Ralph Kirkpatrick (RK), eminent harpsichordist and scholar, was one of the most influential figures in the revival of the harpsichord in the twentieth century. He was also an important figure in the reevaluation of Baroque performance practices that began in the 1930s and 1940s. He performed not only on the harpsichord but also on the clavichord and fortepiano. He played the modern piano for pleasure and occasionally in performance and recordings. He can be heard playing piano in a recording of the Stravinsky Septet (Columbia, 1956) and in a reissue of a recording of Mozart concertos, K. 413 and K. 491 (EMI, 2006). He was known especially for his performances of Bach and Scarlatti, but he also performed and recorded music by, among others, Byrd, Couperin, Mozart, Purcell, and Rameau. Kirkpatrick was also very involved with contemporary music. As early as 1934, he was performing the Falla harpsichord concerto in New York; in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he was playing contemporary pieces by Otto Luening, Ernst Lévy, Robert McBride, and Virgil Thomson. He also performed works by composers such as Elliott Carter, Darius Milhaud, Walter Piston, and Quincy Porter, and a number of works were written specifically for him, including Carter's Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961) and Cowell's Set of Four for Harpsichord (or Piano) (1960). In January 1961, he performed an entire program of twentieth-century harpsichord music at Berkeley that included pieces by Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Frederick Delius, Ernst Lévy, Peter Mieg, Halsey Stevens, Vincent Persichetti, Douglas Allanbrook, Mel Powell, and David Kraehenbuehl. The concert was recorded for later release on the Music & Arts label (1997).

Kirkpatrick was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, a small town west of Boston, into an academic family. He began studying piano at a young age with his mother and others, and he continued his piano studies in Cambridge while he was attending Harvard. He performed on the piano with a number of groups while at Harvard. His later assessment of his early years as a piano student was that he had a technical fluency, but was not at all disciplined.