A few of my clients have instrument collections, each containing a few interesting antique harpsichords and other early keyboard instruments. Sometimes these instruments have lessons to teach, and some interesting problems to solve. The unsigned French double manual harpsichord at left is one such example. Identified in the 1950's by Frank Hubbard as being made ca. 1760 by Collesse in Lyons, France, it has lately been re-identified as having been made by Jacob Stirnemann, also from Lyons. Wouldn't you think that harpsichords would have the maker's name painted or stamped somewhere?" I would, but more about this later (see page 3). The current owner purchased the instrument in the 1950's and hired Frank Hubbard and William Dowd to bring it into functioning order. From what I can tell by snooping around the inside of the harpsichord, it may not have been in the best shape when it entered the Hubbard/Dowd workshop.

With the benefit of nearly fifty years of hindsight, one must say that the restoration work done by Hubbard and Dowd nearly fifty years ago would not stand up to the standards used today. I doubt very much if Hubbard and Dowd were to undertake this project now that they would do it the same way. What they did at that time was to install aluminum jack guides, and new-fangled plastic jacks. The soundboard had numerous cracks, so they glued cloth to the underside of the soundboard to prevent further cracking. And Dowd installed one of his legendary "joy bars" - basically a dowel with a valve lifter spring on one end - under the bass end of the SB.

Today, the new plastic jacks are now old plastic jacks, disintegrating into thin air. The configuration of the jacks chosen by H&D was essentially the reverse of what it should have been - they chose to have the upper manual jacks plucking the string to the left, and the lower manual 8' jacks plucking the right string. I don't know where this idea came from; the only "authentic" configuration is to have the lower manual 8' jacks plucking the left, longer, string, and the upper manual 8' plucking the right, shorter string. The result is that the sound is wrong because the plucking points are incorrect. Curiously, the dampers are glued onto a seperate, non-plucking jacks, so there are four plastic jacks weighing down the keys for each note.

At right is a shot of the instrument's interior, looking towards the belly rail and the cheek. You can see the cotton glued to the underside of the soundboard. Some of this cotton, placed selectively, is not a bad idea if the soundboard is especially fragile. But this amount of cotton under the SB is bound to have a negative effect, and indeed, removing even 50 square cm in the treble had a very good effect on the instrument's tone. Note also the piece of wood running from the center of the image off to the left - this is a new upper brace put in by Hubbard and Dowd. It's just fine, as are the other new braces. They even replaced the oak pinblock, although they nicely preserved the pinblock veneer.