Music: Man from Ypsilanti

The maker of the finest U.S. harpsichords was back last week in Ypsilanti, Mich., full of happy memories. Wiry, black-haired John Chain’s had vastly enjoyed a holiday season of harpsichordery in Manhattan. But he was anxious to get to work.

The U.S. enthusiasts for harpsichord music are a small, fervent, growing body. John Challis is probably the only man in the world who, despite war, continues to manufacture the instrument.* Like most people interested in harpsichords, he is irritated by the lay notion that the instrument is a sort of Pleistocene piano. The true ancestor of the piano is not the harpsichord but the dulcimer, a more primitive stringed instrument played like a xylophone, with little hammers held in the hands. The harpsichord’s strings are not hammered but plucked with quills or leather plectra (picks).†

But the harpsichord was the piano’s great predecessor. In the first half of the 18th Century, it was as popular as the piano is today. The finest composers of the century wrote for it prolifically. The harpsichord repertory includes a mass of rich and fascinating music.

Bakelite and Boar Bristles. John Challis makes his harpsichords in a two-floor studio above an Ypsilanti dress shop. Two assistants, who have been with him for years, help him fit together the intricate combination of carved hardwoods, leather plectra, metal strings and frames, ivory keys and Siberian boar-bristle springs out of which a fine harpsichord is concocted. A slow, painstaking craftsman, Challis turns out only about eight harpsichords a year, at prices ranging from $400 to $2,700. So far, wartime shortages of materials have not affected his output.

John Challis, who is a first-rate harpsichordist himself, was born in Ypsilanti 36 years ago, the son of a jeweler and watchmaker. While at Michigan State Normal College (where he studied piano and organ), he heard his first clavichord, decided to make one. His handiwork was so successful that he went to England to study ancient instruments with Arnold Dolmetsch.

After four years Challis returned to the U.S. bent on creating a type of harpsichord powerful enough to be heard in large U.S. concert halls. He introduced many improvements into harpsichord manufacture, utilized modern materials like bakelite, aluminum and nylon. “I am not an antiquarian,” he explains, “my idea is simply to carry on the manufacturing of harpsichords where it left off when the instrument went out of popularity at the end of the 18th Century.”

*England’s world-famed Dolmetsch family, who made and played harpsichords at Haslemere, have long since turned to defense work.

†In the clavichord the strings are thumped by levers of metal.