A few weeks after I had first entered Harvard in the fall of 1927, I saw a harpsichord for the first time being played by Arthur Whiting in the first concert of his annual “expositions of chamber music.” When as a child I had asked my mother what a harpsichord was, she must have mentioned its two keyboards. Keyboards had always fascinated me, and on Sunday mornings I gazed intently at the multiple manuals of the organ above the minister's pulpit. What gratified me most was their color, that they were not white like those of pianos but golden brown; perhaps they were made of boxwood. But in 1927, neither multiple keyboards, nor Arthur Whiting's program, nor the flaming Chinese red interior of his harpsichord led me to any further investigation.

Two years later, on learning that one of these same Dolmetsch-Chickering harpsichords had been given to the Music Department of Harvard, I obtained permission to examine it at close range. The encounter prompted me to request access to the instrument for the rest of the college year. In May 1930, at a concert of the Harvard Musical Club in Paine Hall, I made my first public appearance as a harpsichordist. I played the “Earl of Salisbury Pavan” and its Galliard by Orlando Gibbons, and an A-minor Fantasy and Fugue of Bach.

By December of that year, I had already decided that I wished to specialize in the cultivation of early keyboard music and most particularly in the performance of Bach on the harpsichord and clavichord. The award of a travelling fellowship to Europe enabled me further to pursue my aims. When I committed myself to the harpsichord, I little foresaw the adventures into which the instrument and its transport would lead me. Many of them have been exasperatingly repetitious, but after more than forty years, they can still take entirely new and unsuspected turns. Most of these episodes have been unpleasant, and I look back on them all with little satisfaction, except as in their fantastic and varied ways they represented tests of fortitude or challenges to keep my temper.