Mark Salling

I decided I wanted to be a musician when I saw the movie 'Amadeus' around 1987. I was five years old, so it was a good time to start piano lessons after seeing Tom Hulce who played Mozart play the harpsichord on his back with his hands crossed. Such a great movie to inspire a five-year-old.

American Actor

David Ogden Stiers

The simple act of sitting down and playing something enormously complex and spiritually uplifting on a harpsichord just bores kids to tears. There's no sizzle, there's no grab. But it's the great lesson of serious music, that it invites you to listen, rather than demands that you listen.

Ted Cassidy

Lurch's quietness is a result of personal dignity. He appreciates things of quality. His greatest joy is playing Bach on the harpsichord, and he recognizes the music as the result of 'a great human effort to express.

Peter Shaffer

There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.

English Playwright

David Russell

I don't try to make the guitar sound like the harpsichord or lute. That makes you end up being like a bad copy.

Scottish Musician

Julia Holter

I don't use the harpsichord because it evokes a past time period: I use it because I like the sound.

American Musician

Eddie Condon

Someday we may have as many followers as the harpsichord.

The harpsichord was popular in the 16th to 18th centuries, so it often appears in historical or classical music contexts.

Historical Use

Unlike a piano, a harpsichord produces a distinctive, metallic sound because its strings are plucked, not hammered.

Sound Quality

The harpsichord cannot play dynamics (loud and soft) because the mechanism plucks strings with consistent force.

Not Volume Adjustable

 would such expressive instrumental program music, as it was known, become popular. By then, larger, more varied ensembles were the rule with woodwinds, brass, and percussion to help tell the tale. But Vivaldi pulled it off with just one violin, strings, and a harpsichord.

Why should you listen to...

 and you say give me a harpsichord right okay uh he came from a musical family mozart's father was an accomplished composer in his own right but once he realized how talented his son was he bent over backwards to support him he basically says my career is over my

The Secret of Musical...

 what really made the modern computer possible? Yes, the military involvement is an important part of the story, but inventing a computer also required other building music boxes, toy robot flute players, harpsichord keyboards,

Harpsichord