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Alfred J. Hipkins

London, 1826 - 1903, London

BiographyLC name authority rec. n86869335
LC Heading: Hipkins, Alfred J. (Alfred James), 1826-1903

Biography:

Hipkins, Alfred James (1826–1903), writer on musical instruments, was born on 17 June 1826 at 22 Medway Street, Westminster, London, the only son in the family of two children of James Hipkins (1800–1882), a cabinet and piano maker, and his wife, Jane Mary Grant (1802–1865). As a boy he wanted to become a painter, but in 1840 he was apprenticed as a piano-tuner with Broadwood's, and worked there for the rest of his life. He began working on equal temperament and the standardization of pitch in the 1840s, and gained the distinction of tuning instruments for Chopin, who always used Broadwood pianos when he was in England. On 2 October 1850 Hipkins married Jane Souter Black, a Scot. Their daughter, Edith (b. 1854), became a portrait painter, and their son, John (1851–1933), who was deaf and mute, became a distinguished wood-engraver.

Apart from a few piano and organ lessons in the early 1840s, Hipkins had no musical training, but he became an excellent pianist, and gave more than forty recitals on Broadwood pianos at the Great Exhibition of 1851; he also became an authority on the history of keyboard instruments. In 1881 he was invited to Berlin and Potsdam by the crown princess of Prussia to examine the pianos which had belonged to Frederick the Great. From 1883 he performed and lectured on early keyboard instruments, and played Bach's ‘Chromatic’ fantasia and fugue on the clavichord and the ‘Goldberg’ variations on the harpsichord before the Musical Association in 1886. In 1896 he published A Description and History of the Pianoforte.

Hipkins did not confine himself to keyboard instruments, and became interested in non-Western music. His Musical Instruments, Historic, Rare, and Unique (1888) included instruments from India, China, and Japan, and his preface to C. R. Day's The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891) came to be seen as a landmark in ethnomusicology. In it he argued that the music of non-European cultures should be understood on its own terms, and not in terms of the experience of the European musician. He also helped A. J. Ellis, who was tone deaf, in his study of non-European scales, On the Musical Scales of Various Nations (1885), using a series of tuning-forks to determine the pitch of notes produced by non-European instruments and then calculating the distance between them. Hipkins also wrote 134 articles for the first edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1879), and contributed articles on pitch and the piano to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Parry relied on his advice for his chapter on scales in The Evolution of the Art of Music (1896).

Hipkins helped in the preparation of many exhibitions, including the music section of the Inventions Exhibition in 1885. He left his collection of tuning-forks to the Royal Institution and his collection of musical instruments, which included a spinet which had belonged to Handel, to the Royal College of Music. He was elected FSA in 1886, and was a member of the council and honorary curator of the Royal College of Music. He died at home in Kensington on 3 June 1903, and was buried at Kensington Hanwell cemetery, Ealing.

Anne Pimlott Baker
(Anne Pimlott Baker, ‘Hipkins, Alfred James (1826–1903)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/33890, accessed 8 March 2016])

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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