In June 2016 the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies at Cornell and the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition celebrated the long and still-flourishing life of the harpsichord, with concerts, papers and instruments representing the many faces of the instrument from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries. With the support of the University of California Berkeley, the Piccola Accademia di Montisi and David Cates, the conference was conceived as a valediction to the life and work of Alan Curtis (1934–2015), founder and former director of Il Complesso Barocco and Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley. Curtis died suddenly at his home in Florence in July 2015. Nicholas Mathew (University of California Berkeley), a conference convenor, wrote in the programme:

Fittingly, concerts and academic sessions were interlaced, comprising one keynote lecture, three paper sessions, six solo recitals, a masterclass and a roundtable discussion of Curtis's legacy.

A gregarious, cembalophilic and caffeine-enlivened audience was discernibly sobered by Richard Leppert's (University of Minnesota) keynote address, which offered a view of the potential darkness lurking within the beauties of a historical keyboard instrument. Leppert read the mottoes and motifs inscribed on instruments as signposts for the social mores and, often, hegemonies which music helps to enforce. Two striking examples offered by Leppert are instruments that are often overlooked by music scholars and musicians, because they are known principally as decorative objects. The first is a 1902 Érard piano, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice, with a carved ebony case by Alexandre Charpentier and decorative painting by Albert Besnard (see Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 149). With the lid closed, the piano is a fine but ordinary example of nineteenth-century casework, but the open lid reveals a sumptuous reclining female nude, painted in cream and gold. Leppert juxtaposed this image with a traditional motto found on seventeenth-century Flemish harpsichords, ducere uxorem est vendere libertatem (to take a wife is to sell liberty), suggesting that both can be understood in the tradition of the ‘domestic’ keyboard, a tool for the regimentation of the feminine. A second example, overlooked in a different sense, is the decoration of the modern Steinway. Leppert read ‘Steinway black’ as alluding to men's evening wear – a blazon of power, industry and conformity – and consequently as a repudiation of the ‘feminine’ keyboard. This is a plausible reading, which in a fuller treatment would be nuanced historically: the rise of the celebrity male piano virtuoso (and his stereotyped habit) predates the ubiquity of ‘Steinway black’ by about a century.

The theme of the ‘domestic’ and ‘feminine’ keyboard was taken up by Sara Ceballos (Lawrence University). Glossing Philip Brett's famous thesis of social performance in four-hands piano music (‘Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire’, 19th-Century Music 21/2 (1997), 149–176), she read the unusual multi-keyboard trios of Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy (1744–1824) as a ‘performance of family’. These compositions, for ‘the German piano, the English piano and the harpsichord [clavecin]’, were written as salon showpieces for Madame Brillon and her two daughters. Ceballos inferred who played which part on which instrument, and used this to suggest a reading of the pieces in terms of maternal and sororal relationships. This sociological reading was developed in the discussion afterwards, which probed the material circumstances of those performances: the ‘English piano’ was probably an early Broadwood square piano; ‘clavecin’ might refer not to a harpsichord but to a wing-shaped instrument with a piano hammer action; and the physical arrangement of the three instruments during performance mirrored family ties.

Emily Dolan (Harvard University) picked up the thread of anomalous multi-keyboard compositions with a discussion of a better-known example: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Concerto in E flat major for Harpsichord and Fortepiano, Wq47. Dolan queried whether this concerto's juxtaposition of ‘new’ and ‘old’ keyboard instruments evinced a differentiated reception of those instruments. The fact that they share the same musical material might signal not that ‘the “new” is pitted against the “old”’, but rather that ‘a new, melded unity’ is being constructed. On the other hand, the same fact might be interpreted as putting the timbral contrast between them into sharper focus: attending to ‘timbral play’, Dolan suggested, can help deepen what might otherwise seem to be a thin repetition and exchange of simple motives between the two instruments. Dolan connected this concerto with a late eighteenth-century fascination with instrumentality and instrumental obsolescence, an emerging theme of her work. However, Bach's concerto must also be understood in relation to the multi-keyboard concertos of Berlin composer Christoph Nichelmann, and ultimately those of Johann Sebastian Bach; the aesthetics of unity through variety, after all, has deep roots in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century thought. In this, then, Bach's curious concerto represents an apt milestone on the journey traced by Dolan involving the ‘history of musical historicity’.

