When I was a first-year undergraduate student at Oberlin College, a writing teacher assigned us a small research project. It was simple enough: choose a research topic, formulate a question about it, and produce a short paper. I chose to write about the chekker, the English term for a common Renaissance keyboard instrument which may or may not have been an early clavichord. Nobody knows exactly what it was and no one will probably ever resolve the issue completely. It introduced me to a long and interesting debate that had been carried on in places like the Galpin Society Journal, and introduced me, before I ever met them, to people like John Barnes, the English instrument researcher who would become indispensable to this work. An equally important experience was my introduction, through this lively debate, to the concept of an historical keyboard instrument as something between a treasure hunt and a mystery novel, and that sense of historical adventure has never left me.

The immediate mystery about the chekker led to questions about a larger mystery. Where were all the clavichords? Oberlin Conservatory, one of the premiere schools for early music in the country, had a half dozen harpsichords of different historical styles in the mid 1980s and even a virginal, but not a single clavichord, and Oberlin was not alone in this regard. The importance of clavichords seemed to be obvious in the historical sources I had been reading for my research paper. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) wrote in 1753, right at the beginning of his introduction to Part One of his famous Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments: “A good clavichordist makes an accomplished harpsichordist, but not the reverse.” Were we missing something relevant? I smelled a mystery as interesting as the great chekker debate, perhaps one in which I could somehow directly participate.