register of citizens of Hamburg, the city where he was to spend the rest of his life...

 and Johann Heinrich Harrass, among others, and he has trained or influenced Australian builders such as Marc Nobel, Andrew Bernard, Alan Todd, Jean-Louis Cocquillat, and Richard Schaumloeffel.

McAllister has worked closely with the firm of Zuckermann

Wolfgang Zuckermann

Wolfgang Joachim Zuckermann is a harpsichord maker, author and environmental and social activist. He was born in Berlin, became an American citizen in 1938 and has lived in France since 1995....

 Harpsichords International (Stonington, Connecticut, US), and with Hubbard Harpsichords, including a month-long residency in 1989 at the firm's headquarters in Waltham, MA. Since 1990, he has carried out his craft from a studio within the Community Work Society Cooperative, alongside a group of heritage artisans in the Melbourne suburb of Preston. McAllister has worked closely with leading Australian and New Zealand harpsichordists as well as performers from Europe and the North America. These include Gustav Leonhardt

Gustav Leonhardt

Gustav Leonhardt is a highly renowned Dutch keyboard player, conductor, musicologist, teacher and editor. Leonhardt has been a leading figure in the movement to perform music on period instruments...

, Ton Koopman

Ton Koopman

Ton Koopman is a conductor, organist and harpsichordist.Koopman had a "classical education" and then studied the organ , harpsichord and musicology in Amsterdam...

, Bob van Asperen

Bob van Asperen

Bob van Asperen is a harpsichordist, organist, conductor, clavichordist and early music-specialist.After completing a conventional music course at university, in 1967 he studied under the harpsichord master Gustav Leonhardt. In 1968 he joined the group Quadro Hotteterre, of which he was a member...

, Anthony Jennings, Peter Watchorn

Peter Watchorn

Peter Watchorn is an Australian-born harpsichordist who has combined a virtuosic keyboard technique, musical scholarship and practical experience in the construction of harpsichords copied from original instruments of the 17th and 18th centuries...

, Christopher Hogwood

Christopher Hogwood

Christopher Jarvis Haley Hogwood CBE, MA , HonMusD , born 10 September 1941, Nottingham, is an English conductor, harpsichordist, writer and musicologist, well known as the founder of the Academy of Ancient Music.-Biography:...

, Roger Heagney, Christiane Jaccotet, Colin Tilney

Colin Tilney

-Education and professional life:Born in London, Tilney studied music and modern languages at Cambridge University, studied harpsichord with Mary Potts at Kings College, Cambridge, and became a student of Gustav Leonhardt...

, Davitt Moroney

Davitt Moroney

Davitt Moroney is a British-born and educated musicologist, harpsichordist and organist. His parents were of Irish and Italian extraction – his father was an executive with the Anglo-Dutch Unilever conglomerate...

, and Bart van Oort

Bart van Oort

Bart van Oort is a Dutch classical pianist.-Biography:Van Oort was born in Utrecht. After completing his studies in modern piano in the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in 1983, he studied fortepiano there with Stanley Hoogland...

. Since 1990, McAllister has served as the keyboard consultant to the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, and has built a two-manual French instrument for its artistic director, Paul Dyer. McAllister harpsichords are owned by such ensembles as The Sydney Consort and the Sydney-based group ThoroughBass.

McAllister has been at the forefront of harpsichord research and, with Andrew Bernard, proposed a unified theory of harpsichord scaling and geometry that accounts for the diverse pitches for which harpsichords were designed, linking this information to surviving string gauges and tuning forks. He was the first to demonstrate that stringing the early-20th-century Pleyel harpsichord with classical wire and installing quill or delrin prectra yields a significant improvement in quality. In collaboration with Peter Watchorn, McAllister researched the surviving instruments by Hans Moermans "the younger" of Antwerp, resulting in the creation of the first modern copies of his surviving 1642 double; one of these copies by McAllister is now owned by the Melbourne Recital Centre

Melbourne Recital Centre

The Melbourne Recital Centre is Melbourne's second largest auditorium for classical music . It was opened in 2009, as part of the Melbourne Recital Centre and MTC Theatre complex, and is located on the corner of Southbank Boulevard and Sturt Street in the Melbourne Arts Precinct,...

in the Southbank precinct.

External links

• Photographs of a construction process in McAllister's workshop, accessed 19 May 2010