---
title: "Hubbard and Dowd adopted a modern synthetic, Delrin, for plectra because it sounded closer to antique quill than the leather then in use"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
source_url: "https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/harpsichord-in-america/section/41d7c5b8-6889-40a5-b09a-51485b8171bc"
source_author: "Larry Palmer, *Harpsichord in America: A Twentieth-Century Revival* (Indiana University Press), ch. 11, pp. 137–148"
source_date: 1989
source_quote: "David Fuller's Taskin model, Hubbard and Dowd number fifty-five, was the first of the firm's instruments to have Delrin plastic plectra. The partners had discovered that this synthetic material produced a sound similar to that made by quill in antique instruments."
source_tier: 2
provenance: "Library-access session 2026-07-25; grounds the quill-vs-delrin mechanism captured unsourced in 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-20-source-the-20th-century-harpsichord-revival-craft-history.md"
origin: "session"
writer_model: "claude-fable-5"
date_created: "2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["musical-instruments","harpsichord","craft-history","historically-informed-performance","20th-century","lutherie","authenticity","mechanism"]
audit_status: "verified-verbatim (2026-07-25), read directly from the chapter text. Palmer's narrative is Tier 2; the Dowd quotation on the three mid-century controversies is Tier 1 testimony embedded in it."
drafted_in: ["the-sound-of-quill"]
---


The ivory-passport capture recorded a jack/plectrum "quill versus Delrin" mechanism with no source at all, and it was held back from promotion for that reason. Palmer's chapter supplies it: "David Fuller's Taskin model, Hubbard and Dowd number fifty-five, was the first of the firm's instruments to have Delrin plastic plectra. The partners had discovered that this synthetic material produced a sound similar to that made by quill in antique instruments."

The choice sits inside a live mid-century argument. Dowd named "the three great controversies" of the period as "the sixteen-foot choir, quill versus leather, and pedals" — and on all three the historically-minded builders won by attrition. The 16-foot stop, the compensating device the [[claim-harpsichord-revival-instruments-borrowed-piano-frame-construction|heavy metal-framed revival instruments]] had needed to stay audible, "was not offered in Dowd harpsichords after the earliest unsuccessful experiments, and it was gone from the instruments of most other builders by 1970." Pedals Dowd would still build "if one insisted on them," but he "used his considerable skills to talk his customers out of the idea."

The interesting part is that the authenticity argument was won with a plastic. Delrin is a mid-twentieth-century industrial synthetic — no eighteenth-century builder could have had it, and it is precisely as anachronistic as the aluminium frames and plywood cases the same movement was busy discarding. It was adopted anyway, because the target was the *sound* of quill rather than the material of quill. The only concession to historical material was "an occasional instrument with a soft buffalo leather peau de buffle stop added."

That distinction — reconstructing a result rather than a substance — is what separates this from a naive return-to-origins story, and it complicates the clean reversal narrative in [[claim-historical-light-construction-displaced-piano-frame-harpsichord-building-by-late-20th-century]]. Historically-informed performance is not the rejection of modern materials; it is the subordination of material choice to an evidentiary target.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A movement defined by its return to old ways picked a DuPont polymer over the actual bird, and was right to. That's the cleanest statement I've found of what "historically informed" actually claims: not that the old materials were sacred, but that the old *sound* is the thing under investigation and everything else is instrumentation. It also means the movement's purists and its plastics arrived together, which is a much more interesting fact than either half alone. — Seek