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Instruments with keyboards allow the performer to control the sound they produce by some kind of mechanical process that rather technical description does not, of course, explain the genius that a human player can add. In fact, it is the interaction between the creativity of the player and the engineering at his or her disposal that make keyboards so fascinating. There are two principal categories of instruments:
• Touch sensitive: where pressure on the key directly affects the sound quality of the note produced, e.g. piano, clavichord.
• Non-sensitive: where the key simply triggers a separate process, e.g. organ, harpsichord.
Nearly all allow the use of both hands (and feet, on the organ) to provide maximum coverage sometimes even 10 fingers seem not quite enough!
We are all now used to the centuries-old arrangement of white and black keys. It was not always so. On the organs of the second millennium ad and earlier, there was simply a set of broad keys some so wide they had to be depressed with a clenched fist to produce the seven notes of the plainsong mode then in use. But with the arrival of 'musica ficta' (feigned music), sharpened or flattened notes were required: the first to appear was B flat, neatly tucked between the A and B notes.
Gradually the other four short, narrow keys were added, and there the keyboard has stayed ever since. Attempts to come up with alternative, more efficient methods have been tried, but none have come close to catching on. The keyboard arrangement we know, like that of the typewriter's QWERTY layout, just is and probably always will be.
The clavichord affirms its place as the earliest of the string keyboard instruments in its very name, taken from the Latin for, simply, key and string. Chronologically older than the virginal and spinet it is first mentioned in the 1400s the clavichord differs from both since its strings were not plucked, and from the piano because they were not hit by hammers. Instead, small brass blades known as tangents would strike the strings from underneath.
The tangent would lift, strike and then hold the string in position, acting like a guitarist's or violinist's finger to determine the length of the vibrating string. This lessened the power of the instrument. However, what the clavichord lacked in volume it made up for in its response to the player's touch: the harder the key was pressed, the louder the note. After striking the string the player could also move the key up and down while the string continued to vibrate, creating a vibrato effect called 'bebung'.
Co-existing with the harpsichord from the sixteenth century onwards, the clavichord was popular for solo recitals throughout Europe, but particularly in Germany, where it continued to be played until the early nineteenth century. Arnold Dolmetsch championed its twentieth-century revival, as he did for many early instruments.
Repertoire
C. P. E. Bach, the fifth son of Johann Sebastian, was an enthusiast: the sonatas and rondos in his collection Kenner und Liebhaber ('Connoisseurs and Amateurs') date from 177987. Twentieth-century composer Herbert Howells composed for the instrument, including the pragmatically titled Howells' Clavichord.
Related Instruments
The clavinet was a 1960s electrified version of the clavichord that produced a pleasingly gentle percussive sound.
The electric organ emerged in the early twentieth century, originally designed as an economical and compact substitute for the larger pipe organ. During its history, makers have employed various techniques for producing tones: vibrating reeds, spinning tone wheels, oscillator circuits and digital samplers. Notable early examples include the French Orgue des Ondes ('Wave Organ'), developed in the late 1920s by Edouard Coupleux and Armand Givelet, the 'Radio Organ of a Trillion Tones' and the Rangertone of the early 1930s.
Probably the most well-known is the Hammond organ, patented by its American inventor Laurens Hammond in 1934. Featuring two keyboards and a set of foot pedals, it produces its unmistakable sound through a set of rotary generators, using drawbars to produce a great variety of tone colours. The Hammond swirling through a Leslie rotating speaker cabinet was at the heart of much black American music from the 1960s onward, especially gospel, jazz, blues and funk.
By the 1960s valves in electric organs had given way to transistors, which were superseded in turn by microcircuits in the 1970s. Instead of originating notes internally, the latest types play digitally-stored samples, allowing players to imitate almost any other instrument.
Repertoire
Check out Jimmy Smith's exuberant funky grooves on his soul-jazz album, Back at the Chicken Shack. Spooner Oldham's soulful, gospel-influenced playing on many of Aretha Franklin's classic Atlantic recordings was the inspiration for one of today's leading players, Larry Goldings. Procul Harum's atmospheric 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' had a famous Bach theme (the air from his orchestral Suite No. 3) at its heart.
