Donald Angle, 65; performed modern music on harpsichord
Imagine Bach channeling Vito Corleone, or vice versa.
Interpreting "Speak Softly Love" from the "The Godfather" for the harpsichord, Donald Angle lent an 18th-century formality to a 20th-century movie theme. He gave Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" a player-piano feel, and "House of the Rising Sun" sounded ever more disquieting as Mr. Angle's arpeggios quickened and the harpsichord's strings were furiously plucked.
Filtering everything from popular songs to jazz, gospel, and country and western through an instrument that was popular a few hundred years ago might strike some as unusual, and Mr. Angle was always quick to agree.
"I'm not a regular harpsichord player," he told the Globe in 1995. "I'm an irregular harpsichord player."
Mr. Angle, whose singular approach to the instrument charted a performing path from a lunch session at MIT to the Kennedy Center in Washington, died in his Salem home on July 27. He was 65 and had been diagnosed with cancer in June.
"As he was dying, I found myself saying to him, 'You're the best; you're the best at what you do,' and he was, partly because he was the only one who did what he did," said his wife, Priscilla Perry Fitch. "He was always fond of saying, 'They broke the mold before they made me.' "
The influences that molded Mr. Angle's approach were as stylistically disparate as the tunes he later arranged for harpsichord.
Piano lessons began at age 9 during a childhood spent mostly in Waynesboro, Pa., just north of the Maryland-West Virginia border. He shied from the instrument at first, which didn't sit well with his mother, who had paid for the piano and a teacher.
"After the first lesson, I decided there were greener fields, and I wanted to quit," he said in the 1995 interview. "My mother said, 'No way.' "
One day a carpenter was doing work at the family's house and gave a memorable performance on the piano, even though he was missing a finger on each hand.
"I can't remember what he played," Mr. Angle recalled in a 1987 Globe interview, "something nondescript . . . but, boy, could he make that instrument dance. And he smiled when he played."
At 12, Mr. Angle began performing at church fairs with a country and western group, and he was soon playing gigs that lasted late into the night with a similar band.
"By the time I was 14 or 15, I was earning a surprising amount of money as a fill-in musician," he said in 1995.
After high school in Waynesboro, he moved to Boston in 1961 and briefly attended the Berklee College of Music, but found it a poor match for his talents and needs, not least because he was still finding ways to overcome a stammer.
"He was too accomplished a musician and had too little theory, and he didn't fit into the jazz mode," his wife said. "Plus, he could hardly speak and was very diffident, so it just didn't fit."
Leaving Berklee, Mr. Angle studied piano tuning at the North Bennett Street Industrial School. In 1962, according to his website, www.donangle.com, he took what he thought would be a temporary job with William Dowd, the renowned harpsichord maker. Mr. Angle stayed until Dowd closed his business in the late 1980s.
At Dowd's workshops, in Cambridge and then in South Boston, Mr. Angle gained an intimate knowledge of the instrument as he built, repaired, and tuned harpsichords.
"I've participated in the building of 517 instruments," he estimated in the 1987 interview with the Globe.
A couple of years earlier, Mr. Angle was checking the sound of the instruments he was working on by playing thoroughly modern music when colleagues began taking notice.
"I guess it started when people heard me test-driving a harpsichord," he said in 1995 of the "doodling" that eventually led to his performing and recording career. "A harpsichord shop can be a very holy atmosphere, but people were dropping what they were doing and coming to listen."
In the early 1970s, he was invited to perform during a lunchtime series at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Performing soon became a sideline he mixed with his work as a technician, playing harpsichord concerts in Europe, for example, when he traveled to repair or tune instruments.
"He consciously wanted the people who came to his concerts to be happy," his wife said. "And he came to think of himself as a storyteller musically."
That included talking between songs, something with which he became more comfortable when his stammer subsided as he used a technique for talking that helped him prepare for performing.
"He'd play in the air," his wife said. "He'd do it in the car on the way to the concert, and people would be guessing what he was playing. He credited that intensity of visualization with helping him overcome the stammer, as well, because he would visualize words that way."
Over the past two decades, he recorded CDs and performed in Austria, France, Germany, and South Korea, and on radio stations from Boston to San Francisco. Charmed by his approach to the harpsichord and by Mr. Angle himself, fans became devoted to his work and responded quickly when they heard of his illness.
"I knew he had friends all over the world and that people he played for and worked for loved having him in their house," his wife said.
"That became evident also when he was sick, because of the number of people and the range of people who have been in touch. He gave so many people so much joy."
In addition to his wife, Mr. Angle leaves a daughter, Caroline of Jamaica Plain; his mother, Lois of Waynesboro, Pa.; and two brothers, Craig of Waynesboro and John of Hagerstown, Md.
A memorial service will be announced. 