jwilzewske: harpsichord

Showing posts with label harpsichord. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Collaborative Poesy of the Goldberg Variations

A passage of music could have a ‘semantic range’ that is essentially the same as that of any word in a language, only much broader in scope—sharing the same kind of elasticity but of a much greater degree than is typical in language... Choosing whether the French overture [Var. XVI] in Bach’s Goldberg Variations connotes ‘sublime confidence’ or ‘deep despair’ is easy because the semantic fields of those expressions are so completely separate. One seems coincident with the music—and the other, far from it!”
— Joseph Swain, p. 55.

T he hypothesis that syntax mediates tension—and its corollary, that if there is no sense of tension and resolution then there is no sense of syntax—do not entail that all tension is ‘syntactic’ in origin... The tension and resolution of this passage depend more on harmonic progression and meter than on the variety of rhythmic durations and texture.”
— Joseph Swain, p. 32.

K onstantin Lifschitz’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 last night was staggeringly beautiful, unified in conception and spiritually cohesive all the way through the Variations to the reprise of the Aria at the end.

T he left-hand/right-hand equality of voices that Lifschitz maintains is astounding—that it is biomechanically/anatomically very difficult goes without saying, but it is conceptually/expressively exceedingly difficult as well. (The intentions of the composer—and of the performer, and, now, of ourselves—are complex and tremendously varied through the course of this work. And they must emerge in the performance as fresh and totally genuine—a factor that learning and technically mastering and memorizing the musical text threaten to a degree, as anyone who has ever memorized and performed music in recital knows well...)

I ntentionalism [in music]... not so much a coherent philosophical position but rather a kind of ‘antidote’ to hermeneutic analytic approaches that treat musical works as ‘organic matter’—in short, like vegetables—rather than as products of thinking [,feeling] people. Ideally, this means encouraging analytic results that might please composers if they were told about them... Intentionalism is meant as a heuristic device that asks that we pose the question: What might the composer have thought about this composition and its sense? It has become common practice for musicologists to invoke the warning of the Intentional Fallacy as if it were law accepted by everyone. In fact, the entire hermeneutic tradition stands opposed to this doctrinaire apologia for New Criticism, so that merely calling the quest for intentions structuring a work of art a ‘victim’ to a fallacy does not make it so.”
— Laurence Dreyfus, p. 171.

T he interplay between the rhythmic, metric, melodic, harmonic, and textural tensions in Goldberg variation—notably in the French overture (Var. XVI)—was fascinating. When harmonic tension predominates, it “frees-up” the melodic syntax and vice versa. The realism of the multi-line, multi-voice dialogue or story-telling is enabled and augmented by the parity/equality of the hands, each tension-generating modality taking its “turn” and providing scope and opportunity for other modalities to express things freely.

L ast night our imaginations were permitted to run, taking all the “rope” they could, until close to the end near the 70-minute mark, when we realized in retrospect that the “story” explored by Bach (and Lifschitz) through all of these Variations is our very own. We had not only understood the story; we had in a palpable, true sense ‘said’ [to ourselves] the things that Bach—and Lifschitz—had just said. The story and these thoughts had come a huge distance to find us, as if meant (intended) to be found by us.

W e were inscribed by them, but we found that we, too, were, in a real sense, inscribing/authoring the thoughts. The attentiveness, the transcendent wide-awakeness that Bach has impelled us to with these Variations: like a newly-discovered, implausibly effective form of prayer. An unforgettable performance and a really wonderful evening.

A poem as a persisting manifestation of language—and, therefore, essentially ‘dialogue’ [that can be indefinitely-extended, with unnamed or yet-to-be-named respondents]—can be a message in a ‘bottle’: sent out in the not-always-greatly-hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it might wash up on land—on some heartland. Poems [and music] in this sense, too are ‘under way’: they are making toward something... Wirklichkeit ist nicht! Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein! [Reality is nothing apart from our individual construction of it. It must be sought and won!]”
— Paul Celan.

