''' upwards is not known; perhaps
in rivalry to Shudi (Kirkman’s c'''' of 1772; Shudi and Broadwood's C'
for Maria Theresa, 1773) or in inspired anticipation of piano compass (Merlin,
1777, C' to c''''). English family of harpsichord and piano makers of Alsatian origin. Jacob Kirkman (b Bischweiler, 4 March 1710; d Greenwich, buried 9 June 1792) came to England in the early 1730s, and worked for Hermann Tabel, whose widow he married in 1738. He took British citizenship on 25 April 1755, and in 1772 went into partnership with his nephew, Abraham Kirkman (b Bischweiler, 1737; d Hammersmith, buried 16 April 1794). (The Jacob Kirkman who was organist of St George’s, Hanover Square, at this time is probably to be identified with another of Jacob Kirkman’s nephews, who died in 1812.) Abraham Kirkman in turn took into partnership his son, Joseph Kirkman (i) (dates of birth and death unknown), whose son, Joseph Kirkman (ii) (c1790–1877), worked with his father on their last harpsichord in 1809. The firm continued as piano makers until absorbed by Collard in 1896.
‘The first harpsichord maker of the times’ was Fanny Burney’s description of Jacob Kirkman; but by then Shudi was dead and her father had become increasingly associated with Kirkman, judging by the correspondence with Thomas Jefferson (1786; quoted in Russell), the entries in Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819–20) and other sources. Clearly Kirkman and Shudi had a near monopoly of the English harpsichord at its apogee and various estimates have been made of how many they produced. In the event, over twice as many Kirkmans of one period or another have survived, and Hubbard’s phrase ‘almost mass produced’, though an exaggeration, is an understandable one. It is not known how many men worked for Kirkman in any one year, nor are the details of his organization and working methods entirely clear. Burney related several anecdotes about Kirkman – about his becoming a money-lender (a matter for which there is much documentary proof), his wooing of Tabel’s widow and his way of dealing with the competition of the ‘keyed guitar’ (see English guitar) – that clung to his reputation; more pertinent to his development as a harpsichord maker are his willingness to make experimental harpsichords (such as the enharmonic instrument for Robert Smith of Trinity College, Cambridge, c1757), his realistic approach to new-fangled inventions (such as Walker’s quasi-Geigenwerk, the Celestina, popular in the 1780s), his experience in related keyboard instruments (spinets, claviorgans, pianos c1770, square pianos c1775) and even his membership of the German Reformed Church of the Savoy, with which were associated both a musical repertory and an organ tradition much more cosmopolitan than even the most exceptional London parish churches. The fact that he sued his former worker Robert Falkener in 1771 for putting up for sale as by Kirkman a harpsichord made by somebody else (probably Falkener, like those now in the University of Glasgow and the Russell Collection, with Kirkman nameboards) does not suggest vindictiveness; no doubt his complaint was justified and accords with other masters suing former apprentices at this period (e.g. Gottfried Silbermann and Hildebrandt).
The detailed differences and similarities of construction between a Kirkman and Shudi harpsichord are still being studied, and comparisons of their tone will remain subjective for some years to come. What can be said is that there were three main Kirkman–Shudi harpsichord types: singles of 8', 8', singles of 8', 8', 4' and doubles of 8', 8', 4', lute. More often than not there is a buff batten (normally, but not always, for the lower 8') after c1760, but lutes were not included on Kirkman singles; sometimes on singles, the buff was activated by a foot-lever (or ‘pedal’). The machine stop, which is unlikely to date before 1765 (and then only at first for special instruments), was a registration aid whereby on being ‘cocked’ by a hand stop the foot could operate machinery attached to the register ends in such a way that stops could be changed without the hands needing to be removed from the keys. The standard system – though there were others – was that on, for example, the Shudi and Broadwood harpsichord of 1775 now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum (said to have been Haydn’s): on depression, the pedal changed the tutti (I 8', I 4' + II 8') to a softer and different colour (I 8' only, not coupled to II lute). On such English harpsichords, there was no coupler as such, the common 8' row of strings being a ‘dogleg’ stop, that is the jacks were so shaped that they rested on the ends of both manuals’ key-levers. This is today commonly regarded as a weakness of design, that the upper 8' cannot be contrasted with the lower 8' in two-manual play since the lower manual automatically plays it; but virtually no literature known to an English harpsichord player in the 18th century required such ‘manual contrast and equality’. Either way it is unlikely that the upper manual was voiced other than as an echo, although on this point scholarly debate still continues. No English organ builder of 1750 was aware of the possibilities of two well-matched manuals; much the same could be said of the harpsichord makers.
The inner construction of a Kirkman was noticeably more complex, and might be thought more clumsy, than a French harpsichord of the same period, but both had developed fairly directly and clearly from the 17th-century Flemish harpsichord. Why English makers by the 1720s were so firmly committed to an idiosyncratic outward appearance to their harpsichords – veneered inside, then outside, with inlay and occasionally quite exceptional marquetry in the keywell – is less clear; of more importance to the player, Kirkman devised an unusual keyboard and key-bed construction, whereby the keys of both manuals were placed on a three-rail frame with front rail pins, so that the key-fall is limited by a rail at the finger end of the keys, a very unpleasant system for fingers used to a French keyboard. Judging by the music written for French harpsichords in 1750, the manual coupling system, whereby the upper manual slid into and out of play with the lower manual and thus did without dogleg jacks, was not at the time understood to have the subtle advantage over the English dogleg system for which recent authors have given it credit. By 1750 French upper manuals also were required for echoes.