The first day of the conference ended with a panel discussion of Alan Curtis's scholarly and artistic legacy. It was moving to see luminaries in the field of early music performance and scholarship – Daniel Heartz, Anthony Newcomb, John Roberts, James Weaver, Arthur Haas and Tilman Skowroneck – speak of Curtis with warmth and gratitude; their remembrances indicated, to those who had not known him, the deceased's brilliance, indefatigability and generosity. A concert by seven of his former students, representing over forty years of Curtis's teaching, concluded the afternoon. Arthur Haas (SUNY Stony Brook and Yale School of Music) said, ‘I still consider myself a student of Alan. It was a transformative experience every time I saw him.’ Haas's beautiful performance of Gaspard Le Roux's pieces in F sharp minor, recalling his first lesson with Curtis, gave eloquent support to his spoken remarks. Katherine Heater's ‘Ricercar a 3’ from The Musical Offering evinced deep musical understanding. Gilbert Martinez's rendition of Rameau's Pygmalion overture, in the arrangement by Claude-Bénigne Balbastre – a fiendishly difficult transcription, rendered more so by the blistering tempo taken – flirted naughtily with the outer bounds of le bon goût in a way that one imagines might have made Curtis smile.

The second day of the conference was a marathon of three concerts – all formidable, and all different. David Catalunya gave a novel recital of repertory from Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 117, on his reconstruction of a clavisimbalum. On this hammer-action instrument, described in early fifteenth-century sources as a ‘mechanized psaltery’, Catalunya played with a wide range of dynamics and cantabile nuance.

Carole Cerasi (Royal Academy of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama) gave a powerfully moving recital of French baroque works. From the first note of d'Anglebert's D minor unmeasured prelude – a warhorse of the harpsichord literature, if there is such a thing – it was clear that she spoke with a voice both unusual and profound. Particularly striking was her rendition of François Couperin's ‘Le Dodo, ou L'Amour au berçeau’, from the quinzième ordre of 1722; in her hands, the opening major-seventh dissonance rang with all the loving, tender warmth of the beginning of Schumann's Dichterliebe. Cembalophilia, Cerasi's playing affirmed, is not solely a disposition towards the harpsichord as an external object, but also the particular kind of love of one for whom the instrument is an extension of herself, a love felt and expressed uniquely in the language of the harpsichord.

Edward Parmentier (University of Michigan) played a recital of early seventeenth-century English and Italian music. His approach to this repertory was captivating. In William Byrd's The Maiden's Song he played the florid counterpoint staccato; the Gouldian texture was austere but lent clarity and rhythmic variety to the counterpoint. This was not so much sensual as rational beauty. Parmentier enthralled his audience further with the capriccio from Frescobaldi's first book (1624) ‘di obligo di cantare la quinta parte senza toccarla’ (in which it is necessary to sing the fifth part without playing it). For those not familiar with this wonderful piece, Willi Apel's explanation will be helpful: it is ‘a kind of enigma canon. The soggetto is written in whole notes at the beginning. The enigma for the player, who must also be a singer, is to find the places where this subject should or can be sung against the four lower parts, for they are not indicated’ (The History of Keyboard Music to 1700, trans. Hans Tischler (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1972), 466). Parmentier sang the soggetto in all the possible hexachord mutations across the whole gamut. He deployed a hoarse bass, a lovely natural tenor and a flautando falsetto with aplomb. There was something madly alchemical about all this.

Two papers rounded out the second day, each dealing with sentiment, reason and sentience in French philosophies of the harpsichord. I (Matthew J. Hall, Cornell University) argued that François Couperin's reflections on the mechanisms of expression at the harpsichord are dependent on categories borrowed from Neoplatonist thought. Thus Couperin's famous expression that the art of touching the harpsichord is the art of ‘giving it a soul’ refers to the Neoplatonist ontology of the soul as harmony, or a relation of number and measure. In this way, the practical art of harpsichord touch – agréments, articulation, overholding, timing and so forth – animates the instrument by making it the sounding board of the movements of the player's soul.

