William Dowd (1922–2008) was an American harpsichord maker who specialized in building historically authentic instruments. Dowd apprenticed with John Challis, the leading US harpsichord maker in the 1940s. In 1949, he set up a workshop in Boston, Massachusetts, with his friend Frank Hubbard. The partnership ended in 1958, and Dowd established his own workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The workshop produced approximately twenty instruments a year until Dowd closed it in 1988. From 1971 to 1985, Dowd maintained another workshop in Paris with Reinhard von Nagel. These workshops primarily built two-manual harpsichords based on French prototypes by the Blanchets, Hemsch, and Taskin, although they produced some smaller instruments as well. RK owned a number of Dowd instruments and worked closely with Dowd in the 1960s and 1970s.

December 28, 1977

Dear Bill,

This is a brief attempt to give a sign of life and some indication of my present adventures. If the typewriter seems occasionally to lapse into gibberish, please forgive it for it is I who most of the time have no knowledge of what it is doing!

After the New Haven and Cambridge concerts, which went beautifully, and just the day before my intended departure, I learned without surprise that the arrangements for the proposed films in Leipzig and Potsdam had fallen through—bankruptcy, as I later found out. So instead of going to Germany at all I took off for Italy, three weeks in advance of my first concert there. My mobility instructor, Chris Foy, was bound for Venice on his first trip to Europe, so I decided to go along as guide or rather pilot-guide. There we met up with my former pupil Fred Hammond, who was due to accompany me on my tour. After a few days in Venice we set off in a rented truck for Florence, stopping in Castelfranco to pick up Fred's harpsichord on the way.