The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 26 (2020) No. 1

The Golden Age of Flemish Harpsichord Making: A Study of the MIM’s Ruckers Instruments. Edited by Pascale Vandervellen. Brussels: Musical Instruments Museum, 2017. [420 pp. ISBN 978-9-090-10838-4.]

Reviewed by Saraswathi Shukla*

1. A Cross-Disciplinary and Cosmopolitan Project

2. Restoration Methods and Cataloging

3. Context and Case Studies

4. Conclusion

1. A Cross-Disciplinary and Cosmopolitan Project

1.1 From 2013 to 2016, the Musical Instruments Museum (MIM) in Brussels undertook a groundbreaking project to restore and document all eighteen Ruckers (and fake Ruckers) instruments in its collection. This ambitious endeavor, led by the curator of keyboard instruments, Pascale Vandervellen, united the work of over thirty specialists in various fields, including organology, musicology, art history, art conservation, and acoustics, who were based in Brussels, Liège, Florence, Hamburg, Neuchâtel, Vienna, Besançon, Bohlingen, Edhill, and Paris—collaborations that went further afield than EU borders. The outcome of this project has been documented in this edited volume, which received the 2019 Bessaraboff Award from the American Musical Instrument Society. It includes critical essays on methodology and the historical context for Flemish harpsichords in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; a full catalog of the Ruckers and Couchet instruments at the MIM, along with their collecting and restoration history; and seven articles exploring groundbreaking research methods in keyboard instrument studies that have produced new findings.

1.2 Stéphane Vaïedelich, curator of musical instruments at the Musée de la Musique, the musical instrument collection at the Philharmonie de Paris, sets the tone for the book by positing that a musical instrument, “as both a tool and a work of art assigned cultural heritage status when entering a public collection, … is multifaceted and complex to understand,” and that “although the history of some [instruments] seems well established and they bear the mark and signature of their original maker, they can no longer pretend to be the product of a single master because they have been so thoroughly modified over the years” (p. 9). Despite a somewhat simplistic narrative justifying the project (“the new Flemish style shattered the codes of Italian harpsichord making by creating a fresh aesthetic involving more solid instruments with distinctive decorations, and often using various woods from different origins”), he argues that the best way to investigate facets of the histories of these instruments, which have been neglected due to outdated research methods and biases, is to “bridge the artificial divide between scientific disciplines and incite them to interact with each other” (p. 9). This principle structures and unites all the contributions to this edited volume.

2. Restoration Methods and Cataloging

2.1 In her introduction, Vandervellen elaborates on her role in the cultural politics, funding, and process of enacting this vast research project within the MIM and on how the contributions in the volume, some by participants in the study and others by institutional colleagues, relate to it. Her transparency about these processes elegantly conveys the degree to which the scholarly components of this book were shaped by the practical constraints and necessities of restoring and documenting the palimpsestic histories of these eighteen instruments. In both of her contributions, she is meticulous in building from basics, beginning with a history of the Ruckers and Couchet dynasties before tracing the global exportation of their instruments and practices of remodeling—in particular, ravalement, which described a variety of processes by which antiquated instruments were expanded and partially rebuilt in the eighteenth century or later. In the catalog, she clearly and evocatively describes the structural characteristics of the instruments that these makers produced—the three kinds of virginals (muselaar, spinett, and mother-and-child) and the harpsichords (single and non-transposing double manual).

2.2 Among the strengths of Vandervellen’s catalog of the MIM’s Ruckers and Couchet instruments is the transparency with which she outlines the building of the MIM’s collection, the restorations former curators of the museum performed, and the lapses in documentation that make the origins and restoration histories of certain instruments difficult to trace. Each harpsichord was measured, redrawn, and subjected to a CT scan or X-ray. Molds were made of bridges and decorative moldings, the woods and pigments were analyzed for the first time, the instruments underwent dendrological and dendrochronological analyses, the composition of the roses was documented for the first time, the pigments and papers were sampled and studied, and new photographs were taken of all the instruments.

2.3 The particularities of each instrument and their vastly differing provenance and collecting histories mean that no single analytical and restoration method could be applied to all the instruments in the collection. To what degree should the instruments be returned to their “original state,” and when does a restoration or a renovation of a historical artifact become a historical modification rather than a bad restoration? With two exceptions, all the instruments in the MIM’s collections were altered after they were acquired by the museum. Not only is none of those restorations reversible, but they typically lack documentation to aid in dating the various layers and attributing responsibility. Vandervellen’s chronological assessment of the MIM’s previous curators and the technicians and assistants with whom they collaborated uncovers both enlightening and damning details of the institution’s history.

2.4 While the past restorations of instruments are clearly documented, the MIM conducted its most recent restoration of those instruments only after the book was completed; thus, the complexities of Vandervellen and her team’s own choices, as well as images of the newly restored collection, are sadly missing from the catalog. For instance, the Ioannes Ruckers mother-and-child muselaar virginal from 1610 (inv. 0275), described on p. 103, underwent two ravalements in the nineteenth century, resulting in its keyboards being stacked atop one another, the case enlarged on the left and covered with a reddish wood veneer, and a new name plate added. Little apart from the soundboard reveals that the instrument was made by Ioannes Ruckers. The reworking of the mother involved so many irreversible structural changes to the case, while the child remained in near pristine condition beneath the wood veneer and eight (!) layers of paint, that one proposal for exhibiting the instrument involved showing the various stages of renovation and restoration. As I learned in a visit to the MIM and a conversation with Pascale Vandervellen, the mother will tentatively remain with its nineteenth-century red veneer, with a strip of swatches showing the coats of paint; the soundboards will be cleaned; and the child, stripped of its added layers of paint, save for a set of swatches on the back of the case, will likely be displayed in its original seventeenth-century state with the Flemish printed paper exposed. This integral aspect of the MIM’s project would have offered valuable insight into the intricacies of the cultural politics of restoration and the particular challenges posed by musical instruments, had it been possible to include it.

