The soft touch
David H. Ledbetter · Early Music · 2012
There is certainly no lack of choice when it comes to guides for playing the harpsichord. They range from lessons in print (for example, Ruth Nurmi’s A plain & easy introduction to the harpsichord (Albuquerque, 1974)) to treatments of individual topics, presented with full musicological apparatus (for example, Richard Troeger’s Technique and interpretation on the harpsichord and clavichord (Bloomington, 1987)). This latest contribution concentrates on touch and expression, so joins Mark Kroll’s Playing the harpsichord expressively: a practical and historical guide (Lanham, 2004); it joins rather than competes, since Kroll’s is of the lesson type whereas Kosovske is musicological (originating in a doctoral dissertation). Kosovske takes the entirely laudable approach of assembling what contemporary methods, treatises and tutors say, arranged under headings that she considers important. This inevitably recalls the modus operandi of Robert Donington and has the same advantages, but also the disadvantage that quotations from very different times and places are jumbled together. On the subject of wrist movement, for example, we have in rapid succession Hans Buchner (Basel, 1520), Tomás de Santa María (Valladolid, 1565), Saint Lambert (Paris, 1702) and Johann Nicolaus Forkel (Leipzig, 1802). This syncretism is matched by illustrations, one of which shows Kosovske’s hand demonstrating a movement described by Santa María, but on an 18th-century French-type keyboard. Instructions are cited from tutors for organ and clavichord (Santa María, Diruta) to pianoforte tutors of the 1790s. Objections to this are obvious. What Kosovske argues is that there are fundamental points in common running through what one might call pre-modern keyboard technique, and there is much to be said for this argument. The same could be said of singing.