I first met Ralph Kirkpatrick forty years ago, on a blustery winter day in February 1974. Of course, I had been aware of him for years. His Bach recordings dominated all the record stores I used to haunt, and his groundbreaking musicological work had revolutionized critical response to Scarlatti. Ralph was also a “fellow” of my Yale residential college, Jonathan Edwards, and I had heard him perform there once or twice in the good-sounding dining hall where I took most of my meals.

I remember that in one of those dining room recitals Ralph performed the Couperin Ordre, which includes “L'Ậme en Peine.” At eighteen I found most of that suite, which I was hearing for the first time, incomprehensible, but Ralph's “Soul in Pain” burned itself into my consciousness. That man, I thought, had really lived what that music was trying to express.

Like nearly everyone else at Yale, I was in awe of this famously forbidding musical eminence about whose sternness people mostly only whispered. I would never have had the nerve to approach him myself. Nonetheless, aware of my efforts on the guitar, Yale School of Music dean Phillip Nelson had been kind enough to set up a personal meeting. So I shouldered my guitar in its heavy traveling case and made my way across the Yale campus to Ralph's office in the rather dilapidated Stoeckel Hall building that housed the Yale School of Music.

I played for him a Bach lute suite, BWV 995, and some Scarlatti sonatas I had just transcribed. Ralph was candid in his reaction: some of my trills in the Bach had “collapsed.” I wanted to shout “if you'd walked 3/4 of a mile in the cold with a heavy traveling case on your left shoulder and played without warming up, your trills would have collapsed too,” but of course I was too much in awe to do anything of the kind. In contrast, after hearing the Scarlatti transcriptions, Ralph remarked that hearing this music on the guitar was “fascinating.”