A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians—from Mozart to Modern Jazz, and Everything in Between

I was once an ordinary tree, although living I was silent; now, though dead, if I am well played I sound sweetly.” Sometimes

Alkan even wrote a piece for four feet, called Bombardo-Carillon, in which the player’s legs are likely to get entangled during performance. (When Swiss-American pianist Rudolph Ganz was asked to perform Bombardo-Carillon with a female pianist, he declined on the grounds that he didn’t know her well enough.)

The men were each asked to play solo and then, seated at the two pianos that had been placed in the room, to take turns improvising variations on a theme selected by the Grand Duchess. Mozart later recalled that his piano was “out of tune and three of the keys were stuck

Mozart’s time included “Janissary,” or Turkish military band, effects such as bass drum, triangle, and cymbals.

Viennese piano builder Gabriel Anton Walter, Mozart’s piano had, besides the usual keyboard for his hands, an extra one to be played by his feet. For the first performance of the D minor Piano Concerto, Mozart played not with two limbs, but with four

In Paris in 1705, Hebenstreit so impressed Louis XIV with his virtuosity on the instrument that the king anointed the huge dulcimer with the official title “pantaleon.” (It was possibly a double entendre; the term pantalon was used in French and Italian comedy for “clown,” and thus it might have been a reference to Heben-streit’s puppetlike movements and jumps as he played.)

The race was also on to make the harpsichord’s sound more pleasing. Jakob Adlung, in his Musica Mechanica Organoedi of 1768, declared that harpsichord quills of goose feathers were too soft to produce a good tone, those made of fish bones too stiff, but that raven feathers coated with olive oil were just right. The Parisian instrument builder Pascal Taskin simply used leather quills to produce a “rounder” sound. Bach’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel mentioned an instrument built in Rome that went Taskin one better: it used quills of leather covered with velvet. “These pieces,” he declared, “sound as if softly touched by a sensitive finger and produce a tone combining the sound of a flute with that of a soft bell. In its fine quality of sound this instrument easily surpasses all others.”

In the end, Ferdinando apparently returned home with two things of significance: both the future inventor of the piano and the venereal disease that would eventually claim his life.

changing articulation, setting up contrasts between long notes and short tones, shifting dynamics, repeating pitches, and making us aware of silence—to enliven their musical phrases.

Such regularity—like the methodical spacing of columns in ancient Greek architecture—connects music to poetry, which also employs sequences of “feet,” predictable arrangements of weak and strong accents that give birth to “poetic meter.” Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter is an example, where each line contains five “iambs” (conforming to the sound “short-long”):
When in/de-spair/with for-/tune and/men’s eyes,/ I all/a-lone/be-weep/my out-/cast state. (Sonnet 29)