A childs history of who-invented-the-piano

By Kathleen Briggs

To explore who-invented-the-piano, we have to know how the history of the piano began. Before any music was even written down, people were inventing musical instruments to play. It didn’t take them long to find out that a string stretched over a box of some kind would make a sound when it wiggled. Then they discovered that a long string makes a low sound and a short string makes a high sound. They also found that if you plucked gently on the string it would make a quiet sound, and if you plucked hard it would made a loud sound. (That’s important to remember for later in this story.)

Someone decided that they could have a LOT of strings if they could stretch them across a big, strong board. To make it work like a lute, they had to invent a way to pluck the strings. After a LOT of experiments, they discovered how to make just the right hook. They took a quill, which is the very tip of a bird’s feather, and cut it in a very special way.

They fastened the quill on the end of a long thin piece of wood called a key. They then built a machine that could hold a lot of strings, quills and everything else they needed. Sound was made by quickly pushing down on one end of the key, which caused the quill on the other end of the key to rise up and pluck one of the strings. Each key was built under one of the strings, so there were a lot of keys to go with all of the strings.

Even though the harpsichord was wonderful and could play many notes at a time and made marvelous music, there were certain other things it just couldn’t do. Because of the way it was made and because a bird’s feather is easy to break, the strings couldn’t be plucked very hard. Therefore, the only way to make the harpsichord play louder was to play more strings at a time, and the only way to make it play softer was to play fewer strings.

Soooooo - you guessed it - they started inventing again. They kept the basic shape of the harpsichord with strings stretched across a very strong box, but they discovered that hitting the strings rather than plucking them would also make a nice ringing sound. The history of who-invented-the-piano was getting better. This was really great news because they found that hitting the string didn’t hurt either the string or the hammer they were using and the best news was that by hitting the string gently they could get a quiet sound, and by hitting the string harder they would get a louder sound. Finally, as the history of who-invented-the-piano continued, they had an instrument that could play both loudly and softly and the musicians were very, very happy - so happy, in fact, that they named the instrument . . . are you ready for this . . .

What? That’s not the instrument you play? Of course, with most long names, eventually the new instrument was given a shorter nickname: the Soft.

What? You don’t play the Soft either?

OHHHH!!

Did I forget to mention that these wonderful inventor/musicians lived not in America or England, but in a country called Italy? Well they did, which means they didn’t speak English. They spoke Italian. So, when they named the instrument, they used their Italian words for “soft” and “loud.” So their name of their instrument wasn’t the “Soft-Loud,” even though their words mean the same thing. The name of their new instrument was the Pianoforte, but we know it by its nickname:

So began the history of who-invented-the-piano.



Kathleen Briggs is a contributing composer/arranger for Music House Publications.