Frank Hubbard learned in England and built in Boston.

Frank Hubbard (1920–1976) was a scholar who became a maker. Wikipedia records that he apprenticed with the Dolmetsch workshop at Haslemere in 1947 and with Hugh Gough in London in 1948, then returned to the United States and, in 1949, founded Hubbard & Dowd in Boston with William Dowd. Harvard Magazine says the two “independently pursued apprenticeships with disciples of Dolmetsch, then founded a harpsichord company in 1949,” and that their first instrument was “modeled on a design by the Flemish Ruckers family.”

The partnership ended in 1958. Hubbard set up his own workshop on the Lyman estate in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Dowd went to Cambridge. In 1965 Harvard University Press published Hubbard’s Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making, of which the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick said: “he unquestionably knows more about the history and construction of harpsichords than anyone alive today.” In 1967–68 Hubbard set up the restoration workshop at the Paris Conservatoire’s instrument museum.

He also made a kit. In 1963, Wikipedia says, he developed one based on a 1769 harpsichord by Pascal Taskin, and about 1,000 had been produced by 1975 — a figure for then, not now.

A widow, a successor and an archive.

Hubbard died in 1976. His widow, Diane Hubbard, ran the company until she retired in 2000, and Hendrik Broekman, who had apprenticed with Eric Herz and with Frank Hubbard, became president and technical director, according to the company’s archived staff page, last updated in 2003. The Smithsonian’s records name its businesses as Frank Hubbard Harpsichords Kit, Inc., Frank T. Hubbard Harpsichords and Hubbard Harpsichords, Inc.

Its status today is unclear, and we say so. In 2011 Broekman donated the company’s records, mostly from 1949 to 2003, to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. A business directory still lists Hubbard Harpsichords, Inc., at a post-office box in Wayland, Massachusetts, with Broekman as principal; its last known workshop address was in Framingham. But when we checked on 2 October 2026, the company’s web addresses did not resolve, and archived copies run only to December 2025. We describe it as a firm whose current trading status could not be confirmed — not as closed, and not as still building.

Its stated ethos survives in that archive: “We are a small company, direct, honest, dealing in perfection according to the standards established from its beginning by Frank Hubbard.”

Historical, not revival.

The modern harpsichord was reinvented twice. First in Paris: the Cité de la musique says Wanda Landowska’s name “reste indissolublement lié au clavecin Pleyel (16 pieds), modèle conçu à partir de ses suggestions, inauguré en 1912” — remains inseparably linked to the Pleyel 16-foot harpsichord, built to her suggestions and launched in 1912, to which she stayed faithful throughout her career. Instruments in that style are now called “revival” harpsichords.

Then in Boston. Harvard Magazine records that Frank Hubbard and William Dowd “independently pursued apprenticeships with disciples of Dolmetsch, then founded a harpsichord company in 1949,” and that their serial number one was “modeled on a design by the Flemish Ruckers family.” Wikipedia sums up the difference: they built “on historical principles, rather than the 20th-century modern (now known as ‘revival’) style practised by virtually all professional makers.” Hubbard’s book and his instruments made the case for the historical approach, and Wolfgang Zuckermann, who visited his Boston shop as a stranger, called him, Wikipedia says, “as close to a saint as I’ve ever met.”

And then came the kit. The New York Times, in its 2018 obituary of Wolfgang Zuckermann, described his “Z-Box” as “a 35-pound box containing a keyboard, strings, plectrums (or pluckers), jacks (plectrum-holders) and tuning pins, but not the wood for the cabinet,” and said “Thousands of people around the world” bought one.

Hubbard’s former partner William Dowd, who closed his Massachusetts workshop in 1988, built, according to the Boston Globe, “more than 800 instruments that are now played in 26 countries.” The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History holds the records of both Boston pioneers — the Hubbard Harpsichord Records and the Dowd Harpsichord Collection — so the American revival is documented in a national archive.

Wolfgang Zuckermann explained his kit in his 1969 book The Modern Harpsichord: “Realizing that most people approach a harpsichord with caution, the way they do a vicious dog, I decided that the only way they might lose their fear of harpsichord maintenance was to go through the process of building the instrument for themselves.”

Germany’s oldest name in the field, J.C. Neupert, founded in 1868, built harpsichords from the 1900s and still works near Bamberg; its historical collection passed to Nuremberg’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum in the late 1960s. In Germany the scale was different. Kurt Wittmayer’s firm in Bavaria made about 440 instruments a year in the 1960s, according to the German Wikipedia, and some 8,430 modern instruments in all before closing in 1995.

The Cité de la musique traces Landowska’s influence forward “aux temps des débuts américains dans la facture de clavecin selon des principes historiques” — to the beginnings of American harpsichord making on historical principles. Across the inner German border, the Ammer workshops in Eisenberg, founded in 1927, built harpsichords with the Leipzig instrument museum from the 1930s, were nationalised in 1972, and continued in family hands, later in the West, until 2017.

A book author’s name on a workshop.

Hubbard’s brand was scholarship. His name stood for a book as much as a workshop, and his company’s self-description — “direct, honest, dealing in perfection” — reads like a scholar’s standard applied to a trade.

For a design guide, Hubbard shows how authority built on research can carry a small firm: one book, a body of instruments, and a reputation among players. Compare Dowd, his former partner, and Zuckermann, whose kit reached a much wider public.

The firm’s later history is a small-business story: a widow who kept it going for a quarter of a century, an apprentice who became its president, and an archive given to a national museum.

For this guide we use an ink blue and a vellum with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument or mark is reproduced.

Keep Hubbard Harpsichords’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.