Useful links

You’ve found the website of the Friends of St Cecilia’s Hall, but, as you’ll have realised, it is for people who already have a relationship with the harpsichord and the other members of the early keyboard instrument clan.

The Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments is pretty much what its name says, with museums at the Reid Concert Hall and St Cecilia’s Hall. St Cecilia’s has keyboard instruments and plucked string instruments, the Reid has the rest.

St Cecilia’s Hall Museum of Instruments, to give it its full name, has a site which links to the two keyboard instrument collections that the hall houses: the Raymond Russell Collection and the Rodger Mirrey Collection. The two instruments involved in the composers composition have their own pages: the Pascal Taskin double-manual harpsichord of 1769, and the Jean Goermans instrument from 1764 which was reworked by Taskin in 1783-84 to look like a Couchet instrument, to increase its value.

If you’re pretty new to the harpsichord Wikipedia’s article is a good place to start with sensible, clear diagrams of how instruments in the family work and a brief history of them. There is a separate article on the history of the harpsichord.

Wikipedia also has an entry on Taskin – there’s also a French entry, but the English is a bit more thorough. There’s no page specifically for Jean Goermans, but his family has an English one.

The British Harpsichord Society has a big site mainly intended for people who are beyond starter level. It has pages and pages of links, and some diagrams on the workings of harpsichords, a bit more technical and realistic than the Wiki ones.

The British Harpsichord Society has a big site mainly intended for people who are beyond starter level. It has pages and pages of links, and some diagrams on the workings of harpsichords a bit more technical and realistic than the Wiki ones.

The site of Dr Bradley Lehman has numerous brief strains of music (unfortunately not the same piece) played on many types of harpsichord. The instruments demonstrated include the clavichord, which is actually quite different. One is entitled to doubt whether the audio file that goes with the Lautenwerk (gut-stringed harpsichord)  is a gut-stringed anything.

Much more convincing, on Steven Sørli’s site there is a Lautenwerk piece by the French 17th century composer Denis Gaultier.

Highly relevant to the competition, WIMA, the Werner Icking Music Archive, has the Pièces de Clavecin by Armand-Louis Couperin, for whose music the two instruments involved in the competition are ideally suited. WIMA also has lot of music by Armand-Louis’s older cousin, François. There was a whole clan of Couperins, of whom Louis (with his own page on WIMA) wrote some wonderful harpsichord music, though he died more than a century before the crucial harpsichords were built. Then there’s a page for Jean-Philippe Rameau, another very important French composer for the harpsichord

Midiworld has several harpsichord tracks by François Couperin, and the Bach page has harpsichord music played by John Sankey, self-styled Harpsichordist to the Internet.

Harpsichords Unlimited has audio files with a complicated rigmarole and uncertain reliability but the video clips link offers a couple of decent full-length Domenico Scarlatti items, played by Elaine Comparone on an instrument built to be used standing up – on YouTube.

You Tube has dozens of clips of all sorts of harpsichords and harpsichordists, with a big preponderance of music by Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. When you’ve watched Elaine Comparone, look in the related videos window for the one of José Iturbi playing a piece by J-P Rameau (also here) on an instrument with six pedals – probably an earlyish 20th century instrument, quite unlike the historic ones in the St Cecilia’s Hall Museum, and isn’t really one of the many forms of the piano today  whatever Iturbi says and whenever he said it!

If it’s time to relax, Four Wheel Drive Harpsichords (“You book ’em, we truck ’em”) is worth a bemused glimpse.

And finally, for something really pretty bonkers. But you have to admire the man’s dedication.

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