About Us
John is an independent conservator and maker of early keyboard instruments. He retired in 2016 from The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF) where he served as conservator and curator of musical instruments since 1988. His research on issues in musical instrument conservation resulted in two books including Artifacts in Use: The Paradox of Restoration and the Conservation of Organs. His book, Changing Keys: Keyboard Instruments for America, 1700-1830 is a descriptive catalog of the CWF keyboard collection. His recent copy of the 1793 Mount Vernon harpsichord is now exhibited there, and his just completed reproduction of the oldest piano made in America is his 34th reproduction keyboard instrument. He recently received the 2020 Curt Sachs Award, the highest honor given by the American Musical Instrument Society for lifetime contributions to the goals of the society. His website is www.PreservationTheory.org.
Email John Watson at [email protected]
Lance grew up on a small dairy farm on the Isle of Wight, where he played the horn in the County Youth Orchestra and was organist at Godshill Parish Church from the age of 13. A Junior Exhibition award enabled him to study piano with Joan Last for his last two years at High School. He went on to study music and organology at the University of Edinburgh, where his tutors included Kenneth Leighton and Grant O’Brien; he later took various history and Renaissance art courses at the Open University. He has had a portfolio job career, including schoolteacher, museum curator and crime scene investigator. He currently teaches harmony and music history at the University of Edinburgh, edits The Galpin Society Journal, and plays the organ at Polwarth Parish Church. Lance is particularly interested in eighteenth-century keyboard instruments and has published articles in Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, The Galpin Society Journal, and the RMA Research Chronicle, some in collaboration with Jenny Nex, and contributed multiple entries to The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (2014) and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Brass Instruments (2018). He is also a keen allotment gardener, an emerging composer, and enjoys beachcombing for fossils.
Email Lance Whitehead at [email protected]
Peter Bavington established his early-keyboard workshop in 1986, following study at the London College of Furniture and two years working with the harpsichord, clavichord and fortepiano maker John Rawson. After many years as a harpsichord maker, restorer and professional tuner, from 1998 he concentrated exclusively on making and restoring clavichords. Following his retirement in 2020, he continues to undertake research into all aspects of keyboard musical instruments: he is the author of several articles on their construction, history and acoustics, and of the book Clavichord Tuning and Maintenance, now in its third edition. He was a founder member and past Chairman of the British Clavichord Society (now disbanded). In 2020 he received the Anthony Baines Memorial Prize, which is awarded annually for an outstanding contribution to organology. Peter lives and works in London, UK.
Email Peter Bavington at [email protected] His website is www.peter-bavington.co.uk
David worked at SAIC since 2009, assigned to the Crane Naval Warfare Center (IN). Prior to Crane, he was an independent consultant, software developer, and small business owner for fifteen years. His roles in IT have included project manager, lead developer, business analyst, consultant, IT manager, architect, DBA, and mentor. He performs freelanc work in .Net 6 and MSSQL.
David Marrero's website including his resume and contact information is at dmarrero.com/.
About Boalch-Mould Online
Text of an article by John Watson, published in the 50th anniversary edition of
Harpsichord Fortepiano in Fall, 2023.
The Venerable ‘Boalch’ ready for its next 70 years
In 1925, Georg Kinsky proposed an agenda for the nascent field of organology in his report to the First Musicological Congress in Leipzig.1 While an increasing number of museums were offering catalogues of their collections, there was a need for lexicons of historical instrument makers and that he was already collecting details about keyboard instrument makers toward that end. According to William Waterhouse—who was among the later scholars who have answered the call and published major directories of instrument makers—Kinsky’s research on 2000 keyboard makers was tragically destroyed in the second World War.2
It was only a decade later that Donald H. Boalch, a linguist and librarian, completed the first edition of his monumental compendium, Makers of the Harpsichord and Clavichord 1440-1840, published by George Ronald in 1956.3 Lists of each maker’s legacy of surviving instruments added greatly to the challenge and the value of his work. Reviews of the 1956 edition praised Boalch for the magnitude of his effort, Frank Hubbard accurately predicting it would be ‘a work on which all future efforts must depend’.4 But Hubbard and other reviewers also noted the author’s failure to accomplish the impossible: full and accurate information collected from correspondents from every country, few of whom had specialist knowledge. That there would be a second edition was, in the words of Edgar Hunt, ‘a foregone conclusion.’5
Only fourteen years after the first edition, Donald Boalch announced work was to begin on ‘an enlarged and completely revised edition’ and by the time ‘B2’ finally rolled off the presses in 1974, the present author was among the eager consumers placing orders, my copy soon to be well garnished with fine-print marginalia. With its list of makers now 50% longer than in the first edition, Howard Schott aptly called it ‘one of the foundation pillars of all research into the older types of stringed keyboards.’
