Sylvia Marlowe Kenneth Cooper - Two Harpsichords Live

I am saddened to see that you have taken down Christopher Hogwood's rendition of Arne's Sonatas. In my opinion, this is the best interpretation of these fabulous pieces.

*_Kenneth Cooper wrote for the slipcase 1/1_*
Sylvia Marlowe felt strongly, as I do, that the harpsichord,
notwithstanding its past glories, was a twentieth-century
instrument. I think we agreed, too, that the harpsichordist
also was a contemporary instrument, convictions which prevented
neither of us from devoting our lives to the revitalization
of the great literature of the eighteenth century. The
avant-garde, for Sylvia Marlowe, was the generation of Stravinsky
and Bartok, and later, of Virgil Thomson and Elliot
Carter; she lived to see many of the works of these composers
become classics. With the aid of the Harpsichord Music
Society, which she founded, and which flourishes at this
writing as a memorial to her and her work, she commissioned
an impressive series of pieces, thereby helping create
a twentieth-century consciousness of the harpsichord.
Our 1972 and 1976 recitals were among her last experiments.
Included with the Baroque works were contemporary
classics, worthy of being transcribed for the harpsichord, we
thought, if only for the fun of playing them; but we both felt
that there were qualities in these pieces which benefitted
from harpsichord performance. Harpsichords can sharpen
the focus of cubist elements, for example-clean edges,
straight lines, basic colors-and because of the sharp contrasts
of the various registrations, they are able to vividly
col or bits of material and brightly spotlight such textures as
balalaika-strumming, bagpipe-wheezing, calliope-creaking,
foot-stomping, drum-rattling and fly-buzzing. Some of the
more exotic registrations we used-the soft peau-de-buffle
(tooled leather), the ncontrolled by pedals with the ease of a conductor's batonare
now fading from fashion. Even harpsichord-builder William
Dowd now prefers purging these modernities to repairing
them. This recording, then, which includes performances
from our January 12, 1972 recital, and from Sylvia
Marlowe's last public concert appearance (March 30, 1976),
represents a style of music-making which also may shortly
vanish altogether.
None of the present works (except the Couperin) have, to
my knowledge, ever been performed or recorded on the harpsichord
before. Stravinsky's Three Easy Pieces, although dedicated
to Alfredo Casella, Erik Satie and Serge Diaghilev,
were composed in 1914-15 with Diaghilev's piano-playing in
mind. Diaghilev did not play the piano. Hence the secondo
part is not only easy, but totally static, a minimalist effect
enabling Stravinsky to take satiric shots at some popular
forms. (The device, not new in the twentieth century, can be
discovered in such works as Haydn's Symphony No. 101,
Beethoven's Quartet Op. 135, and the Couperin Musettes on
this recording.) The Five Easy Pieces, composed in 1916-17
for his children Theodore and Mika, have easy tops rather
than easy bottoms, and were dedicated to Eugenia Errazuriz,
the wealthy Chilean who introduced him to Picasso. Both
sets were later orchestrated by Stravinsky, the Valse and
Polka even turning up in arrangements for cymbalom. Sylvia
Marlowe, aware of the "many years pianists have been playing
harpsichord music," enjoyed the "switch" of doing the
opposite, and found these early works of "my long time friend
Stravinsky" to be "enchanting."
In the Preface to' BeIa Bartok's six-volume piano cycle
Mikrokosmos, the composer writes that "a number of pieces
.. . are suitable for cembalo." 1£ Bartok had known really fine
harpsichords, he might have exploited the instrument much
as he did the piano and the string quartet, seeking new sounds
and new methods of playing. The fabric of Staccato, for instance,
is not dissimilar to that of the pizzicato movement
in his fourth string quartet, which, incidentally, might also
sound terrific on harpsichords. I use a hand cluster where the
composer might have employed his famous "Bartok" pizzicato,
.snapped off tile fingerboard. In preparing From the Diary
of a Fly for publication, Bartok recommended an illustration
to help us visualize the fly's stimulating day. But by
distracting the listener with such an amusing personality, he
conceals a phenomenal little essay in poly-tonality.
Stravinsky's very youthful and very Russian Scherzo, dedicated
to Mme. Nicholas Richter, was recently discovered
and published in a Soviet magazine. The now-it's-Tchaikovsky-
now-it-isn't style comes out bitingly on the harpsichord,
strongly opposing the tender middle-section.
Virgil Thomson's Walking Song is naive and haunting; it ·
originated in a film entitled A Tuesday in November, made
by John Houseman and Nicolas Ray for the United States
govemment in 1945. Mr. Thomson was present in our audience,
I remember.
Eric Satie, master humorist and confirmed existentialist,
responded, it is said, to an accusation that his music had no
form. In September 1903 (or 1891, according to Busser), he
placed musical structure on a philosophical plane with the
shapes of fruits and created a musical "pear