Graduate recital in harpsichord performance

Includes recorded audio files in WAV and MP3 format, 63:03 in length.The harpsichord and its literature covers nearly three hundred years of musical composition and development. This ended around 1810 when the increasingly popular piano completely replaced the harpsichord as the standard keyboard medium. The harpsichord was brought out of antiquity during the mid-1930s in answer to a growing desire by musicians to perform baroque music on original instruments. These musicians found that this antique instrument did not play much like a piano but was something entirely different, leading a number of patient keyboard pioneers to try to recreate the technique and style of playing the harpsichord following limited and often conflicting accounts of historical witnesses and theorists. In what had begun as almost blind obedience to the score, harpsichordists were beginning to interpret the manuscript as a guideline for elaborate improvisation. Melodic, rhythmic, and even harmonic digression were becoming standard practice when performing early music. I organized this program so that each piece on the first half of the concert was in some way connected with a piece by a different composer on the second half. Cabezon and Frescobaldi both preserved the Renaissance polyphonic style of writing; Philips and Jacquet de la Guerre both drowned their compositions in droves of Italian innuendos; Rorem and Rameua explored the instrument???s technical capabilities; and the two Bachs, father and son, both explored dynamic possibilities on harpsichords with two manuals. This was no longer just a concert of selected works by a few random composers but a collection of different approaches to the instrument from a variety of classical and modern perspectives. (See more in text.