Peter Williams noted in his review of B2, that Boalch ‘is a kind of first step for historians, players, owners, museum directors, auctioneers, antique dealers, even makers and harpsichord-kit-handymen.’6 The truth of that statement has been proven repeatedly. John Koster reported that it was his assignment to gather details on the instruments in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for Charles Mould’s 1974 revision of Boalch that grew into his own monumental catalogue of that collection.7 Amusingly, a playful hoax perpetrated by Gustav Leonhardt and Martin Skowroneck in 1984 to build a new ‘antique’ harpsichord began with a search in Boalch. To avoid comparisons with any surviving work that might expose the trick, they choose an obscure maker with no surviving instruments. So began the creation and public debut of a 1755 harpsichord of Nicholas Lefebvre, a ‘forgery without intent to defraud’.8
The last of the print editions appeared a quarter century later, in 1995. Charles Mould, whose doctoral study about Kirkman had been supervised by Donald Boalch, took on the job of compiling what was to become a massive tome. The number of makers grew to about 1600, with about 2000 surviving instruments. Biographies and the catalogue of instruments were divided into separate parts. Kept were the geographical and chronological conspectus of makers and the list of English virginals; but gone were the illustrations. In his preface, Charles Mould acknowledged the internet would soon be the better medium for free public access to the database. One optimistic reviewer of B3 predicted the database would be available as a digital resource a year or two after publication of the book.9 While most organologists are skilled with word processors or even page layout software, the technologies required to turn research databases into interactive online applications require a different and specialized range of skills. Early attempts to convert Boalch were abandoned. It would be twenty-seven years before the dream of a universally accessible Boalch in the digital format came to pass.
The online version of the venerable Boalch database—now called Boalch-Mould Online (BMO)—finally went live on September 1, 2022, with a warm endorsement from Charles Mould. What Howard Schott had written in his review of B2 was surely all the more true of Boalch-Mould Online, that ‘a whole generation of potential readers may only know [‘Boalch’] indirectly from the many references to it in the literature.’10
Lance Whitehead took responsibility for preparing biographies for hundreds of new makers and for updating most of the existing ones from B3 in time for the public debut of the database, and his work continues. The core team also includes the author as database designer and general editor, and Peter Bavington as clavichord editor.
As had each of the print editions, the new online version is a qualitative and quantitative leap forward. Where printed books have practical limitations of page count and photo illustrations, the online medium is virtually unlimited. The original 1840 cutoff is now pushed to 1925 to encompass the historic first generation of the early keyboard revival. Instruments by unknown makers, some with great historical significance, had been excluded from all three print editions, but now are being entered as time permits.
A range of features are now included that could not have been imagined when Donald Boalch began his work in the middle of the last century. No longer are inaccuracies and omissions frozen at the moment of publication. BMO is a truly dynamic and cooperative enterprise in which all of its users are partners and it is as accurate and up to date as we all make it. Online users can easily submit corrections and new information directly online whenever and wherever they are needed. The scheme for user submissions is designed so editors can vet the new information before making it public. Short videos demonstrate the features of the BMO application and show how to submit corrections or new information.
Many of us gather bits of information over the years in hopes of finding time to mine them for some sort of publication that may never materialize. Some users have now discovered the database to be a way to instantly publish findings no matter how small, with credit to them for their contribution always added to the ‘Information sources’ field. Authors of books and articles can simultaneously promote their own past publications and extend the reach of their research by integrating their findings in the database. Everyone gains from the process.
To draw attention to some of the most interesting new discoveries made during the daily updating of BMO, a micro-blog has been incorporated into the website’s landing page. Written by editors and potentially other guest writers, the blog contains links to photos and records within the database, and tips for using some of its features.
