Kirkpatrick, Ralph (Leonard)

Kirkpatrick, Ralph (Leonard), eminent American harpsichordist, clavichordist, pianist, music scholar, and pedagogue; b. Leominster, Mass., June 10, 1911; d. Guildford, Conn., April 13, 1984. He commenced piano studies when he was 6. He pursued his academic education at Harvard Univ. (A.B., 1931), where he received the Paine Traveling Scholarship. After making his public debut as a harpsichordist in Cambridge, Mass., in 1930, he went to Paris to pursue research at the Bibliothèque Nationale; he also had further instruction from Boulanger (theory) and Landowska (harpsichord) before continuing his training with Dolmetsch in Haslemere and with Ramin and Tiessen in Berlin.In 1933 he made his European debut as a harpsichordist. In 1933-34 he taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1937, which enabled him to study 17^th and 18^th century performing practices in chamber music in Europe. His findings in Spain were later utilized in his valuable biography Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton, N.J., and London, 1953; 3^rd ed., rev., 1968). In 1940 he joined the faculty of Yale Univ., where he served as a prof, of music from 1965 to 1976. In 1964 he also served as the first Ernest Bloch Prof, of Music at the Univ. of Calif, at Berkeley. Kirkpatrick greatly distinguished himself as an interpreter of Baroque keyboard music, excelling particularly in the works of Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. He prepared a chronological catalogue of the latter’s sonatas, and his “K.” numbers became widely accepted. He also ed. 60 of the sonatas (N.Y., 1953) and a complete collection of the keyboard works in facsimile (N.Y., 1971 et seq.) of Scarlatti. Kirkpatrick was the author of Interpreting Bach’s “Well-tempered Clavier”: A Performer’s Discourse of Method (New Haven and London, 1984) arid of the memoir Early Years (N.Y., 1984).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire