for harpsichord (2024)

For the first 40 years of my life I had almost nothing to do with the harpsichord. Yes, I knew the Falla Concerto and the Carter Double Concerto, and I was at a very early performance of Xenakis Komboi. But the instrument remained a vague concept, a keyboard instrument that was neither piano nor organ, with a repertoire that I had dipped an unenthusiastic ear into and emerged no more impressed. I was aware of the historic organ; I possessed LPs of Francis Chapelet playing Cabezon on old Spanish organs like Covarrubias and Trujillo, and even played through tientos by Correa de Arauxo and others on the distinctly English organs of the Kentish pit villages in my role as church organist. Like many at the time, my knowledge of the English 16th C tradition exemplified in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book was entirely through Glenn Gould. Gustav Leonhardt LPs seemed to me the very definition of archaic niche.

This obliviousness on my part was of course partly a result of my passionate embrace of modernism. Listening to music before 1950 struck me as a waste of time: what had that stuff to say to us '50s babies? But it was not helped that, when one did make an occasional sortie into early-musicland, the kinds of performance available were those of David Munrow, whose ground-breaking compendia Art of the Netherlands, Music of the Gothic Era, and the Art of Courtly Love were as much experiment as exposition. The das Alte Werke label put out dignified and scholarly, but also zombiedly inert, renderings of 16th and 17th C music by such performers as Pro Cantione Antiqua: well-meaning but lifeless. If you had told me then that Dufay would eventually end up as my favourite composer (after Schubert, naturellement) I would have thought you deranged. The early recordings of the Tallis Scholars were therefore more than just revelatory, they were game-changing. Today, spoiled by the musicological exactitudes and expressive profundity of groups like the Hilliards, then la Venexiana and Diabolus in Musica, and latterly Cinquecento, the Sound and the Fury, Cut Circle, and Beauty Farm, I find myself discussing minutiae of differences between performances of say, the astounding se la face ay pale Mass and coming down on one side or another in terms of excellence. For heaven’s sake, I own more than twenty recordings of l’Homme Armé Masses by composers from de Orto to Forestier. I’ve waited all my life for these kinds of riches. And I have to thank Adam Simon for gifting me with Craig Wright’s book the Maze and the Warrior, subtitled Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music, which took my interest to another level.

Against this backdrop of gradually evolving awareness of ‘what came before’, I met, in Armidale NSW, the harpsichordist Rosalind Halton. This was in 1992. Rosalind’s interest at that point was 17th Century French music, by composers like Jacques Chambonnières, Gaspard le Roux, and Louis Couperin. Through her I encountered one of the greatest works of music I have ever heard: Louis Couperin’s Passacaille in C Major, played here by Skip Sempé. Rosalind’s enthusiasm led me to do my own research, and to that list I added personal favourites, the great Jean-Henry d’Anglebert, whose dense textures seem to me to presage my own, and Girolamo Frescobaldi, whose huge Cento Partite sopra Passacagli fed directly into my two harpsichord works.

The first of these, written soon after meeting Rosalind, was originally titled le Passacaglie as a clear homage to the previously-mentioned L Couperin and Frescobaldi pieces which acted as models. At the time my enthusiasm was greater than my understanding; le Passacaglie came out too pianistically, and a few years later I admitted the obvious, and recast it as the Heart’s Algorithms for piano. As a piano piece it was more successful in an anodyne sort of way, and both Mark Knoop and Peter de Jager played it here and there. But at heart (pun intended) it remains a harpsichord piece, and I plan to retranscribe it back to harpsichord form in the near future; the experience of having written a new work for that medium encourages me to think I can make a better fist of it this time. Watch this space!

Which brings me to ‘…flickering instantiation…’. Between the mid-90s and about 2010 I had scarcely thought about harpsichord music later than 1750, and writing a new piece was not on my to-do list. But I met the extraordinary Andrew Bernard, computer platform designer, ex-harpsichord builder, and general omnimath, who came to be a close friend – and, not unimportantly, the webmeister for your current surroundings; my voice can sound in your head due to Andrew’s curation of the website. His extremely deep knowledge of the harpsichord and its history awoke in me a renewed interest in the instrument and I discovered that over time, between Rosalind and Andrew, I had osmotically gained a proper understanding of what my music might be like when written for harpsichord.

Not that I had any prior intention to launch into such a piece. I had spent six months working intensely on quite another work– in Platonia for bass clarinet and piano – when the thought of a new harpsichord piece popped into my head pretty much fully-fledged. As the Program Note for ‘…flickering instantiation…’ says:

Having just finished Alan Garner’s unique and extraordinary novel Treacle Walker, I was putting off shelving the book and opened the very front pages to the review quotes that publishers seem to feel obliged to include as preface. All were, of course, laudatory in the usual bland, congratulatory way of reviewers ...except one. The quote from the Daily Telegraph’s Sam Leith ran “it’s a glimpse of a world suffused with magic, of which our own day-to-day experience seems to be a flickering instantiation”. I was stunned by the insightful exactitude of this remark, and determined that I would write a piece titled after the two final words. One instrument seemed preeminently suitable to such a work: the harpsichord, whose whole soundworld could be said to be flickeringly instantiatory.

Nonetheless, I could not ignore that the review was posted in that organ of the right-wing, the Daily Telegraph, effectively subverting the probity of the observation. So this piece bears a Schrödinger’s title, one that is simultaneously subtle, and suspect, and I have attempted to convey that ambiguous character by framing the words with quote-marks. In fact, that subtle/suspect sens tremblant is itself a ‘flickering instantiation’, so the title exemplifies itself.

Like the title the music is possessed of a certain irony, being a work of unflinching modernism for an instrument with archaic roots; were it being written in Frescobaldi’s day I might have entitled it Toccata N-esima. The dedication to Luca Quintavalle seemed eminently appropriate.

You can find more discussion of the piece on my July 4 Blog, here. So, I am no longer a harpsichord neophyte and I wait impatiently for someone – Luca, perhaps – to perform the work and prove its validity. I find I am particularly pleased with the way it has come out; it augurs well for the new version of the heart’s algorithms, when I get around to it.

It might be of interest to more technical readers to know that the second half of the piece uses complementary harmonies to those used in the first half. Each harmony has six pitches and together each pair sums to a chromatic scale. For this reason the work needs to be performed in equal temperament.