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John Phillips: Bringing Harpsichords Back to Life
BY JONATHAN RHODES LEE
(/AUTHOR/JONATHAN-RHODES-LEE) ,
August 8, 2011
(/ARTICLE/JOHN-PHILLIPS-BRINGING-HARPSICHORDS-BACK-TOLIFE#DISQUS_THREAD)
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To chat with John Phillips about harpsichords is to tap into
two histories at the same time — one local, recent, and
personal; the other a rich, old, international tradition. This
duality is inherent in the place where Phillips spends most of
his days: a state-of-the art harpsichord workshop on
Grayson Street in Berkeley. There, you are likely to find an
instrument that has been playable for 350 years standing
next to one that has been operational for less than 350
hours. And the longer you sit there, the more likely it is that
some early music luminary who has known Phillips for the
last three decades will wander through the door. I recently
The rosette on a John Phillips harpsichord
had the opportunity to talk with Phillips about his career,
the history of harpsichord making in the Bay Area, and Phillips’ latest projects. To say that he floats
on a stream of historical consciousness is something of an understatement.
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Phillips began building harpsichords at a seminal moment in
the history of the early-music revival. In 1969, while an
undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, he built his first
instrument, one of the dozens of kit models that invaded the
garages of home tinkerers in the ’60s and ’70s. Although he
wasn’t quite aware of it at the time, Phillips had been infected
with a chronic illness — let’s call it “pluck-o-philia” — from
which he would never recover. Since those meager beginnings,
he has built 106 numbered instruments (that is, 106
professional commissions, not including a few more kits and
other “apprentice instruments”). Those harpsichords are
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played by devotees and professionals around the world, from Nicholas McGegan, conductor of the
Bay Area’s esteemed Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, to Trevor Pinnock, British-based founder of
the English Concert.
The notion of building harpsichords for a living may
seem a bit far-fetched in the modern world, yet the
history of professional builders in California stretches
back for nearly a century. Among the earliest such
figures was Julius Wahl, a German immigrant who
began working in Boston’s Chickering piano company
at the turn of the 20th century during a period when
To make one of these old
instruments play again
destroys all these fleeting
remnants of an old
instrument.
Arnold Dolmetsch, a pioneer of the early-music
movement in America, also worked there. Inspired by Dolmetsch, Wahl turned to harpsichord
building. He made his way to California by the early 1940s, where he built instruments with some
support from Stanford University. Others followed in his footsteps, and the initial members of the
historical-instrument movement clustered around the Peninsula. By the time that Phillips came of
age in the late 1960s, there was something resembling an established field here — enough so that,
when he founded the Berkeley Harpsichord Makers Association in 1975, he had three colleagues with
whom to share shop space, and a reasonable hope to supply himself with French spruce and bird
quill. He proved himself correct, and, within a short time, Phillips had set up an independent shop.
Critical Mass Required
Harpsichord builders can’t exist in a vacuum. Someone had to be there
to support these young craftspeople. “There have to be players there to
attract the makers,” says Phillips. Influential harpsichordists began
making their way to the Bay Area — a “critical mass,” as Phillips calls
them — quite early on. Wahl found support through a former student of
the eminent Wanda Landowska, a player named Putnam Aldrich who
was employed in the ’40s and ’50s by both Mills College and Stanford.
Phillips’ own support came first from harpsichordist Mark Kroll, who
was in residence at Santa Cruz while Phillips was a student there, and
who gave him his first pseudo-commission: a kit instrument for the
music department. Whenever Phillips talks about this early specimen of
his work, he will smile meekly and mutter, “And they still have the
thing. ...”
Phillips standing alongside the
new muselaar that he's
building
By the 1970s, the hub of early music had defected from the Peninsula to
Berkeley, largely due to the efforts of Alan Curtis, then a professor of musicology and now a
frequently recorded harpsichordist, conductor, and editor of important musical editions. “What Alan
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was doing in the ’60s was completely new,” says Phillips, referring both to Curtis’ seminal
performances during this period and to his importation of instruments built after historical models.
Curtis’ productions of early opera at Berkeley sparked the interest of young players, many of whom
were further fostered under the wing of Laurette Goldberg, “a force of nature,” as Phillips fondly
refers to her. Goldberg went on to start the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (at that time “a coterie of
people playing funky old instruments,” Phillips recalls). The band used a Phillips instrument from the
start, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Phillips has been in the harpsichord-building game long enough to have seen the field go through
many changes. In the early days, Phillips traveled around the world, visiting early instruments in
museums and private collections, and drawing blueprints from their interiors. “When I started doing
this, all you needed to access these collections was a note from your mother,” Phillips quips. “Now, it’s
almost impossible.” Younger builders have to rely on drawings issued by museums and other sources.