Related Instruments
Made in 1904, American inventor Thaddeus Cahill's 200-ton, keyboard-operated telharmonium was an important precursor to the electronic organ.
The electric piano can sound smooth and mellow, hard and funky, or anywhere in between. Its popularity peaked in the 1970s and declined during the 1980s, only to find a new generation of fans in the worlds of acid-jazz, hip-hop, and garage. Although the Yamaha CP70 electric grand became widely accepted and a new generation of digital pianos has emerged, for many players there were only two main makes to choose from: the Fender Rhodes or the Wurlitzer.
Fender Rhodes
Most influential in the 1970s, the 'Rhodes' helped define the sound of jazz-funk and jazz-fusion, and was played by many soul, funk and disco artists.
Harold Rhodes developed his Army Air Corps Piano from old bits salvaged from B-17 bombers. Using no electrics at all, he achieved a compact portable piano by using aluminium pipes instead of strings. In the late 1950s, Rhodes collaborated with guitar maker Leo Fender to make the 32-note Piano Bass model, made famous by Ray Manzarek of The Doors. The famous 72-note Suitcase model, introduced in 1965, was the first one with the unique 'real' Rhodes sound.
Wurlitzer
Frequently more at home in a guitar-based rock or pop band, the 'Wurly' has enjoyed great success from the early 1960s onwards.
The Wurlitzer's development started when the Everett piano company experimented with B. F. Meissner's ideas about electro-magnetic pickups. The giant American jukebox and theatre organ manufacturer, Wurlitzer, then applied this pickup technology to make an amplifiable piano in which hammers strike metal reeds and the Wurlitzer electric piano was born. The popular EP200 model was first made in the early 1960s.
Repertoire
The hard jangling attack of the Wurlitzer can be heard on 'Dreamer' by Supertramp and 'You're My Best Friend' by Queen. For the cleaner, more lyrical sound of the Rhodes, listen to the soulful Donny Hathaway on 'Everything is Everything' or the clarity of Elton John's classic 'Daniel'.
Related Instruments
Unsurprisingly, the electric piano is closely related to the conventional piano. Players of electric pianos often also play synthesizers.
The development of the early pianoforte into the magnificent grand piano was made possible by a number of innovations and inventions that together brought the kind of power and projection that could happily compete with the sound levels of a full orchestra or a jazz rhythm section.
A single cast-iron frame perfected in the US brought stability and the opportunity for more accurate tuning and better tension on the strings. The French manufacturer Érard provided the 'double escapement' action, allowing for fast repetition of the same note. And laying the long bass strings over the shorter high strings ('overstringing') helped to redeploy the stress. All of these elements came together in the 1859 patent by Steinway for an iron-framed, overstrung, double-escapement grand piano.
The modern concert grand is a beautiful, impressive object and an engineering triumph: with over 10,000 parts, including those three pedals that still puzzle many a piano player the left one mutes, the right sustains by letting all the strings resonate, and the one in the middle sustains only those notes originally held down.
Repertoire
The colossal and evolving range of the grand piano can be understood by comparing a Beethoven sonata (the formidable Pathétique), a Debussy piano work (the shimmering Clair de Lune) and a Rachmaninov concerto (such as his Third, featured in the film Shine). Its percussive qualities are evident in Stravinsky's Petrushka and Bartók's ferocious Allegro Barbaro. Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett explores the sonorous possibilities of the instrument in works like The Köln Concert, and Larry Knechtel's grand piano work is distinguished on Simon and Garfunkel's 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'.
Related Instruments
Examples of upright grands, with the strings running vertically so the instrument could fit against a wall, include the giraffe piano and lyre piano.
Grand Piano: Classic Piano Makes
Once the essentials of the concert grand piano were in place, individual manufacturers began to assert themselves and just as violinists have their personal preference for a Stradivarius, Guarneri or Amati, so pianists find they are drawn to the tone, action and response of a certain make.
Four of the most renowned grand piano manufacturers are:
• Bösendorfer: founded in 1828 in Vienna; the luminous clarity of their pianos' sound particularly appealed to Franz Lizst, jazz pianist Oscar Peterson and arch-perfectionists Steely Dan, who acquired a Bösendorfer for Michael Omartian to play throughout Katy Lied. The huge Imperial Grand has 95 rather than the standard 88 keys.
