There were a lot of shoddy goods, and, in response, there developed a move toward standardizing the instrument, to make the piano into The Piano, a reliable product.īy 1900, hundreds of thousands of instruments were being produced in Europe and the United States, manufactured by hundreds of piano makers who are now mostly forgotten. By 1854, a little book called "The Guard" was published in England to help the middle class make sensible decisions when shopping for a new instrument. The lucky ones, the new middle class of clerks and teachers and accountants, would eventually be able to afford a piano. Some of them were lucky others became inspirational fodder for Charles Dickens. Iron was introduced, as a kind of bracing for the instrument, about the same time that England's rural poor were being snookered out of the little agricultural living they once had, and forced into the cities, where they worked with. Metal frames gave the instrument a kind of potential energy that, when unleashed by the performer, burst out with terrifying new extremes of heroism and violence. Iron made the instrument more stable, less likely to go out of tune, and iron allowed the instrument to be strung up with heavier metal strings and stretched with unheard-of amounts of tension. It was iron-the dull gray timber of the Industrial Revolution-that would help take the instrument to its widest audience. And it was the Industrial Revolution that gave us the piano: the piano as furniture, as household object, as a commodity. Stranger still that the preeminent makers-at least in terms of quantity-are now in Japan and Korea.Įngland gave us the Industrial Revolution, an unmusical thing with its whir of looms, hissing steam and clattering wheels on railroad tracks. Strange that an instrument invented in Italy and pushed to maturity in France would end up seeming so German. The Erard firm would dominate the industry until the Germans and Americans took over with something called the Steinway. A new mechanism for resetting the hammers after they strike the strings was developed in 1821 by the French maker Sebastien Erard. The piano evolved throughout Europe, but it was in France that the instrument learned to walk-and run. But it was in England, in the 1770s, that it found its first muse, Johann Christian Bach, son of the forgotten man who had snubbed the instrument a generation earlier. By the middle of the 18th century, it had its champions in German-speaking countries. Music was changing when the piano was in its infancy, and the instrument evolved simultaneously with a musical culture that was putting more emphasis on expressive effects. Johann Sebastian Bach, then a little-known keyboard expert, pronounced an early model inadequate.īut the piano was a fortunate child. Gottfried Silbermann, a German instrument maker, read a description of Cristofori's instrument and built one along its lines. But news of Cristofori's "invention"-it was more like some exceptional tinkering, and nothing is ever really invented by a single person-made it north.Īnd that's where a singular aberration in the history of keyboard instruments became an industry, and where the piano emerged as the dominant instrument in Western music. Dillon Ripley Center's International Gallery.Ĭristofori's brief burst of inspiration in Italy never became a sustaining national passion the passion there would be opera. But it had promise, the possibility of creating gradations of loud and soft tones (indeed, its longer name, pianoforte, is Italian for soft-loud).Ĭristofori birthed a few more of these awkward beasts, including one in 1722 that is on display at the National Museum of American History's "Piano 300" show-a year-long exhibition of historic pianos, documents, photographs and music, which opened yesterday in the S. Compared to its brother the harpsichord, which had plucked rather than hammered strings, it had no brilliance or precision. It was an ugly child, sickly and anemic, unsure of its role in life. The piano was born in or around 1698, delivered by the Italian midwife Bartolomeo Cristofori to parents of uncertain origin. The odyssey of the piano, an unlikely tale, is the story of man's quest for control of many things, music being only one of them. The exact year of its origin isn't known-sometime around 1700-but the Smithsonian has chosen 2000 as the year to celebrate the event. Over the last 300 years, the piano developed from an idea into an instrument into the most popular and widely played instrument of our time. Smithsonian Celebrates Invention That Struck a Chord
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |