Two makers, held to the light.
A craft is learned from particular people, not from an average. So each quarter this page sets one maker from history beside one working today — the same problem, four centuries apart, solved by two pairs of hands worth knowing. This inaugural pair is a natural one: the man who built the instrument at the heart of this shop's own project, and one of the makers who kept the craft alive to be reproduced at all.
Andreas Ruckers the Elder
The Ruckers name belongs to a whole Antwerp dynasty, but the instrument this shop reproduced — the 1640 single-manual harpsichord now at Yale — is the work of one man: Andreas Ruckers the Elder, second son of the founder Hans. In 1608 he sold his share of the family workshop to his brother Ioannes and set up on his own, and for nearly forty years he built under his own initials. Close to forty of his instruments survive — an extraordinary number for the period, and a measure of both his output and the value later owners placed on keeping them.
What makes an Andreas Ruckers worth four centuries of care is a particular fullness and clarity of tone — contemporaries ranked the family's instruments the way later ears rank Amati and Stradivari violins. He signed his soundboards with a gilt cast-metal rose: an angel at a harp, flanked by the letters A R. His lids carried the block-printed papers and Latin mottoes that are half the romance of a Flemish harpsichord.
The 1640 single is the plain, perfect version of his art — one keyboard, an 8-foot and a 4-foot register, a case painted to imitate red marble, and the motto Musica Laetitiae Comes Medicina Dolorum lettered inside the lid. It is the instrument a first-time builder can actually hope to reproduce, which is exactly why it anchors both Ernest Miller's Harpsichord Project and this shop's own build.
See the original: the 1640 Andreas Ruckers at the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments.
John Phillips
John Phillips built his first harpsichord from a kit in 1969, as an undergraduate. Fifty-five years later his Berkeley shop has produced more than 120 new instruments and restored a dozen antiques — one of the longest unbroken benches in American harpsichord making. He came to it by an unusually scholarly road: a degree in German literature and music from UC Santa Cruz, a master's in musicology from UC Berkeley, and harpsichord study with Mark Kroll, Laurette Goldberg and Alan Curtis before he opened the shop in 1975 with a French double already commissioned.
His instruments are close historical copies — French doubles in the Blanchet and Taskin tradition among them — and the shop is a genuine partnership: Janine Johnson has painted, decorated and made keyboards there since 1986. Phillips is also one of the makers who keeps arguing the fine points that matter to the sound: he'll tell you natural quill is stiffer than plastic, "producing a cleaner attack" — the kind of distinction that separates a copy from a reproduction.
We open the spotlight with him because his career is the whole historical-copy movement in one person: kit-built beginning, scholarly grounding, decades of restoration teaching the hands what the old makers knew, and instruments now in concert and recording use.
Visit: jph.us · Read: Early Music America, "Instrument Makers with Pluck."
Concordia Musis Amica
Concord, friend to the muses — the motto on the Yale 1640's front flapPast spotlights
This is the inaugural pair — Summer 2026. As the quarters turn, each previous spotlight will move here, building into a small gallery of the people who made and make this instrument.
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Summer 2026 — current
Andreas Ruckers the Elder (Antwerp) & John Phillips (Berkeley).
How the spotlight is chosen
The historical maker is picked for the instruments that still teach us — a maker whose surviving work shapes how harpsichords are built today. The contemporary maker is a living builder whose bench is open for study, chosen for craft rather than fame, with every claim on this page checked against the maker's own words and the public record. Suggestions for a future quarter are welcome.