• Steinway: 1853 was a good year for pianos Bechstein, Blüthner and Steinway all set up shop. The innovative New York-based Steinway Company (they introduced the third pedal for selective sustain) produced powerful, durable grands, and were canny marketeers, using performers like Ignacy Paderewski and Artur Rubinstein to promote their pianos. Their Model D nigh on nine feet (2.75 m) in length is considered by many to be the finest concert piano ever.
• Bechstein: Carl Bechstein, a Berlin-based piano maker, saw Lizst in action at a concert and realised that the pianos of the future would have to be able to survive that level of passionate pounding. He quickly built a reputation for high quality, trustworthy pianos of an idiosyncratically ripe, clear, almost clamorous tone.
• Blüthner: the reputation of this Leipzig company spread via the alumni of the local conservatoire. Among their innovations were the addition of a sympathetic fourth string for notes in the higher register (producing a singing, silvery tone) and constructing a special light-weight piano for the ill-fated Hindenburg airship.
The humble harmonium was patented by the French company Debain in the 1840s. Its volume was limited, the number of stops few and its versatility minimal, but with the outlay of relatively little cost and skill a small church could acquire an organ sound; eventually heavy-weight composers such as Berlioz and Richard Strauss came to admire its qualities.
Two foot pedals were pressed up and down in turn, blowing air across the pipes; the air was transferred to a reservoir before passing through to the pipes, but the 'expression' stop gave the player the option of directly controlling the airflow with their feet, thus gaining some small compensation against their organist colleagues (the French sometimes called it the 'orgue expressif'). An alternative system, particularly common in America, sucked the air into the instrument to produce a softer tone.
The harmonium scored highly for its portability and convenience: at its peak 15,000 a year were being produced in the US for the chapel market. The instrument was also an attractive piece of home entertainment a kind of aural Playstation since it was easy to play and often used numbered buttons to produce the chords.
Repertoire
Berlioz's Little Shepherd's Piece and Dvorák's Bagatelles For Two Violins, Cello and Harmonium are rare examples of compositions by classical composers. Nico, in her post-Velvet Underground phase, played it mournfully on doom-laden solo albums like The Marble Index and Desertshore; a harmonium also underpins the opening of Pink Floyd's 'The Post War Dream' (from The Final Cut).
Related Instruments
The book harmonium was an extremely portable version developed to play while visiting presumably appreciative friends in hospital.
The harpsichord took the plucked-string concept of the virginal and spinet to new heights. The earliest example still in existence dates from the 1520s, when Italy was the major centre, but the instrument continued to develop through to the early 1800s: French harpsichords of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were especially graceful and elegantly decorated.
The jack-and-plectrum technique remained essentially the same as its predecessors; however the strings ran at right angles to the keyboard or manual (of which there might be two), and the strings were set in courses of two or more. Yet the harpsichord still suffered from the problem of quick decay: once a string had been plucked the note would fade too swiftly. To compensate, performers and composers added all manner of trills and other ornamentation. And to deal with the lack of dynamics, various attempts some using a Venetian blind system were made to boost the volume.
Whereas the clavichord was seen primarily as a solo instrument, the harpsichord was particularly effective and important in ensemble work, providing the continuo for voices or other instruments (usually improvised from an annotated bass line).
Repertoire
J. S. Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor is effectively a transcription of one of his astonishing improvisations; the melancholy Tambourin by Rameau is more meditative. For continuo work look no further than Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas. More recent appearances include the Beach Boys' 'God Only Knows', the Stranglers' 'Golden Brown' and on Tori Amos's album Boys for Pele.
Related Instruments
The clavicytherium was an upright harpsichord, with the soundboard rising vertically above the keyboard for greater sound projection.
Way before virginals, clavichords and spinets were dreamt of, the organ was already in its mature stage of development. Simple versions existed before the Christian era, and by the tenth century the organ was advanced enough to feature a double manual (or keyboard) and hundreds of pipes, providing the powerful swell of church music that accompanied the growth of Christianity.
At their most essential, organs are a set of pipes, sounded by air released from a windchest and controlled by valves operated by keys or foot pedals there is power, but no touch sensitivity. The pipes fall into two distinct categories:
• Flue: sounded whenever air strikes the top lip (like panpipes).
