The Story in a Piano

What Is Music?

Music is one kind of sound. All sounds, whether musical or not, are the result of sound waves in the air. They travel almost exactly like the waves of the water. They go in circles in all directions at the same speed and will go on forever unless they meet something that has the ability to stop them. If you drop a pebble into the exact center of a basin of water, you will see the ring of waves produced start from the point where the pebble entered the water and travel to the sides of the vessel, which stop them. Also the pebble as it falls into the water will make ring after ring of waves.

When you shout or ring or strike one of the keys of the piano you start a sound wave or a series of them, which you can hear as soon as the sound wave strikes your ear. When the series of waves is regular the sound produced is a musical sound, and when the sound waves are not regular in length we call it some other kind of a sound.

Acting on the knowledge so learned, man has devised numerous instruments with which he can produce musical sounds, such as the piano, phonograph, and many others.

Who Made the First Piano?

The first real piano was made by Bartolomeo Christofori, an Italian. He invented the little hammers by the aid of which the strings are struck, giving a clear tone instead of the scratching sound which all the previous instruments produced. It took two thousand years to discover the value of the little hammers in making clearer notes. His first piano was made in 1709. The word by which we call the instrument pianoforte has, however, been traced back as far as 1598, when it is said to have been originated by an Italian named Paliarino. The first piano made in America was produced by John Behnud, in Philadelphia, in 1775.

How Was the Piano Discovered?

THE DISCOVERY OF STRINGED MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

The piano is a stringed musical instrument. The name pianoforte comes from two Italian words meaning soft and loud, and is accurately descriptive of the piano because the notes can at will be made soft or loud. The piano is a development of the simplest form of making regular sound vibrations by snapping or hammering a string of some kind which is stretched tight and fastened at both ends. We must go far back into history to find the earliest traces of stringed instruments, and even then we do not know where and when they originated, for there seem to be no records which help us to trace their origin. We know that the Egyptians as far back as 525 B.C. had stringed instruments, but we only know they had them—not where they got them or who made them. There is a legend that the Roman god Mercury, while walking along the Nile after the river had overflowed its banks and the land had again become dry, stubbed his toe on the shell of a dead tortoise. He picked it up to cast it aside and accidentally touched some strings of sinew with his finger. These strings were only what remained of the once live tortoise. At the same time Mercury heard a musical note and, after vainly trying to find a cause for the musical sound, twanged the string again and discovered the music in tightly-stretched strings. He set about making an instrument, using the tortoise shell for the sound box and stretching a number of strings of sinew across it. This is only a legend, of course, but if we examine the early musical instruments of the Greeks, which was the lyre, we always find the representation of a tortoise upon it.

Other nations, such as the early Chinese, the Persians, the Hindus and the Hebrews, had stringed instruments much resembling the lyre. In the tombs of the great rulers of Egypt are found representations of harps, and one harp which had been buried in one of the tombs for more than 3000 years was actually found to be in good condition.

Wherever we search among the records of early nations we find evidence that they were familiar with the music obtainable from playing upon stringed instruments, but we have never been able to discover what people or what persons first learned that music could be produced with such instruments.

THE FIRST STRINGED MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

The harp was probably the first practical stringed instrument. Its music was produced by picking the strings with the fingers or with a piece of bone or metal.

The next step was the psaltery, which was produced in the Middle Ages. It was a box with strings stretched across it and represented the first crude attempt at using a sounding board. A larger instrument which came about the same time and was very like the psaltery, was the dulcimer. Both were played by picking the strings with the finger or a small piece of bone or other substance.

Then came the keyboard, first used on stringed instruments in what is called the clavicytherium. This consisted of a box with cat-gut strings ranged in a semitriangle. On the end of each key was a quill, which picked the string when the key was operated.

After this came the clavichord. It was built like a small square piano without legs. The strings were made of brass and on the end of each key was a wedge-shaped piece of brass which picked the strings. The elder Bach composed his music on the clavichord, his favorite instrument, and that is why the music written by Bach is full of soft and melancholy notes. The clavichord produced only such notes.

The next steps brought the virginal, spinet and harpsichord. The strings on all three were of brass with quills at the key ends for picking the strings. The virginal and spinet were very much alike. The harpsichord was larger and sometimes was made with two keyboards. These instruments had notes covering four octaves only.

The arrangement of the strings in the harpsichord provided one step nearer to our piano. It had five octaves of notes and there were at least two strings to each note instead of only one, as in previous instruments.

Why Do We Have Only Seven Octaves on a Piano? Why Not Twelve or More Octaves?

Ordinarily the longest key-board of the piano has seven octaves and three notes in addition, or 52 notes, not counting the sharps and flats. An octave you, of course, know consists of the seven notes C D E F G A B. Every eighth note is a repetition of the one seven notes below or above. The reason that there are no more notes or octaves on the piano is that if we extended the key-board either way one or two octaves more, we should not be able to hear the notes struck on the keys. There would be sound produced, or course, but the vibrations would be too fine for the human ear to hear. It is said that the range of the human ear does not go beyond somewhere between eleven and twelve octaves.

HOW THE MUSIC GETS INTO THE PIANO