Kirkman
harpsichords made from about 1766 may often be found to have two pedals: one
for the machine stop, one for the lid (or nag's head) swell (see fig.1). The latter was the name given to the device whose
mechanism, operated through various types of lever by a pedal, opened a segment
of the top lid (shaped like the elongated head of a horse) along the bentside.
Some kind of lid swell was incorporated in Plenius’s lyrichord or lyrachord
(a version of the gut-strung Geigenwerk), of which a description was
published in 1755; in 1769 Shudi patented his Venetian Swell, later adopted by
Kirkman. Jefferson (in a letter dated 25 May 1786) called the device a ‘machine
on the top resembling a Venetian blind for giving a swell’ and requested one
for his commissioned Kirkman harpsichord. This was some years after Burney
reported (in his travels in Italy) that the two Kirkmans he saw in Venice, and
the Shudi in Naples, were ‘regarded by the Italians as so many phenomena’,
although it is significant that the known exported Shudis (to Berlin, Vienna
and Russia) had all the paraphernalia of the mature English harpsichord:
machine stop, Venetian swell, four registers and a compass extended to C'.
Why Kirkman should extend at least one of his harpsichords to c'''' with
reversed colouring of the sharps and naturals from g''' upwards is not known; perhaps
in rivalry to Shudi (Kirkman’s c'''' of 1772; Shudi and Broadwood's C'
for Maria Theresa, 1773) or in inspired anticipation of piano compass (Merlin,
1777, C' to c'''').
It is possible that circumspect experience would suggest Shudi’s harpsichords to have a more ‘round’ tone than Kirkman’s; if so, such an opinion may be based on the more distant plucking-points reputedly given to Shudi’s basic design by John Broadwood after c1770, or on the leather (or hard cowhide) plectra that details of jack design suggest to have been used for at least some spinets and harpsichords from about 1785 or earlier. It seems to be true that Kirkman’s lute registers pluck nearer the nut than Shudi’s, thus pointing to a more incisive, nasal sound. So subjective is this area of study that Hubbard’s considered view that such English harpsichords ‘are too good. The tone … almost interferes with the music’ could be precisely denied by others who found the tone suitably neutral for music in a very wide stylistic spectrum. All things being equal, the Venetian swells must have dulled the tone, both by interfering with its passage (even when open) and by increasing the weight of the whole structure; but there is no evidence that all things were equal, e.g. that builders did not compensate by voicing more brilliantly. Precise details of voicing and stringing, and of the materials used for both, are still imperfectly understood, although much work has been carried out on these issues in the last two decades of the 20th century. At least one harpsichord from the 1770s has an apparently contemporary machine stop system whereby two foot-levers depressed in a particular order produce the 4' alone on the lower manual, thus suggesting that the voicing was meant to give the register more character of one sort or another than is usually the case today. The buff, or so-called harp, effect, produced by a batten studded with small pieces of peau de buffle (not felt) brought into contact with the ends of the 8' strings at the nut, is called ‘guitar or harp’ by Shudi in the directions on an instrument sent to Frederick the Great; but its purpose can be only conjectured, although special effects in continuo work are the most likely (e.g. in the slow movement of a flute sonata). Machine stops can produce a simulated crescendo–diminuendo effect when applied gradually, while the lid and Venetian swells change the timbre of the sound being produced as much as they do its volume. It has been suggested that, especially as the century neared its end, Kirkman and Shudi harpsichords were intended to be voiced very strongly, and Burney may well have written comparatively when he made his cryptic and unexpected remark about ‘quilling, which in France is always weak’. As for the musical repertory of such harpsichords, it is probably fair to regard an enlightened English harpsichord player of c1770, with an interest in Scarlatti and Rameau, Handel and Corelli, J.C. Bach and Mozart, Arne and Purcell, Kirnberger and Hasse, C.P.E. Bach and Sammartini, as requiring a particularly, even uniquely, versatile instrument.
Like many harpsichord makers in London in the last quarter of the 18th century, the Kirkman family gradually began to build pianos as well as harpsichords. The earliest signed Kirkman piano is a square dated 1775. Until the end of the century, piano making began to increase in volume as the trade in harpsichords diminished. The last surviving Kirkman harpsichord is dated 1800, though Engel says the last one made was in 1809, by which time the firm was fully engaged in the production of pianos, both grands and squares.
A claviorgan by Jacob Kirkman and John Snetzler is illustrated in Claviorgan.
D.H. Boalch: Makers of the Harpsichord and Clavichord, 1440–1840 (London, 1956, rev. 3/1995 by C. Mould) [with details of surviving Kirkman instruments]
R. Russell: The Harpsichord and Clavichord (London, 1959, rev. 2/1973 by H. Schott)
F. Hubbard: Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, MA, 1965, 2/1967)
J. Barnes: ‘Two Rival Harpsichord Specifications’, GSJ, xix (1966), 49–57
P. Williams: ‘The Earl of Wemyss’ Claviorgan and its Context in Eighteenth-Century England’, Keyboard Instruments, ed. E.M. Ripin (Edinburgh, 1971, 2/1977), 75–84
C. Mould: The Development of the English Harpsichord, with Particular Reference to the Work of Kirkman (diss., Oxford U. 1976)
DONALD HOWARD BOALCH/PETER WILLIAMS, CHARLES MOULD