A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.

"Harpsichord" designates the whole family of similar plucked keyboard instruments, including the smaller virginals, muselar, and spinet.

The harpsichord was widely used in Renaissance and Baroque music. During the late 18th century it gradually disappeared from the musical scene with the rise of the fortepiano. But in the 20th century it made a resurgence, used in historically informed performance of older music, in new (contemporary) compositions, and in popular culture.

Harpsichords vary in size and shape, but all have the same basic functional arrangement. The player depresses a key pivoted in the middle of its length, which causes the far end of the key to rise. This lifts a jack, a long strip of wood, to which is attached a small plectrum (a wedge-shaped piece of quill or, nowadays plastic), which plucks the string. When the key is released by the player, the far end returns to its rest position and the jack falls back. The plectrum, mounted on a tongue that can swivel backwards away from the string, passes the string without plucking it again. As the key reaches its rest position, the string's vibrations are halted by the damper, a piece of felt attached to the top of the jack.

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. He is classified as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti he composed in a variety of musical forms, although today he is known mainly for his 555 keyboard sonatas.

Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was the sixth of ten children and a younger brother to Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, also a musician. He probably first studied under his father, the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti; other composers who may have been his early teachers include Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini, and Bernardo Pasquini, all of whom may have influenced his musical style.

He became a composer and organist at the royal chapel in Naples in 1701. In 1704, he revised Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's opera Irene for performance at Naples. Soon afterwards, his father sent him to Venice. After this, nothing is known of Scarlatti's life until 1709, when he went to Rome in the service of the exiled Polish queen Marie Casimire. He met Thomas Roseingrave there. Scarlatti was already an eminent harpsichordist: there is a story of a trial of skill with George Frideric Handel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome where he was judged possibly superior to Handel on that instrument, although inferior on the organ. Later in life, he was known to cross himself in veneration when speaking of Handel's skill. In Rome, Scarlatti composed several operas for Queen Casimira's private theatre. He was Maestro Di Cappella at St. Peter's from 1715 to 1719. In 1719 he travelled to London to direct his opera Narciso at the King's Theatre.

Igor Kipnis (27 September 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a well-known American harpsichordist and pianist.

Born in Berlin, the son of Russian bass Alexander Kipnis, Igor Kipnis moved to the United States with his family in 1938. He learned the piano with his maternal grandfather, Heniot Levy; attended the Westport School of Music, and received his B.A. from Harvard University. He studied harpsichord with Fernando Valenti, and made his concert debut in New York in 1959. He was an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa (Harvard, 1977), and in 1993 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Illinois Wesleyan University.

Kipnis lived in Redding, Connecticut. For five years he was President and Artistic Director of the Friends of Music of Fairfield County, the Connecticut chamber music series, in addition to having served thirteen years as co-artistic director of the Connecticut Early Music Festival.

He married Judith Robison on January 6, 1953. They subsequently divorced, in May 1996, but reconciled shortly before her death on March 1, 2001 of the rare "salt and water" retention metabolic condition, Robison Syndrome.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃filip ʁaˈmo]; September 25, 1683, Dijon – September 12, 1764) was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François Couperin.

Little is known about Rameau's early years, and it was not until the 1720s that he won fame as a major theorist of music with his Treatise on Harmony (1722). He was almost 50 before he embarked on the operatic career on which his reputation chiefly rests. His debut, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), caused a great stir and was fiercely attacked for its revolutionary use of harmony by the supporters of Lully's style of music. Nevertheless, Rameau's pre-eminence in the field of French opera was soon acknowledged, and he was later attacked as an "establishment" composer by those who favoured Italian opera during the controversy known as the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s. Rameau's music had gone out of fashion by the end of the 18th century, and it was not until the 20th that serious efforts were made to revive it. Today, he enjoys renewed appreciation with performances and recordings of his music ever more frequent.

Giovanni Battista Pescetti (Venice, ca. 1704 – Venice, 20 March 1766) was an organist and composer. Born in Venice around 1704, he studied under Antonio Lotti for some time. Having spent some time writing operas in and around Venice, he left for London in 1736, becoming director of the Opera of the Nobility in 1737.

After having to leave London when hostility arose against Catholic Italians, he returned to Venice in 1745 and became Second Organist at St Mark's.

Pescetti was active as a teacher of composition in Venice, his most famous students Josef Mysliveček (1737-1781) and Antonio Salieri (1750-1825). Although his output consists mainly of operatic works, a considerable amount of Pescetti's compositions were written for harpsichord, some intended to be performed on Pipe Organ, including his Six Sonatas, composed around 1756. Nowadays, his keyboard sonatas are generally performed on a modern piano, though various recordings exist that use the intended organ.

The popular Sonata in C minor was transcribed for harp by Carlos Salzedo. The first movement is in two four and opens with eighth notes outlining the tonic triad--C, down a fourth to G, up a sixth to E Flat and back down a third to C. This is echoed in the left hand as the right hand plays quarter notes E flat, C, B natural. The right hand now plays the melody again and continues on, transposing to G major, going through a short development and then ending in G. The melody repeats, then goes to a second section starting in E flat major. This section follows the same structure--melody in right hand, melody in left hand, melody in right hand, transposes back to c minor, goes through the same development and then ends in c minor. The second section repeats again and the movement ends.