If at any moment I were to be asked how I feel about recording, my immediate reaction would be to reply, “I hate it.” Whether this reflects a fundamental attitude or an accumulation of unpleasant experiences, I am no longer able to tell. I have always disliked mechanical contraptions and have only reluctantly become accustomed to such things as the automobile and the telephone. But I have never grown to accept without resistance what comes out of a loudspeaker. At various moments in my life this resistance has been slightly weakened, but there is little evidence that it will ever be entirely overcome. It is also significant that I do not like mirrors and that I am apt to take a strong dislike to persons who are said to resemble me. Let others make what they will of this bit of self-revelation! For reasons that are obviously related, I dislike being photographed, and on the rare occasions when I have sat for painters or draftsmen, I have only been prevented by a consciousness of common human weakness from bitterly resenting what they have produced. Later, when all has become ancient history, I calm down and none of this upsets me anymore.

What I have just said is not quite true. Floods of unpleasant memories assail me when I think even of recording sessions that took place over a quartercentury ago, but since there is some evidence that my recordings have caused more pleasure to others than to me it is perhaps worthwhile to tell a history of how and under what circumstances they were made.

When asked how I feel after a recording session, I am tempted to answer, “like an orange after it has just been made into marmalade; squeezed, shredded, minced, crushed, boiled, hermetically sealed, more embittered than sweetened.” As far back as 1933, I had made some experimental wax recordings with the clavichord, but my first commercial harpsichord recordings were made in December 1936 for a company called Musicraft. They consisted of the Italian Concerto coupled with the three-part Ricercar from The Musical Offering, and the G-major Partita. Of the sessions themselves I recall little except that they went well enough for two or three sides of the Italian Concerto to be accepted without retakes.