I have subtitled this book “What Modern Players Can Learn from Period Instruments,” but I’d like to begin by addressing Why.

A Personal Odyssey

My interest in historical keyboards began while I was a piano student in Boston in the 1970s. Boston was then (and still is) a center for early music, a magnet for specialist performers and ensembles. I had a series of transformative lessons with the harpsichordist Robert Hill immediately after his studies with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam; the near-fanatical attention that he brought to articulation made an indelible impression on me. Not long afterwards, my first encounter with a fortepiano produced a eureka moment: I had been struggling with Beethoven’s G minor cello sonata and realized that my problems with its brilliant passagework, which drowns out the cello unless played mp instead of ff as Beethoven indicates, would be solved by such an instrument. More than a decade passed, but I eventually made my way to Cornell University and spent three wonderful years as a doctoral student of Malcolm Bilson; with his help I acquired a fortepiano of my own, and performed that very cello sonata—playing ff to my heart’s content without drowning out my cellist.

I continued to perform on modern as well as historical instruments, and began teaching at Oberlin Conservatory, working with both “modern” students and Historical Performance majors. As a teacher and as a performer, I became increasingly interested in applying what I had learned from old instruments to “regular” performance. Two unexpected opportunities gave me the chance to do just that. The first was a novelty concert called Aha! Concerto at the Carmel Bach Festival in 2008. I was to perform the Rondo movement of Beethoven’s C major concerto, beginning at the fortepiano, and then, after a dramatic interruption by the emcee, switching to a modern concert grand.