Make Music --<i> and</i> the Instrument

The clavichord’s sound is ‘softer, clearer, cleaner’ than a piano’s. --Mario Gagnon, student

Richard Loucks’ pale fingers touched the clavichord’s ebony keys, sending tiny brass wedges upward against its harp-like array of strings.

The instrument responded in an ancient voice, crudely resonant and yet sweetly subdued, as Loucks played the stately melody and counterpoint of Johann Sebastian Bach’s E major etude from “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”

To Loucks, however, there is more to the clavichord than making music. There is also the making of the instrument itself.

For 16 years, Loucks, a 65-year-old Pomona College music professor, has been teaching undergraduate music students how to build the instruments on which Bach and other baroque masters composed.

“It’s more a matter of spirit than intellect,” said Loucks, a Claremont resident. “I don’t think it’s wrong to play Bach on the piano, but if people have a choice, I think they would find the clavichord or harpsichord better” for baroque and early classical music.

Mario Gagnon, 21, one of the two students enrolled in Loucks’ course this semester, said he is attracted to the meditative quality of the clavichord’s sound, which he described as “softer, clearer (and) cleaner” than that of the piano.

Loucks’ class is not only small in numbers--a maximum of two students a semester--but also is unusual in format. Two experts contacted by The Times said Loucks may be the only college instructor in Southern California who teaches a course on how build two keyboard instruments that predate the modern piano.

Ray Giles, curator of the UCLA Music Museum, said that the re-creation of ancient instruments has customarily drawn limited attention. But he added that Loucks’ course reflects a continuing interest in the United States and Europe in performing Renaissance, baroque and early classical music on instruments that are as close to the originals as possible.

Wm. Neil Roberts, a classical harpsichordist who is co-owner of a Los Angeles shop that sells his handcrafted harpsichords and clavichords, said he knows of no other college in the area that teaches students how to make clavichords.

Ancient instrument making first caught Loucks’ fancy in 1963 when he went on sabbatical leave to study the 17th-Century pipe organs in Frankfurt, West Germany.

“Next to clocks and ships,” he said, “organs were the most complicated machines of their day.” But he said he soon lost interest after completing only three wooden pipes because he was overwhelmed by the mechanical and acoustical complexity of the project.

Building a clavichord, on the other hand, is comparatively easy, he said, because the instrument does not require cast iron parts and heavy furniture to hold high-tension strings in place, as does a piano. After starting his clavichord class in 1969 without any formal instruction, Loucks said he sharpened his skills by spending two sabbaticals studying the craft under John Barnes, former curator of the Russell Museum, which has one of Europe’s finest collections of harpsichords and clavichords.

Alan Douglass, the other student in Loucks’ class, will follow in his teacher’s footsteps. Douglass said that next fall he will continue his biology studies in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, which owns the Russell Museum collection, and study clavichord and harpsichord making with Barnes through Pomona College’s Study Abroad Program.

Douglass, a 19-year-old sophomore, said he dreams of becoming a master instrument maker. “This is what I love. If I could start a career, I would.”

Using woods such as beech, cherry and spruce, students in Loucks’ class build clavichords from kits or from scratch using plans Loucks has drawn from original 18th-Century European instruments. Proficiency at the piano is required of the students who take the course. Students also must pay a $100 fee each, which entitles them to keep the instrument they complete.

(By contrast, Roberts said his finished clavichords range in price from $800 to $3,000. Prefabricated clavichord kits cost as little as $400.)

College Supports It

Loucks, who also is chairman of the music department, said the college has provided him about $16,000 over the years for buying tools, kits and hardware for building clavichords, harpsichords, and most recently a Viennese piano, a copy of the 18th-Century style instrument played by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his contemporaries. Stanton Hales, associate dean of Pomona College, said the college gives strong support to Loucks’ clavichord workshop.

“The effort to learn about the clavichord is marvelously instructive,” Hales said. “Students learn a great deal about the history of music through the construction of a classical instrument. They also learn about the physics and technology of music.”

The clavichord works on simple mechanical principles.

When a key, which rests on a long lever, is pressed down, it lifts a tangent, or brass wedge, that strikes a brass string, causing it to vibrate. The tangent not only makes a string vibrate, but functions like a guitar fret, measuring out a length of string to produce a specific pitch on the chromatic scale. Because the tangent bisects each string, making it vibrate on both sides, one side of the string must be dampened to kill dissonant overtones.

First Evidence in 1425

Although its origins are obscure, the earliest evidence of the clavichord appears in 1425 in a German church altar carving, Loucks said.

By the 16th Century, the four-octave cousin of the piano was already in vogue among composers, who used it as they wrote, and as a practice instrument for pipe organ players, who placed one or more instruments atop another larger clavichord to simulate a huge church organ’s multiple keyboards.

In contrast to the clavichord, the harpsichord produces a louder sound by using levers and jacks that pluck pairs of strings tuned to the same pitch. Because of this, the harpsichord was an instrument that could stand out in concert and opera halls, whereas the clavichord’s lack of volume restricted it to chamber music and the private study, Loucks said.

Like the piano, the clavichord has an advantage over the harpsichord in that individual notes can be made to sound instantly louder or softer, depending on the force with which a key is struck. This made the clavichord the most expressive keyboard instrument of its time, Loucks said.

Although J. S. Bach used the clavichord for composing, Loucks said it was one of Bach’s four sons, Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who wrote some of the instrument’s most important music as well as a seminal book on keyboard technique, “The True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments” published in the 1760s.

‘Box of Flies’

Despite the clavichord’s great popularity in Germany and Spain, not all Europeans were taken with its dulcet tones. Roberts said the French likened its sound to “a box of flies” instead of resonant strings.

By the turn of the 19th Century, the pianoforte, or modern piano, was well on its way to eclipsing the clavichord and harpsichord. But revival of interest in early music performance styles in the 1930s led music buffs to revive an ancient craft that had long since disappeared.

For one of Loucks’ former students, building a replica of an ancient instrument has offered several rewards.

“I became famous, I was known as the girl on campus that (built) the harpsichord,” said Beatrice Tice, a Pomona College European languages and linguistics major who graduated in 1981.

“It was an incredible experience. I didn’t even know what a chisel was,” said Tice, who had persuaded Loucks to let her build an 18th-Century Flemish-style harpsichord that took her more than two years to complete. But after she finished it, she said, “I not only had gained an intimate knowledge of the instrument, but learned some rudimentary carpentry.”