Canadian harpsichordist Hank Knox is a luminary on the international baroque music scene. He’s influenced generations of musicians as head of the Early Music Program at McGill University in Montreal for more than three decades. He has played, recorded and led ensembles all over the world.
He revels in music of all eras, but especially Baroque opera, which he believes speaks as eloquently to the contemporary world as it did to audiences a few hundred years ago.
And while steeped in the musical language of centuries past, he’s captivated by the work of the late 20th century musical iconoclast, Frank Zappa.
Knox shares Zappa’s fascination with finding what’s beautiful in things far off the beaten track, his unrelenting curiosity about how music actually “works” and the joy that comes with figuring that out.
Knox is a founding member of Montreal’s Arion Baroque Orchestra and has performed and toured with the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Les Violons du Roy and l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. He’s released solo recordings devoted to Scarlatti, Bach, Frescobaldi, Geminiani and Handel, along with duos by J.S. Bach and the Manchester Sonatas of Antonio Vivaldi with violinist Mark Fewer. He’s made records with Arion, Les Barocudas, violinist Dorian Bandy, Infusion Baroque and Les Boréades. He conducted a slew of baroque operas at McGill and has collaborated with the Atelier Lyrique of l’Opéra de Montréal on a production of Monteverdi’s Poppea and directed a concert version of Handel’s Ariodante in Calgary.
Knox was born in Philadelphia and grew up in a house with a baby grand piano and parents who encouraged him to play.
He discovered Stravinsky in his teens while exploring his father’s vinyl collection. Around the same time he started organ lessons, played in a rock band, sang Renaissance polyphony in a church choir and first heard baroque music.
At 18, not yet ready for college, he moved to Montreal and got a job assisting an organ builder.
The next year he enrolled in the music department at McGill and started to study harpsichord. He fell in love with the plangent sound of plucked strings and the tactile sensation of drawing a vast array of sonorities from an instrument that is supposed to be inflexible and unexpressive.
“I like technical challenges,” he says, “digging deeply into a piece to see how it’s constructed and what makes it interesting, both to play and to hear. I enjoy performing, especially when the onstage chemistry is good and the ensemble is confident enough and trusts each other enough to take risks.”
That relishing of risk-taking is something he shares with his radically non-conforming musical idol, Frank Zappa. Knox first came across Zappa in the late ‘60s, and he’s amassed a vast collection of just about every recording Zappa ever made.
“His incredible work ethic and demand for precision and clarity in his performances has served as a model for how I approach music making,” says Knox. “It’s about ferocious intensity joined with an appreciation of the absurd and the importance of leaving some things open to chance.”
