Contemporary harpsichord refers to the use of the musical instrument the 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...

 in the 20th century. The instrument was successfully revived thanks to pioneers such as Wanda Landowska

Wanda Landowska

Wanda Landowska was a Polish harpsichordist whose performances, teaching, recordings and writings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century...

.

History

The harpsichord had fallen out of popularity during the mid 18th century in favour of the fortepiano and keyboard. In the 20th century it was revived and composers once again began writing for harpsichord.

Significant composers wrote for the harpsichord in the 20th century including Manuel de Falla

Manuel de Falla

Manuel de Falla y Matheu was a Spanish Andalusian composer of classical music. With Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Joaquín Turina he is one of Spain's most important musicians of the first half of the 20th century....

, Francis Poulenc

Francis Poulenc

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...

 (Concert champêtre

Concert champêtre

Concert champêtre is a harpsichord concerto by Francis Poulenc, which also exists in a version for piano solo with very slight changes in the solo part....

), Frank Martin

Frank Martin

Frank Martin may refer to:*Frank Martin , Swiss classical composer*Frank Martin , ice hockey player*Frank Martin , head men's basketball coach...

, Philip Glass

Philip Glass

Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...

, Michael Nyman

Michael Nyman

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...

, Louis Andriessen

Louis Andriessen

Louis Andriessen is a Dutch composer and pianist based in Amsterdam. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague...

, Theo Bruins

Theo Bruins

Theo Bruins was a Dutch pianist and composer.Bruins' earliest piano lessons were with his mother. His professional piano studies commenced in 1946 with Jaap Spaanderman at the Conservatoire of the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum Foundation...

 and Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...

. It is probably the works of György Ligeti

György Ligeti

György Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.-Early life:...

 that are the most frequently performed pieces of contemporary harpsichord literature. His composition Continuum

Continuum (Ligeti)

Continuum for harpsichord is a musical composition by György Ligeti composed in 1968, and dedicated to the contemporary harpsichordist, Antoinette Vischer...

 in 1968 was a groundbreaking piece in terms of a new technique of playing.

Revival style harpsichords were produced mainly by the Pleyel et Cie

Pleyel et Cie

Pleyel et Cie is a French piano manufacturing firm founded by the composer Ignace Pleyel in 1807. In 1815, he was joined by his son, Camille, as a business partner. The firm provided pianos to Frédéric Chopin, and also ran a concert hall, the Salle Pleyel, where Chopin performed his first — and...

 company at the request of Landowska, who instructed them to add a 16' stop in 1912 and to make them less fragile when moving, so they were cast in iron or steel. Generally these instruments are no longer considered popular as they are considered unauthentic and weigh considerably more than historical copies.

Frank Hubbard, in "Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making" dismisses them on the ground of their acoustic inferiority to instruments built according to the ancient techniques, as well as to the overall absence of 16' stops in most antique instruments.

Popular culture

The harpsichord also had a significant career in popular music. Its first appearance in jazz music happened around 1940, when pianist Johnny Guarnieri

Johnny Guarnieri

Johnny Guarnieri was an American virtuoso jazz and stride pianist, born in New York City, perhaps best known for his big band stints with Benny Goodman in 1939 and with Artie Shaw in 1940...

 was asked to play a harpsichord in Artie Shaw

Artie Shaw

Arthur Jacob Arshawsky , better known as Artie Shaw, was an American jazz clarinetist, composer, and bandleader. He was also the author of both fiction and non-fiction writings....

's quintet

Quintet

A quintet is a group containing five members.It is commonly associated with musical groups, such as a string quintet, or a group of five singers, but can be applied to any situation where five similar or related objects are considered a single unit....

 "Gramercy Five". The band recorded eight tracks between 1940 and 1945, which were reissued in 1990 (The Complete Gramercy Sessions).

In the 1960s and 1970s, the harpsichord was used by groups including The Beatles

The Beatles

The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...

, The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys are an American rock band, formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, California. The group was initially composed of brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. Managed by the Wilsons' father Murry, The Beach Boys signed to Capitol Records in 1962...

, The Jimi Hendrix Experience

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

The Jimi Hendrix Experience were an English-American psychedelic rock band that formed in London in October 1966. Comprising eponymous singer-songwriter and guitarist Jimi Hendrix, bassist and backing vocalist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, the band was active until June 1969, in which...

, The Kinks

The Kinks

The Kinks were an English rock band formed in Muswell Hill, North London, by brothers Ray and Dave Davies in 1964. Categorised in the United States as a British Invasion band, The Kinks are recognised as one of the most important and influential rock acts of the era. Their music was influenced by a...