• Reed: where the air is vibrated by a metal tongue.
From medieval times onwards the motto of the organ was 'bigger and better', multiple manuals (including the great, swell, choir and solo) and a vast array of organ stops imitating different instruments and voices. When the French organ-maker Aristide Cavaillé-Col added the surge of electricity the volume continued to rise (a power responded to by composers like Charles-Marie Widor and Cesar Franck), up to the massive auditorium organ in Atlantic City, New Jersey, reckoned to be as loud as two dozen brass bands.
Repertoire
Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is a virtuoso tour de force. From the revival of organ composition following Cavaillé-Col's technical innovations, Franck's Chorale No. 2 in B Minor is mystically contemplative; Widor's famous Toccata (from his Fifth Organ Symphony) is known to most wedding attendees.
Related Instruments
The automatic barrel organ, using pins on pre-prepared drums to control the release of air into its flue pipes, was adopted by both country churches and street entertainers. The regal, or portative organ, was a tiny portable reed-organ popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, often used in processions.
The piano accordion, effectively an outsize mouth organ with bellows and a keyboard, emerged in the early nineteenth century as a Viennese invention, although its roots go back 5,000 years to the cheng, a Chinese instrument which used bamboo pipes, a gourd and a windchamber to achieve a similar effect.
The principle of the accordion is relatively simple; by moving the bellows in and out with the left hand, air is forced through the various reeds. The left hand also presses pre-set chord buttons, while the right hand picks out the melody. The squeezebox was briefly on the verge of becoming accepted as an orchestral instrument (Tchaikovsky incorporated it in his Suite No. 2 in C Major), but the accordion's main role has always been as an extremely portable way of providing rich accompaniment to folk songs and dances.
In fact the most striking aspect of the instrument is its universality, from the cafés of France to the pubs of Galway and the klezmer bands of eastern Europe. The accordion adds an essential element to the sounds of the tango, merengue and polka, and features widely in country and cajun music.
Repertoire
The melancholy Parisian sound is best captured by Edith Piaf recordings such as 'La Vie En Rose'. Authentic good-time New Orleans accordion is typified by Buckwheat Zydeco's 'Ma Tit Fille'. For Irish virtuosity, Sharon Shannon's eponymous debut album is outstanding.
Related Instruments
The hexagonal concertina beloved of hornpipe-dancing sailors has no keyboard just two sets of studs and is consequently deemed to be more demanding to play. National variants of the accordion include the Russian bayan and the Argentinean bandoneon.
The title of father of the modern piano is generally credited to Bartolomeo Cristofori, who was the keeper of instruments at the court of the Florentine Medici family. Like others at the time he wanted to find a way to combine the ability of the clavichord to use crescendo and diminuendo with the brilliance and relative power of the harpsichord.
After a number of prototypes Cristofori produced his 'gravicembalo col piano e forte', or harpsichord with loud and soft, in 1709, creating an action that allowed a leather hammer to hit a string (from underneath), be caught to prevent it rebounding on to the string, and finally damp the string. The idea, though, did not initially catch on Cristofori only made a score of pianos until German manufacturers like Gottfried Silbermann began improving the hammer action in the 1720s. The development of the affordable square piano increased its popularity, and by the end of the eighteenth century the English Broadwood company had adopted the sustain pedal.
By the time Broadwood sent Beethoven a pianoforte in 1818, the groundwork was set for the arrival of the metal frame and the innovations that created the modern grand piano in the nineteenth century.
Repertoire
Pianoforte works that can be heard on CD, played on authentic period instruments, include Josef Haydn's Variations in F Minor, J. C. Bach's Sonata in B-flat Major Opus 17, No. 6 and Mozart's Fantasia in C. One of Cristofori's original 'pianos' from 1726 features in a recording of Giuseppe Paladini's Divertimento in G Major, performed by Walter Bernstein. The Italian composer Muzio Clementi was one of the first composers to write specifically for the pianoforte rather than the harpsichord: his Gradus ad Parnassum remains a seminal set of studies.
Related Instruments
The orphica dating from around 1800 was an extraordinary instrument designed as a portable piano and worn round the player's neck.
