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I was once fortunate to participate in a PDQ Bach music concert performed by the unparalleled Peter Schickele. (For those of you who have never heard of PDQ Bach, I envy you for a pleasant listening for the next few hours.) At some point that night, Schickele needed a harpsichord — but, as he explained, He just doesn't have the money to tour with one. So he took out some knives and forks and a piece of A4 paper from the tuxedo jacket and put them on the strings of the grand piano, and-very remarkable-when he played it, it sounded like a harpsichord. 

Or close enough to my ears. But as I learned later, the sound of a real harpsichord is completely different. The grand piano is built for the stage, and its reverberation is attributed to the concert hall where it is placed (or, in modern classical music recording, its sound is processed through digital plug-ins). On the other hand, the harpsichord's reverberation comes from its own wooden wall. Therefore, the real harpsichord is not very loud. 

I find this kind of intimate music very attractive. The sound swims; after your finger disappears, every note you touch will last a long time. This is a warm and rich sound, equivalent to enjoying the music of a campfire in cold weather. There is an irreconcilable difference between my description and Dan Moller's. You have a reason to scratch your head. The latter recently called cembalo's sound "dry and thin." I suspect this is because its warmth is unlikely to be noticed or experienced unless you are next to a well-made harpsichord. The microphone may not be able to pick up this subtle reverberation. This is the kind of instrument that sounds best to the person playing it. 

According to almost any modern estimate, this would make the harpsichord inferior to the piano, at least on a practical level-even on an aesthetic level. After all, does this mean that the harpsichord is risking becoming an individualistic instrument, purely to please the player? The audience is excluded from the music experience. 

I will do the opposite: the piano is a tool for expressing individualism; the harpsichord is a tool for dynamic and undisciplined spiritual life. This is a glorious relic of an era when music got rid of the impossible burden given to it by romanticism and was deprived of any other reliable source of ontology. The harpsichord belongs to an era, and music is an activity that needs to be completed, not heard. When Bach described his Goldberg Variations as "to refresh connoisseurs", one might think that he meant that just listening to these variations would refresh us. Not at all: as he said, these connoisseurs received "keyboard practice." Refresh yourself by playing variations, rather than passively listening to them. After all, what people buy is not a recording of sheet music, but sheet music. 

This makes the harpsichord not solipsistic, but "discrete". In the Middle Ages, the word used for "rhetoric" was usually the Latin word dictamen, which meant "to write letters." For centuries, this has been the main metaphor for understanding communication. Bach often tells his readers about his work, as if he was writing them a music letter. When I sighted Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord, I received a message from Bach and joined the conversation.

Therefore, although the harpsichord is played in the living room, it is not a radical individualistic activity at all. When we understand a musical work as a form of communication between the composer and the reader--just as we understand the reading of a book as a form of communication between the author and the reader--it becomes full of Possibility of explanation. I participate in the composer's music as a peer, even if I acknowledge its excellence.

The 19th century witnessed a steady decline in this form of participatory music. The music played in the living room after dinner is no longer considered the real thing, but the real thing—the shadow of the concert hall. When sound reproduction technology emerged, it ensured this transition. For most people, music is no longer a discourse activity, but an "experience".

The piano performed well in the concert hall. Of course, in this context, if the piano and the harpsichord play against each other, the piano will undoubtedly win. But a piano concert is an experience, not a word. In the concert hall, there is an indestructible barrier between the composer and the audience. What is produced is not words, but the audience's one-way awe of the composer and performer. When Bach played on the piano at a concert, we heard more of Schopenhauer or Adorno than Bach. 

The music of the harpsichord is best heard in my living room. My friends and I like it very much. It doesn't need to be loud there. It's talkative and friendly like this.

John Ahern is a PhD student in Musicology at Princeton University.

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