Thank you for this informative video! My biggest struggle with harpsichord playing is binding all the notes together en not letting some sound harsh. This video helped me preventing that!
The video is very useful, thank you! I'm always lift up my little finger especially when I play trills. Every day I'm trying to relax it and play etudes for hours, but it doesn't improve. Could you tell me something that may help me?
Very good teaching and very good explanation of the elements that influence sound production and tone control at the piano as well. These are universal principles.
Your videos are very educative. I got two questions: 1. Given the peculiar mechanism of keys and plucks, would practicing these techniques on an electronic keyboard be a waste of time? 2. How much do harpsichords entail in terms of maintenance expenses? For instance, do strings break as a result of wear & tear? Thank you for these great videos.
As far as point number 2, harpsichords don't hold their tuning well and require frequent tuning as a result. The "quills" (what actually pluck the strings) require frequent replacement.
Very interesting series of videos you make! Do you use rotational movements with the hand to give the fingers the right gravity when they are needed and to limit finger motion? Some pieces of the WTC seem to require this, for instance Prelude BWV 850, 851 etc. I read conflicting things about this. Thanks!
A very intriguing instrument. I assume they are quite rare these days. What do you say to people who are curious and have never played the instrument? Where does one go to get a chance to try playing a harpsichord? I would think most music stores don't have one to try out?
Thank you for your question! They aren’t too rare anymore, though you still wouldn’t find one in a normal music shop these days (at least not in the United States). Some churches have a harpsichord (though often I’m not very good of repair), and most universities also usually have a least one somewhere, and universities that have a program in early music will of course have many that are nice instruments. If you want to look at the kind of harpsichords that are for sale, check out harpsichord.com - which is the Harpsichord Clearing House. Their site is fun to look at even if you aren’t at all interested in buying one! :)
I kind of adore how you blithely destroy any and all of Wanda Landowska's bizarre notions (to be fair, she was historically important, AND she played only really strange instruments... but BOY HOWDY did she have a tortured, hard-way, asking-for-RSI technique, ugh)