The synthesizer has come a long way since the world's first one the American RCA Mk I, made in 1951, whose bulk occupied a laboratory. To play it, composers such as Milton Babbitt (who was a fan of Mk II) had to tap in punched-tape instructions there was no keyboard. Synthesizers became commercially available during the mid-1960s when two innovators, Donald Buchla and Robert Moog, each brought out their own designs. Robert Moog's Moog, with its new voltage-controlled oscillator, was the more influential and was played by top rock keyboard players such as Keith Emerson.
A conventional synthesizer is a keyboard instrument that generates a wide variety of sounds purely electronically, using no mechanical parts at all. With many models providing pre-programmed sounds as well as the capability of altering every aspect of a sound (e.g. pitch, timbre, attack and delay), the synthesizer player can imitate a range of instruments or invent entirely new squeaks, warbles or rumbles.
Analogue synthesizers are now regarded as classics and are collected for the unique quality of their sounds. From the late 1970s, these gave way to a new generation that used digital microcomputers, for example the Fairlight CMI (which plays sampled sounds (see p. 158) and Yamaha's FM (frequency modulation) models.
Repertoire
Walter (now Wendy) Carlos pioneered the early Moog with technical precision on Switched on Bach. Autobahn by the German band Kraftwerk inspired the late 1970s synthesizer boom. Listen to The Human League's 'Don't You Want Me Baby?' for their influential 1980s synthesizer band sound.
Related Instruments
Modern digital synthesizers are played in conjunction with samplers, sequencers and other studio equipment, using MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) to connect them together.
From honky-tonk bars to the low point of piano-smashing contests of the 1970s, the upright has been seen as the poor cousin of the grand. It can never recreate the power and tone of a grand, but its compact shape brought music into the heart of hundreds of thousands of homes at the end of the nineteenth century.
The upright piano was developed in the 1800s from what previously had been grand pianos with the strings and soundboard placed up against a wall constructions too tall to be practical. However, two amendments made all the difference: the Austrian Matthias Müller and the American John Hawkins realised independently that if the strings started from near ground level the height would be drastically reduced further improved by using a diagonal layout for the strings. Robert Wornum of London added the final touch in the 1830s with a tape-check action, preventing the hammer rebounding on to the strings, and still in use today.
Although the placement against a wall could lead to a lack of resonance, with the added disadvantage of the player having his or her back to the audience, or fellow musicians, the upright proved convenient and immensely popular a vogue enhanced by the arrival in the late nineteenth century of the automated player piano, which meant that no musical skill was required for families at home to enjoy performances by the great players of the day.
Repertoire
Scott Joplin's recordings of his own 'Maple Leaf Rag' and 'The Entertainer' were most likely performed on an upright (he also produced piano rolls of his versions), Jelly Roll Morton's 'Jelly Roll Blues' and 'King Porter Stomp' likewise.
Related Instruments
The player piano or pianola is an automatic upright, which uses air pressure controlled by the holes in a paper roll to control the striking of hammers against the piano's strings.
One of the oldest of the string keyboard instruments, the virginal dates from as early as the 1460s and marks the beginning of the harpsichord family. Its generally oblong case was often highly decorated, particularly the back of the lid, which might display an intricately painted landscape on being lifted up, revealing a small three- to four-octave keyboard with strings running parallel the particular characteristic of the virginal.
The instrument was played on a table or laid across the performer's lap. To produce its clear, articulate and brilliant sound, the strings were plucked: as a key was pressed down, its jack would be raised, simultaneously lifting a damper clear and pushing a plectrum against the string, which could vibrate until the player took his or more likely her finger off the key.
Playing the virginal was considered part of the skills of an educated young woman (hence the instrument's name, according to some sources) and was particularly important in English music of the early seventeenth century. The concept was developed into the spinet which frequently had a wing-shaped body more like a grand piano, strings set at 45 degrees to the keyboard and a fuller tone.
Repertoire
Walsingham, the set of 30 variations by the virtuoso virginalist John Bull, and William Byrd's The Woods So Wild are among the nearly 300 pieces collected in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, the main depository of English music for the virginal.
Related Instruments
The chekker was the first term used for string keyboard instruments, but experts seem unable to decide whether this was a precursor of the virginal, a clavichord or an upright harpsichord.