, The Monkees

The Monkees

The Monkees are an American pop rock group. Assembled in Los Angeles in 1966 by Robert "Bob" Rafelson and Bert Schneider for the American television series The Monkees, which aired from 1966 to 1968, the musical acting quartet was composed of Americans Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork,...

, The Partridge Family

The Partridge Family

The Partridge Family is an American television sitcom about a widowed mother and her five children who embark on a music career. The series originally ran from September 25, 1970 until August 31, 1974, the last new episode airing on March 23, 1974, on the ABC network, as part of a Friday-night lineup...

, The Mamas & the Papas

The Mamas & the Papas

The Mamas & the Papas were a Canadian/American vocal group of the 1960s . The group recorded and performed from 1965 to 1968 with a short reunion in 1971, releasing five albums and 11 Top 40 hit singles...

, and Simon & Garfunkel. Other artists since these decades to have used harpsichord include Kate Bush

Kate Bush

Kate Bush is an English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer. Her eclectic musical style and idiosyncratic vocal style have made her one of the United Kingdom's most successful solo female performers of the past 30 years.In 1978, at the age of 19, Bush topped the UK Singles Chart...

, Tori Amos

Tori Amos

Tori Amos is an American pianist, singer-songwriter and composer. She was at the forefront of a number of female singer-songwriters in the early 1990s and was noteworthy early in her career as one of the few alternative rock performers to use a piano as her primary instrument...

, Björk

Björk

Björk Guðmundsdóttir , known as Björk , is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her eclectic musical style has achieved popular acknowledgement and popularity within many musical genres, such as rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical and folk...

, The Arcade Fire

The Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire is an indie rock band based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It consists of the husband and wife duo of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, along with Will Butler, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury, Jeremy Gara, and Sarah Neufeld. William Butler and Régine Chassagne attended McGill University,...

, The Stranglers

The Stranglers

The Stranglers are an English punk/rock music group.Scoring some 23 UK top 40 singles and 17 UK top 40 albums to date in a career spanning five decades, the Stranglers are the longest-surviving and most "continuously successful" band to have originated in the UK punk scene of the mid to late 1970s...

, and hip-hop band Cypress Hill

Cypress Hill

Cypress Hill is an American hip hop group from South Gate, California. Cypress Hill was the first Latino hip-hop group to have platinum and multi-platinum albums, selling over 18 million albums worldwide...

.

The harpsichord returned to the popular vernacular in large part because of the television show The Addams Family

The Addams Family (TV series)

The Addams Family is an American television series based on the characters in Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons. The 30-minute series was shot in black-and-white and aired for two seasons in 64 installments on ABC from September 18, 1964, to April 8, 1966...

, which included numerous references to the instrument thanks to the character of Lurch

Lurch

Lurch is a fictional character created by cartoonist Charles Addams as a manservant to The Addams Family. In the original television series, Lurch was played by Ted Cassidy, who came up with the now-famous catchphrase: "You rang?" When the phrase was delivered in the actor's slow-motion...

 who was frequently seen and heard playing the harpsichord. Other films that include harpsichord include the 1960s Miss Marple

Miss Marple

Jane Marple, usually referred to as Miss Marple, is a fictional character appearing in twelve of Agatha Christie's crime novels and in twenty short stories. Miss Marple is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St. Mary Mead and acts as an amateur detective. She is one of the most famous...

 films featuring Margaret Rutherford

Margaret Rutherford

Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford DBE was an English character actress, who first came to prominence following World War II in the film adaptations of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest...

 and cult show The Prisoner

The Prisoner

The Prisoner is a 17-episode British television series first broadcast in the UK from 29 September 1967 to 1 February 1968. Starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan, it combined spy fiction with elements of science fiction, allegory and psychological drama.The series follows a British former...

in the episode "Dance of the Dead". Also, the harpsichord could be heard in accompaniment to the Oompa-Loompas in the hit 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a 1971 musical film adaptation of the 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, directed by Mel Stuart, and starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. The film tells the story of Charlie Bucket as he receives a golden ticket and visits Willy...

.

Performers

Notable performers who are involved in playing contemporary music for harpsichord include Wanda Landowska

Wanda Landowska

Wanda Landowska was a Polish harpsichordist whose performances, teaching, recordings and writings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century...

, Antoinette Vischer (Switzerland), Elisabeth Chojnacka

Elisabeth Chojnacka

Elisabeth Chojnacka is a Polish harpsichordist living in France. She is one of the world's foremost harpsichordists specializing in the performance of contemporary harpsichord music....

 (France), Jane Chapman (UK), Annelie de Man (Netherlands), and Vivienne Spiteri (Canada).

External links

• Procembalo complete free catalog of Contemporary Harpsichord Music