Harpsichord Music of the Italian Renaissance

Excerpt from the CD booklet essay by Trevor Stephenson:

I made this recording of Italian harpsichord music during the Autumn of 1997 at a small, quiet cabin in the woods. As I listen now to the CD master back at my home in the comparatively noisy city of Madison, I am delighted that the particular flavor of the silence at the cabin pervades the music still.

The harpsichord heard is a replica of a 1665 Italian instrument by Ridolfi. My thanks to friend Norman Sheppard for building this instrument through the Fall and Winter of ‘96 and on into the Spring of ‘97; it was a joy to visit his shop on an almost daily basis, where, while he worked, we would talk at length about the Italian Renaissance as its miraculous keyboard invention grew to life atop two sawhorses. The instrument is six feet long and weighs forty pounds. It has a range of four octaves, which comes to ten pounds per octave as compared to the modern grand piano’s roughly one hundred pounds per octave. The wires, made of a soft brass, are about the thickness of toothbrush bristles. When the player presses a key, a wooden jack holding an eighth-of-an-inch long and sixteenth-of-an- inch wide quill cut from the shaft of a crow feather rises about a quarter of an inch during which it plucks and passes the string. The touch is so light that you can play a note by blowing on it. The object of this extreme economy of design is to produce a sound that is immediate, forthright, rich, and very clean. And the object of such a sound is to get the music to the listener, and the listener to the music, now.