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Yuxuan Yang
The Smithsonian's Archival and Digitization Work on William Dowd and Frank Hubbard
Yuxuan Yang's research at the Smithsonian organizing materials related to William Dowd and Frank Hubbard.
Our research fellow Yuxuan Yang recently travelled to the Smithsonian's archival system, where together with on-site researcher Julie she has been carrying out survey, organization, and archiving work on materials related to William Dowd and Frank Hubbard. Dowd and Hubbard occupy an extraordinarily important place in the twentieth-century revival of the harpsichord: the two first met at Harvard, later devoted themselves jointly to the study and making of early keyboard instruments, and in 1949 founded Hubbard and Dowd in Boston with the explicit aim of rebuilding the tradition of harpsichord making along "historically based" principles. They not only made new instruments themselves but also continued to restore historical instruments from public and private collections — including those of the Smithsonian — and in doing so steadily refined their understanding of historical structure, proportion, materials, and craft. Hubbard later undertook extended study trips in Europe, examining original instruments at length, and in 1965 published Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making, which has since become a classic of modern harpsichord scholarship and practice. Dowd, through his long career of making, restoring, drawing, and researching, established a pivotal position within the Franco-American tradition of harpsichord making in the second half of the twentieth century.
In this project, Yang has adopted a relatively systematic strategy of digital organization, archiving drawings, templates, design notes, correspondence, and photographic materials to support further research. The significance of the work lies not merely in preserving documents, but in transforming these first-hand materials back into a research foundation that can be analysed, compared, and interpreted. Further study of the relationship between harpsichord construction, historical form, and modern analytical methods is still ongoing. At the Smithsonian, the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History now holds two core collections: the Dowd Harpsichord Collection and the Hubbard Harpsichord Records. The former systematically documents Dowd's career as a maker and researcher, including correspondence, photographs, design notes, drawings and templates, and materials from both his Boston and Paris workshops; the latter preserves nearly half a century of Hubbard's business, research, and design records, and is particularly rich in tracings, rubbings, templates, and a substantial body of drawings related to historical instrument making, parts of which are already accessible through digital finding aids. In other words, the Smithsonian's stewardship of William Dowd and Frank Hubbard is not confined to static collection: it combines archival preservation, scholarly organization, and digital openness, and continues to provide a solid foundation for contemporary harpsichord research.
