Rockin' the Harpsichord!

[wd8dky]

[Tom Williams]

The irony is that Ted Cassidy was indeed a talented keyboardist and singer.

[Bobadohshe]

This is pretty funny

[SteveCoscia]

Must've missed that episode. Clever.

[uhoh7]

Making Harpsichords was almost a lost art, and I read many bad ones were made in the 20th century, you have to be very careful buying them. But now you can hear some fantastic ones.

 

[video:youtube]

 

They do fall out of tune, but can be tuned superfast by an experienced player: 2-3 minutes even.

 

This lady explains alot about them:

 

The Adams Family was such a awesome show.

[stoken6]

I was fortunate to try one as a youth. My overwhelming impression is the fragility of the thing - like a violin or a top-notch acoustic guitar.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[uhoh7]

Bach was a serious gearhead, hear his favorite keyboard, the "Lautenwerck" (you have to love German), a morph of the harpsichord and an older polyphonic mainstay, the Lute:

 

[video:youtube]

 

Consider the most advanced technological device in Bach's lifetime, perhaps outside of various timepieces, was the church organ. In that sense he really was an astronaut

[uhoh7]

How did they rock these harpsichords back in the day? Here is an incredible presentation, informed by the latest scholarship on historical keyboard methods, where improvisation was a central skill:

 

[video:youtube]

 

If you like those sequences, with the suspensions, here is a fantastic cheat sheet with the fundamentals keyboard players knew in 1780, a free resource created by the Scholar and Professor Derek Remes:

Voice Leading Patterns of the 17th and 18th centuries

[uhoh7]

haha, I know I'm beating this horse, but some might enjoy,

 

Here we have essentially the same ideas as above, but presented by a very experienced live performer and his Killer harpsichord:

 

[video:youtube]

 

This is really the Jazz niche in "classical" gigs. It's too bad kids don't train from the start, as they once did, to improvise with the "cliches" (cadences and sequences) mentioned in the videos. It's very interesting to see the common aspects of Basso Continuo with basic Jazz chords, e.g. major and minor (though minors always differ rising and falling, and sport #3s in the 5ths); triads which invert over a fixed bass, flat and natural 7ths; but just as Jazz chords start showing #11s, b9s etc, some 18th century chords notated by figured bass have very unique flavors, eg. the 2nd which is a 3/4/6 and the falling 6th which is 3/4/#6 by default (and in the "Rule of the Octave" basic progression.)

 

Certainly the Basso Continuo can express sublimly dissonant harmonies, EG many of Bach's 371 chorales, and even in those short examples one or 2 "tonicizations" produce rich, often melancholy depth, equal, many feel to a well improvised "standards" complexity.