On Jan. 24, ALLISON — mezzo-soprano Allison Messier and harpsichordist Paul Cienniwa — performs at Quincy’s Thomas Crane Public Library. The duo’s raison d’être, re-interpreting rock and popular repertoire with Baroque sensibility, puts an old spin on newer music, but also a new spin on a less-old but rich tradition: pop music borrowing classical trappings. The harpsichord’s pop history, in particular, is a diverting tangle of aesthetics, opportunity, and technology.
The harpsichord gained pop prominence in the 1960s, an era of lush, heavily-produced studio wizardry. The famous, notorious Phil Spector’s studio-engineered amalgamations — the so-called Wall of Sound — grafted the harpsichord’s metallic pluck onto massed pianos and organs. But soon, the instrument came to the fore, starring in the Righteous Brothers’ Spector-produced “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” or the Beach Boys’ “When I Grow Up (to Be a Man),” or The Mamas & the Papas’ “Monday Monday.”
It spawned its own intricate, wistful genre: Baroque pop. The style’s quintessence, The Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renée,” was anchored by Michael Brown’s elegantly jangling harpsichord. Across the Atlantic, it bridged the passage from rock into psychedelica for numerous groups: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Zombies, the Kinks.
But harpsichords had already been hanging around studios, available for experimentation. Consider the legendary RCA Studio B in Nashville, built in 1957 at the behest of producer and guitarist Chet Atkins, and soon after home to a harpsichord, which twanged its way onto country and country-pop records — a particularly florid example being Norro Wilson’s rollicking playing on John D. Loudermilk’s 1961 “Language of Love.” (Serendipity was occasionally imposed: A harpsichord only chimed through the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” after organist Brian Auger arrived at a recording studio to find no organ.)
ALLISON performs Jan. 24 at 3 p.m. at the Thomas Crane Public Library, 40 Washington St., Quincy. Free admission; 617-376-1316.
Matthew Guerrieri can be reached at matthewguerrieri@gmail.com.