“Drawings are great,” Phillips says, “but they don’t share the same amount of detail. Everyone will
come away from the experience of an old instrument with a personal reaction to it. There’s nothing
like the old ones.”
In recent years, Phillips has had several opportunities to get really up close and personal with “the old
ones,” in the comfort of his Berkeley workshop. Since 2000, a private collector has been entrusting
him with the restoration of antique instruments acquired at European auctions. Phillips is now
working on the fourth and fifth such harpsichords that he has restored, both large, French
instruments from the early decades of the 18th century. Before that, he was privileged to restore
specimens from the first half of the 17th century, instruments that had originally issued from the
workshop of the Ruckers family in what is today Belgium — the “Stradavarius” of harpsichords, to use
a somewhat strained analogy.
To Phillips, restoring one of these old instruments
means getting it into good playing condition as well as
bringing its painting and decoration back to something
resembling its original state. This sort of restorative
work raises the hackles of some museum curators. “The
problem with artifacts,” says Phillips, “is that they are
artifacts.” Museum people aim to keep the instruments
stable, he explains, treating them as physical records
that should remain in their current states without
“When I started doing this,
all you needed to access
these collections was a note
from your mother,” Phillips
quips. “Now, it’s almost
impossible.”
further intervention. “Restoring and cleaning old instruments will damage evidence — and ‘evidence’
is the key word” to curators, says Phillips. So much of a harpsichord is ephemeral: the quills that
pluck the strings, the strings themselves, the cloth that’s glued to many surfaces of the instrument, the
glue itself. To make one of these old instruments play again destroys all these fleeting remnants of an
old instrument. That’s what worries the curating sort.
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Yet there are limits to the reasoning of the museum culture. Without restoration, the sounds of these
old harpsichords, arguably their most important feature, can’t be assessed. Moreover, many of the
instruments that have come into Phillips’ shop have suffered at the hands of past restorers, who have
already all but obliterated the original ephemera, covering the old instruments in wholly new garb.
The changes that the instruments have gone through are not necessarily due to incompetence or
dishonesty, but rather to different ideas about the inherent value of antique harpsichords that marked
previous generations of restorers. In these cases, Phillips aims to strip away the anachronisms and
return the instruments to their earliest-deducible state. Still, the process remains a delicate and
stressful one, as Phillips relates. “At some point, it comes to this: Here is an antique instrument, and I
walk up to it with a chisel in my hand.” The work starts from there.
Peeling Back the Past
One of Phillips’ recent projects involved a Ruckers
harpsichord built in 1627, which had been “spruced up” in
the 1920s by a salesman who hoped to make the
instrument fit a then-current idea of what harpsichords
should look like. He took an instrument that had originally
been black and applied green crackleur (a painting
technique intended to look old and cracked, a common
trick of people who forge antiques). To anyone who truly
knows 17th-century harpsichords, the color was all wrong,
so the choice was obvious to Phillips and his collector-
'Harpsichords are like cuisines ...'
employer: Restore the instrument’s decoration as well as
its structure. It required a good bit of forensics, but by staring at interior glue lines and by carefully
removing the green paint, Phillips eventually determined what the instrument’s state was at around
1701. He used that as his guidepost in the restoration process. But he left just a little bit of the 1924
decoration on the spine, the back of the instrument that most people never see. “That decoration had
become part of the instrument’s history,” Phillips explains. That history, as well as the instrument’s
earlier state, deserved to be preserved, in his estimation.
In addition to his restoration work, Phillips keeps up his own building of instruments, producing a
steady stream of harpsichords for professionals and amateurs alike. The waiting list for his expensive
instruments is long. He builds harpsichords of all shapes and sizes. “Harpsichords are like cuisines,”
he often jokes, as he is explaining to someone that there are prominent Italian traditions, French
traditions, German traditions, and English traditions, among others. And if California cuisine is
famous for incorporating many national styles of food in its daily offerings, then it’s no wonder that
Phillips builds in all these styles. John Phillips is, without a doubt, the master chef of California
harpsichord building.
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Jonathan Rhodes Lee (https://www.sfcv.org/author/jonathan-rhodes-lee) studied harpsichord
in New York, San Francisco, and the Netherlands. He is currently enrolled in the graduate program
in historical musicology at UC Berkeley.
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