3. Context and Case Studies

3.1 The first three essays, by Karel Moens, Marcel Vekemans, and John Koster, provide historical, art historical, and organological context. Moens examines the social and legal constructs that made harpsichords from Antwerp such a lucrative global export as opposed to other musical instruments, and convincingly demonstrates that harpsichord and virginal makers were the only luthiers to be a part of the Guild of Saint Luke as opposed to the guild of minstrels. Koster provides a much-needed link between keyboard repertory, cultures of keyboard playing, and the instruments themselves in Antwerp. The weakest of the set is the report by Vekemans, which asks to what degree paintings can provide clues about the original state of Flemish keyboard instruments, but in the end, primarily addresses limitations to identifying the makers of instruments in Dutch and Flemish paintings.

3.2 The six essays following the catalog entries demonstrate how different scientific techniques, when applied to particular aspects of these instruments or to individual case studies, yield information and data for which organologists and musicologists have never before had confirmation. Some of the essays, intended for conservators and museum specialists, are quite technical in their examination of the materials and stylistic characteristics of the roses of individual harpsichord makers (Emily Akkermans and Patrick Storme) and of the pigments and papers used on soundboards and cases (Steven Saverwyns and Marina Van Bos). For musicologists and musicians, these still offer valuable insights into the sources of the materials used, the highly technical processes applied to these instruments, the profiles of the artisans and decorators who worked on them, and the financial investment of producing and acquiring these instruments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One study analyzes the acoustic silhouettes of antique instruments, some not in playing condition, and others before and after restoration, and takes into account how wood ages and how restoration seems to affect resonance (Sandie Le Conte). The dendrological analyses by Arjan Versteeg, Pascale Fraiture, Armelle Weitz, and Philippe Gerrienne reveal that the thousands of Ruckers and Couchet instruments used not only European spruce, but also a wider variety of woods sourced from high-altitude regions in central Europe, as far as eastern Austria. Contrary to common belief, the wood used in these instruments was not stored for decades before use, and instead, on average, was used within a few years. The circulation, acquisition, and manipulation of lumber for keyboard instruments in Antwerp was far more complex than historical sources have indicated. The concluding essay, by Alain Anselm, synthesizes many of these techniques to prove that a harpsichord long thought to be by Hans Ruckers is in fact a seventeenth-century French instrument that was subjected to numerous ravalements, including by Antoine Vater and Pascal Taskin.

3.3 These essays are, on the whole, beautiful examples of cross-disciplinary collaborative research. One criticism might be found in the framing of the book. Although the instruments are cast as the protagonists of the study, they ultimately play a passive role as objects rather than actors. Koster, for example, adopts Grant O’Brien’s assumptions in Ruckers: A Harpsichord and Virginal Building Tradition (p. 221) about how balance points make an instrument easier or harder to play, without considering how these instruments may have conditioned the technique and capacities of musicians of the past and the extent to which such an evaluation reflects a bias towards a particular school of thought about harpsichord playing and technique. Functionality is also a key component of Le Conte’s study of acoustic silhouettes in Flemish harpsichords, but only insofar as functionality is defined as the basic ability of a jack to pluck a string when a key is pressed. How does the frequent and regular use of a harpsichord or virginal affect an instrument’s acoustic silhouette, and is there not a difference between functionality and playability? How do the International Council of Museums’s deontological codes impact the restoration and conservation of historical instruments, and how might those requirements and limitations inform musicological assessments of instruments and their repertory? The MIM’s study and these essays open new doors to exploring these questions.

4. Conclusion

4.1 This is a methodologically groundbreaking volume and the first of its kind to bring together so many different approaches to studying instruments. Vandervellen has gathered very high quality contributions and skillfully structured and framed them so that that these disparate disciplines speak to one another and weave a nuanced picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish musical and artisanal practices as they relate to the building of keyboard instruments from Antwerp. The large format of the book and its generous color photos of instruments, their restorations, their interiors, and microscopic details of their paint and wood make it a valuable source for musicians and musicologists alike. Where musicology has moved away from instrument studies and continues to debate the role of scientific study, technology, and the digital humanities, this book revives discussion by providing raw data as well as methodologically innovative analyses. It serves as a link between the cultural and material studies so prevalent in musicology, newer branches of critical organology, and traditional museum studies and organology. By opening new possibilities in the field of keyboard studies, Baroque music, organology, and art history, this volume reveals rich areas of research that scholars can and should pursue in the future.

^[*] Saraswathi Shukla (saraswathi.shukla@gmail.com) is completing her dissertation, “The Harpsichord at the Intersection of Art and Science during the Ancien Régime,” under the supervision of Philippe Canguilhem and Nicholas Mathew at the University of California, Berkeley, and received her AB in History from Princeton University. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50, the Georges Lurcy Fellowship, the Chateaubriand Fellowship, and a DAAD Study Scholarship, and was most recently awarded the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music’s Irene Alm Memorial Prize.