A piano is a keyboard that produces sounds by the striking of strings. We would not immediately imagine this common object signals the beginning, and end, of the first stage of modernity. Before getting there, we must distinguish between the striking of strings and the keyboard and how their matrimony began.
The string is most intimately tied to the genesis of Western music. Orpheus plucks his lyre and sings of the gods. The strung tetrachord would accompany the rhapsode’s performance of Homer. (West, 1992; Mathiesen, 1999) However, the limited range is evident as we can hear below.
The keyboard was, at first, the tool of the water and pipe organs. These are ancient wind instruments, distinguishing from the piano’s use of struck strings. Before this, strings were struck by hand with a mallet over a soundboard. This was known as a hammered dulcimer. Examples of this existed as far back as Hellas and persisted into the High Medieval period. (Hughes, 1974)
Music back then was more restrained, preferent to monophony. At a stretch a single voice could be attended with a drone. Music was an aid for contemplation, not for pleasure. The church’s dislike of polyphony was pietist. The idea that tonality beyond a perfect fifth introduced a dangerous sensuality, undesirable to the Christian life. (Caldwell, 1978)
O Virtus Sapientiae – O Power of Wisdom – Hildegard von Bingen (12th century)
The troubadours brought a dangerous new idea to Medieval Europe, the love lyric was to be sung. This developed into the ars nova (the new art) of the 14th century with the work of Guillaume de Machaut bringing new rhythmic changes, and a preference for expression over the temperance of the ars antiqua. (Leech-Wilkinson, 1993)
Je vivroie liement/Liement me deport – Guillaume de Machaut (14th Century)
The church was right to fear this move away from univocity, for never since has music existed for clerics alone. Renaissance music begins, imprecisely, in the 15th century and the contrast is imminent. Music was released into play and tonality stretched further. Compare what we have heard before to the rhythms of a Monteverdi:
Or the early experiments in tonality of a Gesualdo:
What is most evident is the increase in voices and the flourishes across the scales. Fingers had been freed and they went where they willed.
As music developed more towards a preference for polyphony, the desire for access to wider and wider ranges of tone grew. This was always the keyboard’s greatest strength and the grand, contrapuntal fugues of the Baroque period flourished by this. Yet, these heavy, domineering tones could not express the growing desire for lightness and expression. What technology beyond the keyboard could allow the access to tones across a single instrument but escape the solemnity inherent to the organ? The harpsichord allowed a certain lightness and fluency in musical expression that set a new tone to the emotional background of the West.
The harpsichord was a marvel of ingenuity and immediately took over as the preferred instrument of the gentler classes. It is the driving force behind the concerto and the centre of chamber music. As music entered the classical period, we are not surprised the harpsicord would take such precedence alongside with counterpoint. They are quite synonymous. Why? There’s no methodologically satisfying way to investigate this other than the basic observation that a harpsichord is a contrapuntal machine. It plays precisely and quickly, it plucks the notes up and sings most when it trills across melodic lines. It has a weak, ringing sustain that dims quickly. It is geared towards to the staccato and the contrast of voicings. (Pollens, 1995) See how the bowed instruments confirm to its pule and play rather than it to their capacity to sustain:
Haydn’s invention of the symphony disrupted this. (Heartz, 1995) Its eventual preference for concentrated thematic development over the exploration of tonality’s infinitesimal variations began a trend towards a convergence of harmonic exploration. Romanticism wants to lounge in feeling not jump in thought. Consider the moments of growth and sustain in Berlioz in the light of Mozart.
A row of violins creates a texture where a line of harpsichords make a racket. We can see the slow decline of the harpsichord from a position of centrality as the orchestra. It became a more solitary instrument as it began to understand a more momentous change. The pedal.
The pedal, more than the expansion of keys, distinguishes the piano from the harpsichord. A pedal lifts the damper off the string to allow the tone to continue. This is to say you can determine the length of note. The piano becomes a much more intuitive instrument. (Isacoff, 2011) This allows a new form of expression. We can go on at length in text over this, but I believe it is most edifying to simply hear the difference. Below is a version of Bach’s first piece from the Well-Tempered Clavier with the instrument he had in mind when composing, the harpsichord, and the piano. Notice the distance between the notes. The ambience that does, or does not, arise.
Only eccentrics like Gould refuse to conform to the piano’s demand. His view of the piano as a “contrapuntal machine” (his quote) is an anachronism. It treats the piano as a harpsichord while enjoying its lovelier timbre. Hear below how he returns the instrument to Bach’s original vision.
