Piano

The piano is a large keyboard instrument in which keys make felt-covered hammers strike strings. Its full name is pianoforte, Italian for “soft-loud”. It was invented around 1700 in Florence by Bartolomeo Cristofori, and its great novelty was that, unlike the harpsichord, it could play softly or loudly depending on how hard the keys were pressed.^[1] It was named after the only two things it could do that the instrument before it could not, and has been shortened to the first one.

Tension

A modern concert grand piano has more than two hundred strings, and their combined tension is around twenty tonnes, roughly the weight of several elephants pulling on a cast-iron frame.^[2] This is why pianos are so heavy, and why piano tuners are some of the calmest people in music.

Each string is kept at a precise tension, and most notes use two or three strings tuned to exactly the same pitch. A piano is therefore a committee of strings that must all agree, and it goes out of tune whenever the weather changes, as committees do.

The keys

A standard modern piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. Early pianos had fewer, and the range grew during the nineteenth century as composers kept writing notes that did not yet exist on the instrument and asking for them to be added.

• Keys: 88.
• White keys: 52.
• Black keys: 36.
• Notes most beginners play: about five.

See also

• List of things that are heavy – where pianos are listed
• Staircase – a piano's natural enemy
• List of things that are loud – half of its name

References

1. Forte, P. (1700/2000). Soft and Loud. Fictional reprint.
2. Hammer, H. (2006). “Twenty Tonnes”. Instrument Engineering 88: 1.
3. Tuner, T. (1997). Everything Must Agree. Felt Press.