The male family members formed a string quartet, with Alexander playing first violin, the father second, Michael viola, and Wolfgang cello.

He describes how he sought information: "Dropping in on Frank Hubbard in Boston (one of three American harpsichord makers) as a complete stranger, I was given a guided tour of his workshop on a Sunday morning after getting him out of bed.

"[2] With this informal background Zuckermann succeeded in building his first harpsichord, which was rather similar in form to the kit instrument he started selling a number of years later.

Americans of the day had essentially no computers or other digital equipment with which to spend their free time, and recreational activity involving the assembly of things was widespread.

"[17] Zuckermann kept track of his more unusual customers, writing later in The Modern Harpsichord: Once a 300-pound truck driver walked into the shop, sat down, rattled off a Bach invention, and pulled out the cash to buy a kit, all in dollar bills.

A 13-year-old boy appeared with the contents of a piggy bank ... A prison warden once wrote us that a convict had made a harpsichord while serving time for murder.More systematically, he found that his buyers were typically rather educated; advertising was more effective in magazines that targeted this audience, such as Saturday Review or The New Yorker.

Zuckermann reports he recently sent kits to three soldiers in Viet Nam and three complete harpsichords now grace the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where one customer wrote of tuning [an instrument] to the accompaniment of gunfire.

"[17] The Zuckermann kit harpsichord was designed to maximize affordability, and therefore involved considerable outsourcing of parts to manufacturers who could create them with the cost advantage derived from mass production.

The instrument had the additional virtue of simplicity: rather than a complex machine designed to produce an instantaneous variety of colors,[36] it was a basic keyboard that plucked the strings.

All of these constructional factors came to be increasingly avoided by builders (including the firm Zuckermann founded) as the field of harpsichord making moved toward a historicist approach; see Kottick (2003:ch.

Zuckermann's preference for historical principles was especially evident in the book's warmly appreciative account of the work of three builders, Frank Hubbard, William Dowd, and Martin Skowroneck, who are acknowledged today as the key figures in the move toward historically-based harpsichord construction.

"[41] Zuckermann also attacked the German production harpsichord on grounds of its visual esthetics, characterizing it as tubby and ugly; he further asserted that the historical builders virtually always created instruments of grace and beauty.

"[44] The conflict between the two approaches of building was indeed a live one at the time Zuckermann wrote his book, but is no longer; authentically-oriented harpsichords completely dominate the field today.

Living in England (see below) he designed instrument kits on historical lines in collaboration with builder Michael Thomas:[52] a harpsichord in Italian style[53] and a clavichord.

In July 1963, in collaboration with Eric Britton,[55] he founded the Sundance Festival of the Chamber Arts in rural Pennsylvania; it featured classical concerts, marionette operas,[56] theater, dance, and poetry.

During the later years, the festival was co-run by Zuckermann and his friend Michael Smith, who was theater critic for the Village Voice; they had met when Townsend interviewed him for his newspaper.

[57] Smith described the venue thus: Deep in the woods in northern Bucks County, Pennsylvania, two hours west of New York, they had built a small covered stage and a wide amphitheatre for the audience that was open to the stars.

[58] Later, Zuckermann and Smith launched a further arts collaboration as sponsors of Caffe Cino, a coffee house cum off-off-Broadway theater located near his harpsichord workshop on Christopher Street.

Cino had, it appears, been paying off the police in order to run an establishment not permitted by the zoning laws, and Smith and Zuckermann were unwilling to try to follow in his footsteps.

"[60] The nadir of the experience for Zuckermann was a night spent in jail, as Stone relates: [The play] Empire State features [among other characters] ... an obnoxious boy of ten.

Zuckermann ... wrote ... about the event, "two inspectors dressed as hippies came and watched one of our plays [Empire State] containing what was then considered a dirty word, starting with 'mother'".

Because the obscenity was said in front of a child performing in the play, Zuckermann and one of the actors who was also the boy's uncle were arrested on January 26, 1968, only three days after the Caffe's opening.

[63] The 1960s, when Zuckermann's harpsichord project flourished, was also the time of when the American government sent its troops to fight in a controversial war in Vietnam, leading to a sharp rise in domestic political activism.

[67] He left New York for England, where he bought and moved into Stafford Barton,[68] a 15th century house in rural Devonshire with 28 acres of fields and gardens.

He played an active part in creating small local collaborative projects that cut away from the values and patterns of the dominant consumer society.

Zuckermann's significant experience as a 'kit builder' on a large international scale was one of the important driving forces behind the program and its various spin-offs and demonstration projects.

Zuckermann followed this up with a number of other EcoPlan projects such as co-author of a children's book, Family Mouse Behind the Wheel (1992), as well as taking a leading role in The Commons Car Free Days program.

In 1994 Zuckermann collaborated with Eric Britton, with whom he had worked much earlier on the Sundance Festival, to create an interactive program under The Commons for something they called "Consumer Holiday – The one day a year we turn off the economy and think about it".

Zuckermann and Britton described the store as "a bookstore and arts center ... which resolutely refuses the separation of 'culture' from the issues of technology, society and personal responsibility.

"[74] A 2008 visitor described the store thus, "A small but well stocked hideaway just inside the medieval city walls near Porte St Lazare, the shop is infused with the character of its owner.