Imagining which Bach would have preferred is a pleasant, if fruitless, afternoon spent.
The piano quickly became the premier instrument of Europe. While audiences may flock to see a notable first chair violinist within an orchestra, we cannot imagine them as eager to see than performer alone. This was true enough for the harpsichord with Bach composing for it solo, and the guitar always having a dedicated corpus we are eager to hear, but what shifts is the emphasis from the piece composed to the performance itself.
There are famous pianists, there are not famous harpsichordists. A harpsichord was a musical tool whereas a piano, by a simple change in technology, is a space for original work: that of interpretation. The piano allows a nuance of decision, an interpretative practice of the solo performer usually allowed only to the composer. Now the piano has become a medium for the introspective engagement with a piece, how do I feel about this, what aspect do I want to emphasise? We buy recordings by specific pianists, different ones of the same pieces. And they do have noticeable differences on the level of texture, expression and meaning. Compare the sensual depth of Horowitz with the light virtuosity of Rubinstein on the same Chopin work:
And if you have time check this fantastic video where differences in style becomes a gateway into exploring their different approaches to life itself:
I pick Chopin because no composer is more intimately attached to the piano than he. Schubert loved it but used it to accompany his lieder, Litsz made his reputation off it but pursued his dreams of being Beethoven and even the composers of the great piano concertos like Brahms were more interested in music than they were the instrument. Chopin rarely stepped beyond solo piano works and didn’t seem particular interested to. He seemed to have attached himself with a particular tenderness to the intimacy, the quietude the piano allows in a manner that reflected his own sensitivity. He composed the chief romantic music of the piano and said the most romantic thing one could ever say about it in a letter to his love: “I tell my piano what I confide to you.” (Chopin, 1931/2013, p. 143) We hear this, even today the Chopin competition remains the rare classical spectacle to be given regular public attention. The peculiarity of the sustain of the piano, how it drops off quickly yet seems to linger endlessly, became his range of emotional expression. One that leaned so well into the technology that we must presume was not imagined at the time of inventing it. Draw your attention to the following, if no other, piece:
The odd melancholy, isolation and rich tenderness here is not something we can imagine on another instrument. It is something we wish to see recreated time and time again. More examples of this solemnity and solitude followed the window Chopin from Romanticism into Impressionism: (Plantinga, 1984)
While echoes of this can be heard in periods before, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata springs to mind, the strange space the piano allows for personal vulnerability and idiosyncrasy of approach remains to this day. There were attempts posthumously, partially reviled by the sentimentality Chopin and his descendants had unleashed on music, to return the piano into a machine of intellect:
Yet the endurance of the competition and the popular association of Chopin with his piano indicates something more. We understand something particular about the instrument was unlocked that allowed a full expression of an aspect of the human condition. We unlocked something in the instrument that unlocked something in ourselves.
And it only took two thousand years and pedal.
Bibliography
- Caldwell, J. (1978). Medieval music. Indiana University Press.
- Chopin, F. (2013). Chopin’s letters (H. Opieński, Ed.; E. L. Voynich, Trans.). Courier Corporation. (Original work published 1931)
- Dahlhaus, C. (1989). Nineteenth-century music (J. B. Robinson, Trans.). University of California Press.
- Einstein, A. (1947). Music in the romantic era. Norton.
- Heartz, D. (1995). Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese school, 1740–1780. Norton.
- Hughes, A. (1974). Medieval music: The sixth liberal art. University of Toronto Press.
- Isacoff, S. (2011). A natural history of the piano: The instrument, the music, the musicians — from Mozart to modern jazz and everything in between. Knopf.
- Kottick, E. L. (2016). A history of the harpsichord. Indiana University Press.
- Leech-Wilkinson, D. (1995). The emergence of ars nova. Journal of Musicology, 13(3), 285–317.
- Mathiesen, T. J. (1999). Apollo’s lyre: Greek music and music theory in antiquity and the Middle Ages. University of Nebraska Press.
- Mayes, C. (2021). Piano: A history in 100 pieces. Yale University Press.
- Plantinga, L. (1984). Romantic music: A history of musical style in nineteenth-century Europe. Norton.
- Pollens, S. (2009). The early pianoforte. Cambridge University Press.
- Samson, J. (1985). The music of Chopin. Routledge.
- West, M. L. (1992). Ancient Greek Music. Oxford University Press.
Making a Zine 