Information searches that would have taken days in the print versions, can be completed in an instant. The maker’s biography is a click away from each instrument record. As it grows, BMO is becoming a portal to resources throughout the internet: Look up an instrument and find links to the museum’s online catalogue entry with photos or a YouTube video of a demonstration, talk, or performance on that instrument. Bibliographic references also carry hyperlinks if the source is online as they increasingly are.
Searching ‘makers’ returns a clickable list of makers whose name or whose biography contains the search term. The results list also shows the number of surviving instruments which, when clicked, opens the full data on those instruments. Collections can also be searched by any fragment of the collection name, or by its location. Again, a clickable number indicates how many instruments from that collection are in the database, and clicking the number opens the full data about the instruments.
The number of photographs linked to individual instruments already surpasses two thousand and continues to grow at the time of writing. A photo search feature displays all the photos for a requested maker, collection, date, current location, or place where made, the results then sortable by maker, date, or current location.
A challenge in Boalch and throughout the harpsichord and clavichord literature has been the need for a concise and stable means of identifying specific instruments. The last two print editions of Boalch struggled to invent short identifiers which encoded the maker’s name and date. The last edition also indicated conjectures with ‘(A)’ for Attributed. Practical complications arose or the system failed entirely as attributions and date estimates changed. Hence ‘BAFFO(A), G. A. 1791(A)’ was the identifier in B3 for an instrument possibly by Baffo possibly made in 1791. The same instrument had been previously designated in B1 as No. 10 under Baffo. The same instrument is now re-attributed to Vincentius with a new date estimate of 1610-1612. The ID for the same instrument is now simply, reliably, and forevermore ‘BMO-57’.
Boalch-Mould Online is a project of the Musical Instrument Research Catalog (https://mircat.org), a new charity that also provides support for Early Pianos Online (https://earlypianos.org) and a new digital archive for preserving the collected research of scholars (https://mircat.org/archive/) which now hosts the archive of the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society. Another of the archive’s first online collections is a fascinating trove of photos and notes from a 1961 tour of European harpsichord makers, museums, and collectors. MIRCAT relies entirely on its users for financial support and for contributions of time and information for its musical instrument research initiatives.
1 Georg Kinsky, ‘Stand und Aufgaben der neueren Instrumentenkunde‘ in Bericht über den I. Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress der Deutschen Musikgesellschaft in Leipzig vom 4. bis 8. Juni 1925, pp.78-79, available online from Google Books at https://bit.ly/448OOWL.
2 William Waterhouse, The New Langwill Index: A Dictionary of Musical Wind-Instrument Makers and Inventors, Tony Bingham 1993. Preface, p.vii.
3 For more about Donald Boalch, see his obituary by Charles Mould in The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 53 (April 2000), pp.9-10.
4 Frank Hubbard, review of B1 in MLA Notes, Vol. 14 No. 4 (Sep. 1957), p. 572.
5 Edgar Hunt, review of B1 in Music & Letters, Vol. 38 No. 2 (Apr. 1957), p.197.
6 Peter Williams review of B2 in The Musical Times, Vol. 115, No. 1582 (Dec., 1974), p.1049.
7 Personal communication with John Koster in 2022.
8 The project was detailed by Martin Skowroneck in ‘”The Harpsichord of Nicholas Lefebvre 1755” The story of a forgery without intent to defraud’, The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 55 (April 2002), pp.4-14. According to Tilman Skowroneck (private email to the author 2023-07-02) the 2002 GSJ article was necessitated by the unintended listing of the forgery as a genuine antique in B3. The instrument remains in the database as BMO-1156 with an appropriate Red Flag notice about its true origins.
9 Howard Schott, review of B3 in The Musical Times, Vol. 137, No. 1843 (Sep. 1996), p.30.
10 Howard Schott review of B2 in Early Music, Vol. 3. No. 1 (Jan. 1975), p.83.
John Watson is a retired conservator and curator of instruments at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Virginia. His research on keyboard instrument history and conservation resulted in thirty-four reproduction instruments, numerous articles and three books. He designed and published the online version the 'Clinkscale' database of Early Pianos, now maintained by Thomas and Michele Winter, and he is designer and general editor of Boalch-Mould Online. He received the 2020 Curt Sachs Award, the highest honor given by the American Musical Instrument Society for lifetime contributions. Website: www.PreservationTheory.org