who
have grown up with electronic keyboards may not appreciate the dominant position the piano was to occupy for nearly three centuries.
No one is certain exactly when the first piano was built, but we know from historical records that one existed by 1700, when it was described as a "gravicembalo col piano e forte," or "harpsichord with soft and loud." The fact that the instrument came to be known as a pianoforte (which eventually was shortened to just piano) shows how significant it was considered that it could play both soft and loud tones.
Before the piano was invented, the primary keyboard instrument was the harpsichord, which looked like a smaller, more delicate grand piano. The harpsichord produced its sound by a simple mechanism that plucked the string; as a result, the loudness of the note was the same no matter how hard you struck the key. Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731), who is credited with single-handedly building the first piano, created an instrument that struck the string with a hammer. The sound of the first pianos was rather weak and brittle, but the biggest advancement over the harpsichord was that the player could now modify the loudness of the instrument by hitting the keys with more or less force. For the first time, a keyboardist could play a crescendo (in which the sound is made to gradually grow louder) or decrescendo (gradually growing softer), which made possible all sorts of expressive nuance that had previously been unavailable to the player.
Bartolomeo Cristofori
At first there was some resistance to the new instrument--Johann Sebastian Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714-1788) did not write kindly about the first pianos--but within a relatively short time the piano completely eclipsed the harpsichord. While the earliest sonatas by Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809) were intended for the harpsichord, virtually all of the sonatas and concertos for keyboard by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) were composed for the piano.
In their ongoing attempts to make the piano's sound louder and richer, builders added strings (most keys on today's piano have three strings) and made the strings thicker. This required greater string tension, which required a heavier outer case and, eventually, a massive cast-iron frame. The strings on a modern grand piano exert a force of over 18 tons! The mechanism became more sophisticated--and complicated--and pedals were added. The next time you're at a piano recital, don't just look at the pianist's hands; watching his or her feet and how the pedals are used will reveal a lot about the performer's musicianship.
Being a keyboard instrument, it had the ability to play more than one note at a time and could therefore be used to perform virtually any piece by itself, both melody and harmony. As such it was the primary medium for the dissemination of music in the years before the existence of recordings. Even large works for orchestra such as symphonies were arranged to be played by one or two people at a piano keyboard. It also became the primary instrument for accompanying other instruments or the human voice, and a long line of major composers created a vast repertoire for the piano, both alone and in combination with other instruments for chamber music, or even as a solo instrument with a full orchestra.
By the 19th century, the piano was the most popular instrument of all, and a well-bred young lady was expected to possess certain social skills, including conversation, dancing and playing the piano. Consider the fact that at one time, there were over 60 piano factories in the city of Vienna alone! The earliest popular music reached its audience through the sale of sheet music for piano, and by the end of the 19th century (and well into the 20th), the home of virtually every family that considered itself prosperous or had any aspirations to culture had a piano in their parlor. (For those who had no talent for performing, there were "player pianos" in which a roll of punched paper was run over a special mechanism that in turn caused the keys to respond all by themselves.)
Nowadays the electronic keyboard has essentially replaced the piano as the standard tool of music students and composers. Like the piano, it has gone through an evolutionary process, and only lately have electronic keyboards become "touch-sensitive"--that is, the amount of force with which you hit the keys determines how loud the instrument will sound. It was precisely that same development that occurred when Christofori made the harpsichord touch-sensitive, and created the piano.
