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4 Harpsichord music
The first music written specifically for solo harpsichord came to be published around the middle of the sixteenth century.
Well into the eighteenth century, the harpsichord was considered to have advantages and disadvantages with respect to the piano.
Besides solo works, the harpsichord is also well-suited to accompaniment in the basso continuo style (a function it maintained in opera even into the nineteenth century).
Through the 19th century, the harpsichord was ignored by composers, the piano having supplanted it. In the 20th century, however, with increasing interest in early music and composers on the lookout for new sounds, pieces began to be written for it once more. ConcertoOrigin Etymology Concerto (from the latin concertus from certare to strive, also confused with concentus , in its most general sense, is a name for a piece of classical music in which there are two distinct groups of instruments, one larger than the others for the instrument were written by Francis PoulencFrancis Jean Marcel Poulenc ( January 7, 1899 January 30, 1963) was a French composer. Poulenc was born in Paris. His mother, an amateur pianist, taught him to play, and music formed a part of family life. As a young man, in 1918 he was fulfilling his Nat (the Concert champêtre), Manuel de FallaManuel de Falla y Matheu ( November 23, 1876 November 14, 1946) was a Spanish composer of classical music. He was born in Cadiz. From the late 1890s he studied music in Madrid, studying piano with Jose Trago and composition with Felipe Pedrell. It was fro and, later, Henryk GóreckiHenryk Mikolaj Gorecki (born December 6, 1933) is a Polish composer of classical music. Gorecki was born in Czernica, in southern Poland. He did not study music seriously until he was in his twenties, when he began to study in Katowice. Later, while conti. Bohuslav Martinu wrote both a concerto and a sonata for it, and Elliott Carter's Double Concerto is for harpsichord, piano and two chamber orchestras. György Ligeti has written a small number of solo works for the instrument (including "Continuum"). More recently harpsichordist Hendrik Bouman has composed in the baroque style 32 solo pieces, 1 harpsichord Concerto and 2 compositions of chamber music with obligato harpsichord.
5 Harpsichordists
Musicians who play the harpsichord are known as harpsichordists. Modern harpsichord playing can be roughly divided into three eras, beginning with the career of the influential reviver of the instrument, Wanda Landowska (1879-1959). Landowska used a harpsichord made by Pleyel of the heavy, piano-influenced type discussed above. Such instruments, though now considered inappropriate for earlier music, retain some historical importance for the works that were specifically composed for them (concertos by Falla and Poulenc, for example). An influential later group of English players using post-Pleyel instruments by Thomas Goff and the Goble family included George Malcolm and Thurston Dart.
The next generation of harpsichordists were the pioneers of modern performance on instruments built according to the authentic practices of the earlier period, following the research of such scholar-builders as Frank Hubbard and William Dowd . This generation of performers included such players as Ralph Kirkpatrick, Igor Kipnis , and Gustav Leonhardt . More recently, many other outstanding harpsichordists have appeared, including Trevor Pinnock, Kenneth Gilbert , Christopher Hogwood, Ton Koopman , Christophe Rousset , and Andreas Staier .
For a list of harpsichord performers, see Harpsichordist.
6 See also
6.1 Baroque composers of solo harpsichord music
