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van der Voort, Han

Han's Homepage - Chapter Music, Section Harpsichord Han van der Voort's Homepage After having experimented earlier with two smaller versions, the first one in 1969, I designed and built a two-manual harpsichord in 1976. I don't play it myself (I have never had the ambition to learn), but my wife Mirjam does, sometimes accompanied by a flute-playing friend. It is roughly based on the famous 1769 Taskin harpsichord but it is certainly not a copy. I had to use different (cheaper) materials and simpler building techniques, because I did not have a lot of money at the time and of course I never have had the skills of a professional harpsichord builder. I looked at it as another experiment, not knowing in advance whether the frame and the soundboard would be able to bear the combined tension of the 183 strings, whether the mechanism with two manuals and three registers would work reliably, and last but not least the sound would be good. I decided to experiment radically with the soundboard. When the 12 spruce planks of the soundboard were glued together, the 8' bridge, the 4' bridge, and the braces were attached, I exposed the whole soundboard to the bright sunlight for a few days. As I expected, it cracked in several places. The cracks were then filled with strips of spruce, and the soundboard was put outside in the sun again. This process was repeated until no more cracks appeared. Then, the soundboard was glued to the harpsichord case. I did not use a hard glue, but a layer of silicon rubber, to enable the soundboard to vibrate more freely near the edges. This was an idea inspired by the flexible way the cone of a loudspeaker unit is usually suspended inside its metal frame. At the end of the day, or rather the year, I had spent just Dfl 900 for materials. (One Dutch guilder was about 50 US dollarcents at the time.)

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