Piano

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[[File:CabinetG_000.jpg|thumb|A Grand Piano]]

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[[File:CabinetG_000.jpg|thumb|A Grand Piano]]troll

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The piano, that common instrument of school music programs, appears to be the ultimate expression of the stringed musical instrument, which date back to the lyre and the harp.

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 Pianos (a shortening of the compound term "piano-forte") work by striking wires with felted (or leather headed) hammers, with a redaction mechanism that pulls the hammerhead away from the wire before it can dampen out the sound. Because the force of the hammer strike is generally proportional to the stroke on the key, this allows a piano to play a note softly (piano) or loudly (forte), leading to its name.The immediate predecessors of the pianoforte were the clavichord and the harpsichord, both of which tried to combine the ease of play of a traditional organ keyboard with the expressive range (and general portability) of a large concert harp. Of the two predecessor instruments, the harpsichord was the more common, and used a mechanism that plucked the strings (and later wires) of the instrument when a key was hit. This lead to a distinctive "plinking" or "plucking" sound, more like a strung harp, but lacked the ability to adjust the volume of a given note, and had only limited ability to change the duration of a note.

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While the harpsichord provided the mechanism for tying keys to striking particular strings that was used to make the first pianos, the clavichord (an earlier instrument, invented in the 15th century, was the first keyboard instrument to strike the strings by key stroke, hitting them from the side with a small (dull) blade called a tangent. Clavichords fell out of favor in the 17th century, and were virtually unheard of from roughly 1750 to 1890, when a number of musical instrument shops began making them again as a smaller complement to the piano.Prior to the clavichord, the first real stringed instrument that used hammers was the dulcimer, with variations such as the cymbalon and the readis spreading through the Balkan regions. All of these instruments relied on the player to strike strings with small hammers, often times holding multiple hammers with different heads in the gaps between their fingers, to get different tonal ranges, including a felted head for dampening a string.The first true pianoforte was built in 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy. His patrons, the Medicis, commissioned the first ones; there are three Cristofori pianofortes still in existence, dating back to the 1720s.

The Instruments Wiki

Changes: Piano

Revision as of 23:25, 10 January 2016

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-[[File:CabinetG_000.jpg|thumb|A Grand Piano]]
+[[File:CabinetG_000.jpg|thumb|A Grand Piano]]troll
-The piano, that common instrument of school music programs, appears to be the ultimate expression of the stringed musical instrument, which date back to the lyre and the harp.
-&nbsp;Pianos (a shortening of the compound term "piano-forte") work by striking wires with felted (or leather headed) hammers, with a redaction mechanism that pulls the hammerhead away from the wire before it can dampen out the sound. Because the force of the hammer strike is generally proportional to the stroke on the key, this allows a piano to play a note softly (piano) or loudly (forte), leading to its name.The immediate predecessors of the pianoforte were the clavichord and the harpsichord, both of which tried to combine the ease of play of a traditional organ keyboard with the expressive range (and general portability) of a large concert harp. Of the two predecessor instruments, the harpsichord was the more common, and used a mechanism that plucked the strings (and later wires) of the instrument when a key was hit. This lead to a distinctive "plinking" or "plucking" sound, more like a strung harp, but lacked the ability to adjust the volume of a given note, and had only limited ability to change the duration of a note.
-While the harpsichord provided the mechanism for tying keys to striking particular strings that was used to make the first pianos, the clavichord (an earlier instrument, invented in the 15th century, was the first keyboard instrument to strike the strings by key stroke, hitting them from the side with a small (dull) blade called a tangent. Clavichords fell out of favor in the 17th century, and were virtually unheard of from roughly 1750 to 1890, when a number of musical instrument shops began making them again as a smaller complement to the piano.Prior to the clavichord, the first real stringed instrument that used hammers was the dulcimer, with variations such as the cymbalon and the readis spreading through the Balkan regions. All of these instruments relied on the player to strike strings with small hammers, often times holding multiple hammers with different heads in the gaps between their fingers, to get different tonal ranges, including a felted head for dampening a string.The first true pianoforte was built in 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy. His patrons, the Medicis, commissioned the first ones; there are three Cristofori pianofortes still in existence, dating back to the 1720s.