I ’ve come to feel over the years that a musical work, however long it may be, ought to have basically—I was going to say ‘one tempo’ but that’s the wrong word—one ‘pulse rate’; one constant 'rhythmic reference point'. Now, obviously, there couldn’t be anything more deadly dull than to exploit one beat that goes on and on and on indefinitely. That’s what drives me up the wall about rock and about minimalism. Anyway, I would never argue in favor of an inflexible pulse. That just destroys any music. But you can take a basic pulse and divide or multiply it—not necessarily on a scale of two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, but often with far-less-obvious divisions—and make the result of those divisions or multiplications act as a subsidiary pulse for a particular movement or section of a movement... So in the case of the Goldbergs, there is in fact one pulse, which, with a few very minor modifications—mostly modifications that I think take their cue from ritards at the end of the preceding variation, something like that—one pulse that runs all the way throughout.” — Glenn Gould, 1982 radio interview with Tim Page.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Luca Guglielmi and Ovid’s Harpsichord at Midnight

T he late-night BEMF program last night was organized around themes from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’:

Louis Couperin - Prelude & Passacaille in C major (Bauyn m.s.)
Francois Couperin - La Regente ou la Minerve; L'Atalante; Les Silvains
Girolamo Frescobaldi - Cento Partite sopra Passacagli
Baldassare Galuppi - Sonata in E minor, Op. 2, No. 3
Dieterich Buxtehude - Praeludium in G minor (BuxWV 163)
Johann K.F. Fischer - Passacaglia in D minor (Suite ‘Urania’)
J.S. Bach - Prelude, Fuga & Allegro in E-flat major (BWV 998)

I especially enjoyed Guglielmi’s varied treatment of the cadences in the Buxtehude, emphasizing a diversity of rhetorical aims and composerly intentions and showcasing widely-varied articulations in Baroque form.

I n keeping with the theme of Ovid’s rhetoric, Buxtehude’s Praeludia embody architectural structures that are parallel to the ‘Dispositio’ in the Classics, basically a forensic method or form for conducting oratory: (1) ‘Exordium’, the orator capturing his audience, (2) ‘Narratio’, the orator presenting salient facts of the case, (3) ‘Confirmatio’, the orator explaining evidence and logical proofs, and (4) ‘Peroratio’, the orator passionately expressing the logical conclusions that are justified by steps (1) through (3).

I n harpsichord rhetoric as in spoken oration, the orator/composer/harpsichordist has the latitude to insert a ‘Digressio’ here and there. An extra ‘Exordio’ or a ‘Peroratio may optionally be inserted to reinforce a point here and there as well.

I n Buxtehude’s Praeludium in G minor, a wild, improvisatory, mind-blowing ‘stylus phantasticus’ prevails—not only in the ‘Exordium’ but elsewhere—and this is what can really make audience members gasp, emotionally caught-up as they are in the thing.

O ur minds were thoroughly convinced by objective forensic and evidentiary harpsichord arguments, but hearing and seeing the emotional ‘finish’ is what captures our hearts’ imagination! Guglielmi’s account of the Buxtehude ‘Peroratio’ was given in an all-out, athletic toccata style, more like a winning jockey-and-racehorse than the closing statements of a dramatic, rhetoric-genius trial lawyer.

T he whole peformance was gorgeous and elicited a prompt standing ovation at the end from the large, appreciative midnight BEMF audience.

B onus vignette: It was beautiful to see Guglielmi pat his harpsichord on the right-hand "cheek" of its body, on the wood to the right of the keyboard following a couple of these very difficult pieces, as if to thank it for its performance. The gesture resembled nothing so much as that of a jockey, patting the horse after winning a big stakes race. Or a human master petting the much-loved dog or other companion animal.

T he 2-manual instrument by William Dowd, on loan from James Nicolson, is one based on a Ruckers Franco-Flemish design of 1628 and it bears this inscription on its lid: “Saltatur me canente ... ubi melos, nec ibi mali” which I believe means something like: “Dance as I sing ... ever sweet, never sour.” Or was it ‘canum’ instead of ‘canente'’? ... “Turn me tummy-up like a beloved pet dog ... always well-behaved, never bad.”

L uca Guglielmi was born in Turin in 1977, where he studied music and humanities. He studied Composition with Alessandro Ruo Rui, and Choral Music and Choral Conducting with Sergio Pasteris at the Conservatory "G. Verdi" of Turin. In 1999 he was chosen to participate in the Extraordinary Course in Conducting under the direction of Carlo Maria Giulini at the Fiesole Music School. He has served as harpsichordist and organist with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale di Torino. His study of the harpsichord has been diverse, with Patrizia Marisaldi among others and most recently under Ton Koopman. He studied organ with Vittorio Bonotto, piano accompaniment (including lieder) with Eros Cassardo. When he was 20 he was invited by Jordi Savall to join his ensembles Hesperion XX (now XXI). Guglielmi teaches harpsichord, organ and orchestra at courses at Urbino, Pamparato, San Feliu de Guixols (Catalonia) e Barbaste (France).

L ast night’s 11:15 p.m. recital in the atmospheric sanctuary of Boston’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church was financially supported by Ruth M. McKay and Don Campbell. Bravo!

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

New Quantitative Ways to Look at Small-Scale Variability in Meter and Rhythm

A pianist friend of mine says that the 2-part Inventions are merely ‘steep hills’ but that the 3-part Sinfonias are ‘craggy mountains whose paths have lots of twists and turns’. Having lived with these pieces most of my life, I have to agree.”
— Lee Ridgway, harpsichordist, BEMF 2011 Fringe Recital.

H arpsichordist Lee Ridgway performed all 15 of J.S. Bach’s 2-part Inventions and all 15 of the 3-part Sinfonias yesterday, in one of the ‘fringe’ recitals at the Boston Early Music Festival. He performed them in the sequence in which they originally appeared in W.F. Bach’s clavier-büchlein. His masterful and sensitive treatment of each provoked a number of reveries for me, for which I am grateful.

A mong these was a reflection on how the moment-to-moment agogic metric accents might be analyzed with mathematical and statistical signal processing and spectrum-analytic methods similar to those that have been applied over the past 20 years in cardiology, to understand heart rate variability (HRV) and develop predictive models of cardiac disorders. The pulse quickens; the pulse also slows! Quantitative details of small-scale dispersion of meter—and the abnormal, motoric diminution of HRV that occurs in stress and in disease states—can tell us so much! Just to see what interesting things may turn up, I begin with one of the simplest ‘variability’ measures—the root-mean-square standard deviation, RMSSD:

I look in the music theory literature and recent doctoral dissertations, and so far I am unable to find anybody who has pursued this sort of thing. If I am wrong, please email me or add a comment below.

O vernight, I download some MP3s of others’ performances of the 2-part Inventions and begin to run some analyses using the MATLAB signal processing toolbox software—the same modules that I use for analyzing digital electrocardiograms. I pick off beat-by-beat interbeat intervals in the left-hand part and the right-hand part. I exclude marked ritardando/accelerando bars; also exclude fermatas.

T here is more or less constant variation in articulation and timing... successive notes are crafted with varying durations—this is especially true on harpsichord more than other keyboard instruments, but it would be true as well for winds, voice, any instrument. The plot above is a composite across 2-part variations—a quick exploratory ‘look’ only; not what we would do for a proper analysis.

D etached releases ranging from ‘sharp’ ones to ‘lingering’ ones… this all shows up in the RMSSD and other time-domain variability measures. It also shows up in frequency-domain power-spectrum and other FFT- and wavelet-transform-based measures.

A nd, naturally, the variability and rhythmic power-spectrum measures change throughout the course of each piece. The power spectrum has ‘shoulders’ on it, on both the left (slower, longer IBI) and right (faster, shorter IBI) side of the median interbeat interval or rhythmic frequency. In principle, we would watch and measure the time-evolution of the power-spectrum from the beginning of a piece to the end of a piece—look at these evolutions or trajectories for different performers whose interpretations and styles differ. Then we would be better able to account objectively and quantitatively for how they do what they do!

L inkages across the bar-line are frequent, often involving small melodic voice-leading in one part (hand). These were particularly prominent in Ridgway’s accounts of the C-major, F-major, G-major, and C-minor 2-part variations. Beautiful, truly.

T hrough thoughtful, passionate application of agogic variations in small-scale timing, we get an acute sense of tension between (1) propulsion from ordinary and extraordinary accents in the metric frame and (2) propulsion from motivic and other phrase units. It is a major source of musical drama and beauty—not just in Bach but, I think, in all music. It was simply Ridgway’s fantastic playing yesterday that makes me think of these mathematical ways of explaining and understanding how it works.

R idgway is a solo organ and harpsichord performer, has performed for more than 40 years throughout North America and Europe. A native of Oklahoma, he received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Oklahoma and Master of Arts from New England Conservatory of Music. Presently the organist and choir director at St. Chrysostom[s Episcopal Church in Quincy, MA, he is also Dean of the Boston Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. The instrument on which he performed yesterday at Emmanuel Church is one made by Boston’s Allan Winkler, a 2-manual adaptation of a 1716 design by Carl Conrad Fleischer… gorgeous sound.

B eyond their pedagogical applications, the Inventions and Sinfonias offer us wonderful, individual pieces of music… The similarities or contrasts between pieces in the same key; the [affective] characteristics of different keys; the characteristics of individual themes; … how the voices engage in dialogue or games of chase...”
— Lee Ridgway, harpsichordist, BEMF 2011 Fringe Recital.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ton Koopman: C.P.E. Bach, Improvisation, and a License to Imagine

T he very difficulty of this music could be seen as a mark both of its sublimity and of its visionary modernity.”
— Annette Richards, p. 153.

T o better understand ... conventional form not only drives perception and expectation, it promotes coherence. ... C.P.E. Bach could play with the audience’s expectations to heighten their sense of drama. ... C.P.E. Bach’s affective musical discourses involved many contrasting rhetorical materials such as exclamation, interjection, suspension, interruption, affirmation, and negation. Through the dramatic use of these semiotic guides, situating them within the framework of the rhetorical model, as well as associating these ideas with congruent key affects, C.P.E. Bach produced organized, coherent, musical arguments that were imbued with content and effected communication.”
— Damian Espinosa, MTO 10(3), 2004.

T he SPCO’s performance last Sunday with Ton Koopman and his wife, Tini Mathot, was an inspired tour de force.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Concerto in F for Two Harpsichords, Wq. 46
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sinfonia in G, Wq. 183, No. 4.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sinfonia in D, Wq. 183, No. 1.
Johann Sebastian Bach - Sinfonia from Cantata No. 42.
Georg Philipp Telemann - Tafelmusik III Suite

C hoices of tempi and pauses in the C.P.E. Bach Wq. 183 Sinfonias stylistic narrative were dramatic but not extreme. These are all highly melodic works that require great sensitivity to the lyrical contours and cues regarding expressions’ prominence, and the SPCO and Koopman rendered these with beautiful mastery.

Y es, the accompaniment’s “single lines, stabbing chords and pauses avoid covering up the delicate harpsichord sonorities” [Aaron Grad, program notes]. But, far more significant, the extemporaneous pauses—and interrupting the rhythmically cohesive fast movements with fantasy-like slow movements—impart an exuberant, expansive, improvisatory quality to each of these pieces—aided and abetted by Koopman’s enthusiastic conducting. This seems to grant us permission to apply looser, improvisatory paradigms to our listening. The ‘Allegro assai-Andante-Presto’ and ‘Allegro di molto-Largo-Presto’ best characterize how we feel the movements’ form and intent, reminiscent of ‘extroversive semiosis’ which involves the progress of variations in communicating meaning (Agawu 1991, see link below).

M oreover, some physical correlates of ‘prominence’ are duration, pitch movement, loudness, and timbre contrast (see Patel, p. 118). The loudness changes and timbral changes that occur with ‘releases’—with the decay and reverberation of the notes that the players have just released—are correlates that C.P.E. Bach uses to great advantage in these pieces. There are back-beat emphases in the Allegro assai in Wq. 183 No. 4 that are strong correlates of ‘prominence’ as well.

T he Concerto in F for two harpsichords Wq. 46 is likewise comprised of three movements, ‘Allegro-Largo-Allegro assai’, the same fast-slow-fast pattern of the Sinfonias. The harpsichord parts require phenomenal technical virtuosity, with really fast passages in the outer movements. Koopman’s and Mathot’s execution of these was flawless and successfully communicated to the audience in the acoustically-excellent, modest-sized 1,100-seat Ted Mann Concert Hall on the University of Minnesota’s main campus West Bank.

C .P.E.’s dramatic and rhetorical devices include some features that, to me, resemble ‘time compression’ or ‘time focusing’ in laser systems—the interaction between an amplifier and a saturable nonlinear absorber results in pulse compression and intensification of harmonics in lasers (see Akhmanov Fig. 1-3, reproduced below). For example, the triplet figures (and 3x2 sextuplets) in the Allegro and Presto movements of the Sinfonias played against and coherently sync-ed with notes of longer duration yield a steeper pulse—a sonic contour with steeper loudness waveform—in much the same way as would be the case in a laser system. (I have no idea whether others have considered this before, but I swear it would be a common and natural reverie for any optical engineer or laser designer attending a Ton Koopman interpretation of C.P.E. Bach to have. Seldom confessed out-loud, this sort of conniption and trans-discipline serendipity is contributory to why we engineers and scientists love attending live chamber music performances.)

M y delight and wonderment at these features make me entirely ready to believe that C.P.E.’s writing anticipated modernity and postmodernity by 200 or 250 years—anticipated not only laser physics but, gee, flexible, disintermediated capitalism of mobile rather than fixed capital; anticipated the victory of agility over power, of transnationalism over nationalism, of instantaneity over duration, of software over hardware, of services over products, of consumption over production; anticipated the supremacy of Now over the Past or the Future. Maybe even a Tardis. So dramatic and radical are these C.P.E. Bach pieces that all sorts of things seem plausible.

D oes [Emanuel] Bach stand between the times? [Baroque and Classical] No, he is his own time.”
— Ludger Rémy, harpsichord, liner notes to C.P.E. Bach: Harpsichord Concertos Wq. 30, 37, & 38, CPO, 1995, p. 18.

T hese C.P.E Bach pieces—so vivid and dramatic as they are when interpreted by Koopman—also remind me of the ‘unmediatedness’ of photographs—so ‘unproblematic’ for modernists insofar as the photographer’s intent, the photograph, and the viewer’s experience of the photograph are assumed to cohere with each other, the meaning is assumed to be self-evident, and “unlike other cultural texts, even the simplest among us can read a photograph” [Lutz & Collins 1993; p. 28]. C.P.E.’s Sinfonias as acoustic holograms?

I n short, SPCO and Koopman and Mathot succeeded in diverting and inspiring us, in ways that we had no reason to expect or hope for. We came; we listened; we innovated—and went home very, very happy.

N ote/Update, 03-MAR-2011. Some readers emailed me to say that I must be joking, when I suggested the bit about acoustical lasers above. But no! I was entirely serious! Can chamber orchestras performing in chambers “lase” acoustically? Yes! I witnessed it in U of M Ted Mann Hall last Sunday. Ton Koopman and SPCO acoustically lased in the frequency range 0.1 Hz to 10 Hz... several decades lower than test-tube thermoacoustic lasers (see videos, links below). To have composed these peculiar pieces in the way he did, C.P.E. Bach almost certainly grasped this, even if he didn’t have a word like ‘lase’ to name what he was doing. The repetition of it in the Sinfonias is too ‘deliberate’, I think, for Bach to not have known what he was doing! The acoustic laser action is not stable, on account of the irregular shape of the chamber and the varied reflections/absorptions from the Ted Mann Hall’s walls and ceiling and surfaces below. Indeed, the intermittency/instability of the effect adds tremendously to the drama and emotional impact of the pieces. And the lasing is supported not at one frequency only but intermittently at several, also owing to the irregular shape of the enclosure. Chamber orchestra = polychromatic acoustic laser! Listen harder! You will hear it, too!

YouTube video #1
YouTube video #2
YouTube video #3
YouTube video #4

Some things to read, about acoustic lasers:
Item #1
Item #2
Item #3
Item #4
Item #5

What a novel compositional device, C.P.E.! Make the chamber ensemble ‘lase’!

T he Enlightenment exemplified intellectual changes of early modern time-space compression, including the Copernican revolution and perspectival painting. These changes were important moments in the scalar jump from the city-state to the nation-state, the most important social and political unit of the modern era, homogenizing local cutures and economies...”
— Barney Warf, p. 12.

N ever in history has distance meant less... Figuratively, we ‘use up’ places and then dispose of them.”
— Alvin Toffler, p. 75.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Messing About in Harpsichords: DIY Ceramic Plectra

T he sound of the harpsichord resembles that of a bird-cage played with toasting-forks... No, it is more like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.”
— Sir Thomas Beecham, British conductor (1879-1961).

S omtimes I cannot leave well-enough alone. An amateur guitarist friend at work was showing me his nice, new pick—made of some exotic ceramic material. The manufacturer of the pick is very mysterious and non-forthcoming with regard to what the “specially-formulated”, lubricious, hard material is. But junior Archimedes that I am, I go and measure it—measure its density, etc.—and I suspect (but do not know for certain) that it is boron nitride.

I think: “That is really cool! But why should guitarists have all the nice toys? What about harpsichordists?”

T here are all sorts of other technical materials that are used for musical instruments that are specially selected or constructed so as to achieve physical properties that vary by desirable amounts, in desirable directions.

T hink graphite violin bows: how far they have come in the past 20 years. Think Michel Wegen graphite-epoxy composite guitar picks. Think ceramic composites in jet engine turbines. Think exotic dental composites and orthopedic surgery ceramic composites. Think yttria-stabilized zirconia cutlery in your kitchen!

I n one of my former lives, I did some semiconductor engineering and physical electronics. I have a slab of silicon nitride lying around. I look up the Young’s modulus (elastic modulus) and other physical properties of the silicon nitride and compare it to the properties of Delrin™ and of bird quill. Hmmm. I go down to my basement shop at home and begin slicing up my little left-over silicon nitride slab into plectra-shaped bits.

T he machining of the plectra is pretty straightforward, if you are a rockhound and have some lapidary and faceting tools and some diamond bits for your Dremel MotoTool™ (or comparable 20,000 rpm flexible-shaft hand tool). I used 400-grit diamond for most of the cutting, and 14,000-grit and 30,000-grit cerium oxide powder for the polishing work.

T he ceramic surfaces are polished to nanometer smoothness so that they will not abrade the harpsichord strings.

H ere is a drawing of my ceramic plectra:

McNair silicon nitride harpsichord plectra

T hey are quieter and slipperier than Delrin™ plectra. The sound of the harpsichord tongues and jacks would not be at all affected by these exotic ceramics. The “ceramic vs. Delrin™ vs. quill” noise differences I’m talking about are only about the noise of the plectrum tip itself, just as it slips against the deflecting string before the plectrum excursion (or string deflection) is large enough that the plectrum releases the string.

I think the only person who can possibly hear the “scritch” of Delrin™ acetal plastic against the strings is the performer a few inches away. With nitride, there is no plectrum-against-string noise at all.

T o everybody else, the pleasant harpsichord “action-falling” sounds with ceramic plectra like these should be identical to the ordinary mechanism quilled with conventional plectrum materials.

R emains to be seen, but I suspect these technical ceramics may give much lower “wear” compared to Delrin™ or quill? Much less frequent need for re-voicing and re-quilling? Other advantages?

I do suspect that plectra made out of such ceramics will, in general, give a “brighter” sound—maybe brighter than purists would find desirable, who knows? But the toughness of these materials might open up new horizons of harpsichord dynamics and expression.

A nd I have no doubt that the “springiness” (nitride elastic modulus ~ 200 GPa, compared to Delrin™ and bird quill elastic modulus ~ 3 GPa) will give a ‘faster’ action than Delrin™ or quill.

H ere is a little Excel spreadsheet I put together, modeling the stiffness of Delrin™ plectra of different dimensions. (I have a similar spreadsheet for my silicon nitride plectra.)

Spreadsheet model of Delrin™ plectra stiffness

W hat else? The nitride materials do not undergo ‘work-hardening’. They do not get brittle like Delrin does with elapsing time and more playing. And the nitride composites have very low coefficients of friction (somewhat lower than zirconia, as I recall). Other advantages, too.

A nyway, the possibility of helping to advance the state of harpsichord technology intrigues me. Why is the ‘business end’ of the harpsichord sound-producing mechanism still stuck with Delrin™, same as Hubbard and others used 50+ years ago!

A lso, you may want to give a look at Lorna Gibson’s new materials science book, on composites (link below). More ideas for innovative plectra materials! No reason why homogeneous, nearly-isotropic (same properties in all directions, along all axes) like Delrin or ceramics is the only way to go.