Deirdre Loughridge (Northeastern University) dealt with another kind of metaphysics whereby the harpsichord may be understood as animate. She explored Diderot's ‘sentient harpsichord’, a metaphor whereby the harpsichord's keys are likened to the philosopher's senses, and its strings to the body's nerve fibres: both oscillate and set one another resonating. In the philosopher, this resonance results in feeling and thought; for the harpsichord too, then, this resonance must result in something analogous to the philosopher's sentience. From this lemma Diderot concluded (or at least joked) that the harpsichord must also be sentient, rational and even procreative, giving birth to ‘little harpsichords, living and resonating’. The sentient harpsichord, Loughridge argued, is an emblem of Diderot's radical materialism.

The third and last day of the conference began with a magisterial presentation by John H. Roberts (University of California Berkeley) on the timing of cadential chords in eighteenth-century recitative, ‘one of those questions that seems never to go away’. Roberts propounded an important distinction: the timing of a cadence, whether the accompaniment cadences with the voice or is delayed, is but one half of the question; for in either case, the voice may either end with a characteristic truncation formula (such as a falling fourth or second) or with a full grammatical cadence (which includes a suspension over the dominant). In short, the harmonic syntax of the cadence interacts with its rhythmic placement. Both aspects must be kept in view when interpreting a particular notation in a particular source, and in determining the placement of the cadence in performance. Roberts did not falter in pointing out methodological shortcomings in previous studies. (See, for example, articles by Dieter Gutknecht, ‘Performance Practice of recitativo secco in the First Half of the 18th Century: A Contribution to the Debate of the Interpretation of Recitative, Particularly in Handel's Operas’, Early Music 33/3 (2005), 473–494, and Paul Sherrill and Matthew Boyle, ‘Galant Recitative Schemas’, The Journal of Music Theory 59/1 (2015), 1–61.)

Leon Chisholm's truly original contribution situated the harpsichord and its cousin the clavichord at the heart of the sea change in musical techniques and styles that took place around 1600. Chisholm argued that the increasing use of the keyboard as a compositional tool was symptomatic of broader changes in early modern music culture that encompassed the expansion of the keyboard into many other domains including instruction, rehearsal and private speculative study. If polyphony had long implied an ensemble context, by the end of the sixteenth century the prominence of the keyboard offered a radically different paradigm for polyphonic music-making. To distinguish between consort playing and keyboard playing, Chisholm coined the terms ‘unincorporated’ and ‘incorporated’ polyphony respectively. ‘Corporate’ would be a more straightforward and neutral term to cover the first concept, since ‘unincorporated’ implies a lack, whereas ‘corporate’ describes the actual practice of those ensembles. Nevertheless, Chisholm argued convincingly that the rise of ‘incorporated’ keyboard polyphony was accompanied by new conceptual and experiential categories for musical production and reception. It would be hasty, though, to trace a straight line from the keyboard's new role around 1600 to its entrenched predominance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most importantly, how the developing ‘incorporated’ polyphony interacted with concurrent and still-surviving corporate practices (such as chamber-music ensembles) remains an open question.

The day was rounded out by a masterclass with Parmentier, with participants from Cornell University and Berkeley, and a recital by Jean-Luc Ho (Franconville, France). Ho played J. S. Bach's Ouvertüre nach französischer Art, bwv831, with an overtly Gallic accent, which seemed a caricature. By contrast, his intabulation of ‘J'avais cru qu'en vous aymant’, an anonymous air de cour published by Ballard in 1705, was beautifully played, richly elaborated in a polyphonic texture. With the Bach it seemed there was something to prove, but with this simple air, which was encored to everyone's delight, there was only heartfelt singing.

The conference concluded on the note on which Peter Sykes (Boston University and The Juilliard School), President of the Westfield Center, had intoned his introductory remarks: the only two essential components of cembalophilia are a harpsichord and love, not only of the instrument but of one's colleagues, teachers, students and the art itself. Even in debate or disagreement, whether aesthetic or intellectual, there was unity in the shared love of the discourse. Cembalophilia is indeed a salutary condition.