The Piano: The Evolution Of The Piano

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When it comes to classic musical instrument, piano is definitely one of the names that pop up in your mind. Indeed, after its first appearance around the year of 1700, piano has never left the stage of high culture and top class performance. Till today, three hundred years have past since it was first invented. Surely, a lot of changes have been made during this long period of evolution, the designers learnt to utilize better materials but the basic inner mechanism have stayed the same. However, the outside appearance of piano did changed a few times throughout the course of time. The first piano borrowed quite a bit of its look and design from the harpsichord because it was invented by Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori, an Italian harpsichord maker. (Powers, W. 2008) Namely, a noticeable amount of improvements have been made during the evolution of the instrument base on the demand of the time and arena. In this essay, stringed instruments with keyboard which are in the …show more content…

It finally happened in Florence in 1709, Cristofori’s new instrument was named by a poet and journalist named Scipione Maffei, “gravicembalo col piano e forte” (roughly “harpsichord with soft voice” in English). Eventually, it was shortened to pianoforte, and finally just piano. As soon as its first appearance, Cristofori’s piano became popular among the musicians because its ability to make music in more loudness and varying tones. (Pianonet. 2017) Cristofori was undoubtedly a great inventor as he solved many of the technical problems that continued to puzzle other piano designers for decades. However, his design was highly complex and the material he used was rather costly, causing many of its features to be dropped by the later models until the modern makers picked them up again in recent

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