Posts from — November 2008

As you can see in our last entry, Cristofori’s early "pianoforte" looked more like a haprsichord, with no inner metal frame, only two strings per unison, and only a 4 octave range. But it was definitely a beginning for the first keyboard instrument to strike the strings with a hammer instead of plucked with a quill (harpsichord) or struck with tiny tangents (clavichord.) Cristofori used deer leather to fashion his original hammers.

By the 1720’s Cristofori had made some twenty "gravicembali col piano e forte" ("harpsichord with soft & loud") and had added a padded "backcheck" to catch the hammer on the rebound. A sketch of Cristofori’s early piano action is shown below

 This original design was little changed over the next fifty years, as keyboard players of the day just began to explore the potential of this new "soft-loud" instrument. One of the key limitations (no pun intended) in Cristofori’s early design was the necessity to allow each key to raise all the way back up, before being able to play the key & hammer again for another strike of the note. You had to lift fully off the key because that’s what it took to bring all components back to their ready-to-play positions. This made it impossible to repeat notes quickly, and as new composers for this wonderful instrument entered the field, they demanded faster repetition for their more allegro, presto and vivace compositions. Cristofori began work on the early versions of an extra stick of wood, a "repetition lever," that would hold the hammer aloft only half-way back to rest position, allowing it to  be replayed without allowing the key to raise fully back up.

This repetition action was improved further by the great Parisian piano maker Sebastian Erard, who invented a "double escapement" around 1821 (Erard pianos are still made today!) Indeed, this ability to repeat any note more and more rapidly, with less and less raise of the key, became one of the most dominant quests in piano evolution, as great composers of the baroque, classical and romantic eras wrote more quick & lively passages and trills into their increasingly ornamental pieces. And although many would surmise that we have come as far as we can, and achieved maximum key-repeat velocity in the modern era of piano design, a visit to the Steinway factory in New York (a field trip I highly recommend!) will reveal that their action technicians still work on ways to improve this even further, introducing new experimental action designs every few years.

But increasing the rapid repetition of keys and notes proved to be only one of many problems that would rear their head in the evolution of the modern piano.  A discussion of these issues, and one man who made huge improvements in these areas, John Broadwood, follows next

Ah, those Italians, genius engineers and master inventors – Galileo, Da Vinci, Fermi, the moving vehicle, the make-up of the Solar System, the electric battery, the Fiat…OK maybe not the Fiat so much. I had one of those damn cars and it spent more time in the shop than on the road.

But truly, the Italians have produced some of the greatest scientists, philosophers and inventors ever seen, and perhaps none more important for music lovers than Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua. Cristofori moved to Florence in 1688, at the behest of his Prince, de Medici, at the age of 33, to be the Prince’s own court inventor of clocks, mechanical devices and musical instruments. Cristofori was already competent at building the plucked-string kyboard instruments of the day, the spinette and the virginal.

Around 1700, Cristfori invented an instrument he named the "Arpicembalo", literally "harp-harpsichord." It was the first keyboard instrument with two strings per unison and the strings excited by a strike from a hammer instead of a quill plectrum. The fact that it could produce a wide range of volumes, from soft (piano) to very loud (forte), eventually caused everyone to substitute "pianoforte," or the soft-loud, for Cristofori’s original harp-harpsichord moniker

The amazing genius of Cristofori’s invention was the "escapement action." Configuring just a few sticks of wood and a few springs, Cristofori fashioned a mechanism that allowed the hammer to be lifted up to string by pressing down the key, but then having the stick that was pushing the hammer up, snap out, or disconnect, from the hammer at the precise moment just berore it struck the strings. Obviously, without this "escapement" ability, the hammer would hit the strings but also be held against them, therefore instantly stopping the vibrations, as long as the player held down the key. The escapement mechanism allowed player to strike the keys, set the notes vibrating, and release the key only when necessary, at any pace they desired. Thus was born the sound and playing style that allowed for the beautiful "Piano," as it came to be known for short.

The piano is now 300 years old, and so many improvements have proceeded from Cristofori’s original cabinet, frame, string, hammer and action designs (covered next post.) But as I viewed some of Cristofori’s original 1720s pianos at the Smithsonian’s heavenly "300 Years Of The Piano" exhibit in 2000, as a technician, the thing I was most struck by was how little his basic action design has been changed, how similar the functional design is to that of a grand piano built in the 21st century.

Ah, those Italians, they’ve given us so much joy! I like the shoes, too. We’ll look at some of the improvements and evolution since Cristofori’s day in our next entry.

Music has been an essential part of life since the beginning of time. It has been used to accompany all nature of ritual and ceremony – from the earliest aboriginal drumming to signal an important event or to provide rhythm for tribal dance -  and to provide a blissful form of enjoyment and entertainment.

There are so many different kinds of music, from all corners of the globe. Wavy singing and string instruments from the Orient, tribal drumming from Africa, digeridoo droning from Australia, stiff & starched Baroque music from 18th-Century Europe, Ragas form India based on a scale with many more tones and semi-tones than the mere 12 in Western music, and "pop" music blaring out of boom boxes and iPods everywhere.

Regardless of the type of music, it’s always made up of a sequence of rhythms, notes of the melody, and some type of chordal or droning accompaniment, that immediately forms a higher-order language of its own, capable of communicating right to the core of our beings in, ways words always fall hopelessly short. No matter what mood you start out in, music can instantly transport you to another world, another state of consciousness, and often, absolute ecstasy. A so-called "music-reviewer" or journalist must have the most absurd job of all, as music can only be experienced directly, never described or explained.

In the history of Western music (a history we will venture into further in another post,) the earliest form was "organum" or single note chants and hymns sung by church acolytes. You can still hear many examples of monks singing biblical liturgy in latin, in unison, one note of the scale at a time. The western music scale was further defined and catalogued as 12 distinct semi-tones by Pythagoras, and by the 15th Century, singers and musicians were combining 2 and 3 notes at a time to form harmony and chords. The most popular instruments of the 16th and 17th Century were stringed instruments, early reeds  horns, and the earliest keyboard instruments: the cembalo, the celeste, the virginal and the harpsichord.

All these keyed instruments used a keyboard divided into the twelve semi-tones of Pythagoras’ Western scale. Pressing down any key set one or two strings vibrating by means of pushing or pulling a quill or plectrum across the string, somewhat similar to using a plastic guitar pick to strike one of the guitar’s strings.

Setting the strings in motion in this way allowed for only a relatively thin sound (as in the beautiful but rather tinny and metallic sound of a harpsichord), and greatly limited the range of soft-to-loud any player could produce, no matter how soft or hard he struck the key.

In order to produce a much wider range of volume and a much richer tone, some type of soft-but-firm "hammer" had to be discovered for striking the strings, and some type of mechanism had to be invented to allow the pressing of the key to "throw" the hammer against the string, yet still get out of the way once the string was struck, so it could vibrate freely.

Enter Bartolomeo Cristofori…(continued)