Keyboard music

“ Complete master of the piano-forte keyboard, he calls to his melodious uses, with most consummate ease, all of its resources that are known to skilful performers, as well as constantly discovers and applies those that are new. Under his magnetic touch, this instrument may become, at his will, a music-box, a hand-organ, a harp or a bagpipe, a "Scotch fiddle," a church-organ, a guitar, or a banjo: it may imitate the "stump speaker" as he delivers his glowing harangue ”

“ Harps, in which the strings are plucked with the plectrum, are in some form or other as old as music itself, and appear in the most various shapes in the first dawn of civilisation. The mechanism of the keyboard, which by means of an easy leverage adapted to the human fingers, gives the player control over the sounds of pipes or strings, is not quite so ancient, since it presumes a certain inventive capacity ”

“ Whether our old keyboard be destined to yield to such a successor or not, there is very much beautiful piano music of our own time, naturally contrived to fit the form of the hand to it, which it might be very difficult to graft upon another system even if it were more logically simple. ”

“ The Transpositeur being an independent false keyboard can be applied to any pianoforte by any maker. It has therefore the great merits of adaptability and convenience. It can be placed upon the proper keyboard of an instrument, and by touching a spring to the right hand of the player and a button which permits the keyboard to be shifted through all the semitones of an octave, the transposition desired is effected. ”

“ I wish very much that some of our ingenious American instrument-makers could have the opportunity of examining it. It has been publicly exhibited at the South-Kensington Exhibition, before the recent meeting of the British Association, and elsewhere. The highest scientific authorities have pronounced most thoroughly in favor of its 'perfectness, beauty, and simplicity.' Whether the greater complication of the keyboard will interfere seriously with its popular use, remains to be seen."
Mr. Theodore Thomas recently gave an excellent performance of the works of American composers. ”

“ It had a compass of five octaves, and although the keyboard was of the same extent as in the larger harmoniums, the instrument could be instantly folded up so as to occupy less than half its height and length. The jury, in awarding the inventor a prize medal, said the portable harmonium was peculiarly constructed for producing expression, and might either be used by itself for the performance of music written for the organ or harmonium, or for taking violin, flute, or violoncello solos or parts—its capabilities of expression giving it great advantages in imitating these instruments. ”

“ The influence of the keyboard upon the development of modern music is as conspicuous as it has been important. To this day C major is 'natural' on the keys, as it is in the corresponding notation. Other scales are formed by substituting accidental sharps or flats for naturals both in notation and on the keyed instrument, a fact which is evidence of the common origin and early growth together of the two. ”

“ The mathematical ratio referred to on page 134, if strictly carried out in tuning a keyboard instrument would cause the half-steps to vary slightly in size, and playing in certain keys (especially those having a number of sharps or flats in the signature) would therefore sound out of tune. There would be many other disadvantages in such a system, notably the inability to modulate freely to other keys, and since modulation is one of the predominant and most striking characteristics of modern music, this would constitute a serious barrier to advances in composition. ”

“ That is precisely the miracle the pianola performs for you. It gives you, from the moment it enters your house, control over the keyboard of the pianoforte that so long has stood mute in your home. All you have to do is to put in the perforated music roll, work the pedals—and the music begins. Supposing it is that coon song from the comic opera you liked so much. The first time you play it, you may be so interested in the instrument's accurate reproduction of the tune that you don't stop to think of the expression. ”

“ The desire for a power of increase and decrease on keyboard instruments like the harpsichord and organ, so as to emulate the bow instruments, and even the human voice, in that flow and ebb which are at the foundation of form no less than of expression, has led to the contrivance of mechanical swells as the only possible approach to it. ”

“ Thus if an organ has forty speaking stops, all running through the entire keyboard, then each time one key is depressed forty pipes will speak, and if a chord of five tones is played, two hundred pipes will speak. The object of having so many pipes is not merely to make possible a very powerful tone, but, rather, to give greater variety of tone-color.
The pipe-organ usually has a pedal keyboard on which the feet of the performer play a bass part, this part often sounding an octave (or more) lower than the notes indicate. ”

“ It is called the 'voice harmonium,' because the securing of perfect intonation brings the tones much nearer to the quality of the human voice. The instrument has been invented and patented by Mr. Colin Brown of Glasgow, Ewing lecturer on music. By the use of additional reeds and a most ingenious keyboard, he has succeeded in giving each key in perfect tune. The 'wolf' is banished altogether, without the privilege of a single growl. ”

“ The bells which were intended thus to be played by hand were furnished with an inside clapper as well as the outside hammers, the clapper being connected by a wire with the keyboard below, and the hammer operated upon by the mechanical barrel, so that the same set of bells could be played either by machinery or by hand. The keyboard, though arranged on the same principle as the ordinary pianoforte keyboard, was a large affair with wooden keys, so far distant from one another as to admit of being struck with the fist without disturbing the keys on either side ”

“ Before notation existed,—before keyboards were invented,—people sang. Before a child knows anything of notation or a keyboard, it sings. It is following its natural, musical instinct. Notation and keyboards are simply symbols of music—cages in which the beautiful bird is caught. They are not music any more than the alphabet is literature. Unfortunately, our system of musical symbols and the keyboard itself are very complex. For the young child it is as difficult as are Calculus and Algebra for his older brother. ”

“ Well-controlled hands, fingers, wrists and arms, with excellent manipulation of the keyboard, may be admired at the recital, but little of that effective playing is heard which finds its way to the hearer's heart. A dead monotony will too often recall the letter that killeth because devoid of the spirit that giveth life. ”

“ We have divided the octave into twelve equidistant degrees, because we had to manage somehow, and have constructed our instruments in such a way that we can never get in above or below or between them. Keyboard instruments, in particular, have so thoroughly schooled our ears that we are no longer capable of hearing anything else—incapable of hearing except through this impure medium. ”

“ You can get an approximate idea of the sound of a harpsichord by plucking the strings of a modern piano with the plectrum of a mandolin, or with a common quill toothpick.
The invention which overthrew the clavichord and the harpsichord and brought into existence the piano was the hammer action. For years the problem of applying the keyboard to the principle of the dulcimer, already [Pg 93] explained, had occupied the minds of instrument builders. The solution was the work of Bartolomeo Cristofori, born at Padua, May 4, 1653, and it was made public in 1711. ”

“ By forming the habit of reading away from the piano the pupil soon becomes able to hear the music without making the sounds at the keyboard and this leads to a mental conception of the piece as a whole, which invariably produces surprisingly good results. ”

“ Great houses, like those of Ibach, Duysen, Kaps, and Blüthner, are taking it up. Hausmann in Berlin, and Wendling in Leipzig, are the chief supporters of the scheme. In America we hear stories of remarkable results. Only by the development of such a new keyboard, which will have to answer the demands of the modern conception of music, will it be possible to draw new tone-effects from the piano. Its utmost capacities, in its present form, have been exhausted, it would seem, by Liszt. ”

“ At the top of each leg is a richly engraved band of brass, and rosette, to conceal the place where the pin held the leg to the instrument. The drawer knobs were doubtless brass also, for these are not the original ones. The panel above the keyboard is beautifully painted in metallic lustre, and has two carved panels besides, over velvet. The legs are boldly carved with the acanthus leaf, and everything about the piano is as elegant as possible. By the time these last two instruments were made music had taken a decided advance. Musical societies were organized in all the large cities ”

“ These are, a double escapement, which he is still perfecting, a transposing keyboard, a 'pédalier,' which can be adapted to any piano, thus enabling organists to practise pedal passages without spoiling a piano by coupling the notes, and lastly the 'pédale harmonique,' a pedal which can be used while playing chromatic passages, as it can be applied to the melody alone, or to any specific notes, at the option of the player. ”

“ Still the question of organ touch is complicated by the peculiarities of the instrument and the varieties of mechanism. Many organs exist with four keyboards (even five may be met with) , and the necessarily different levels of these make it almost impossible to keep the hand in a uniform position for all of them. It is rare to find any two of these manuals with a similar touch, and the amount of force required to press down the key varies within wide limits. Even on the same keyboard the touch is appreciably heavier in the bass, and inequalities occur between adjacent notes. ”

“ Brilliant scale passages and arpeggios, accompanying a harmony on another keyboard, may be given with an effect at once light and bizarre, with the 16-feet bourdon and the fifteenth three octaves above it. ”

“ He knew that his memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown) ”

“ It has been remarked by Professor Huxley that the ingenuity of human inventions has been paralleled by the tenacity with which original forms have been preserved. Although the number of keys within an octave of the keyboard are quite inadequate to render the written notation of the four and twenty major and minor modes, or even of the semitones allied to the one that it was first mainly contrived for, no attempts to augment the number of keys in the octave or to change their familiar disposition have yet succeeded. ”

“ In order to understand the principles upon which the rules of modern fingering are based, it will be well to glance briefly at the history of those rules, and in so doing it must be borne in mind that two causes have operated to influence their development the—construction of the keyboard, and the nature of the music to be performed. ”

“ But the short compass of the keyboard, which in Bach's time and indeed until about 1770 never exceeded five octaves, was ill adapted to the association of two performers on the same instrument, and it is doubtless on this account that the earlier composers have left so little music of the kind. ”

“ Were it possible to transfer Orchestral passages to the keyboard notatim, the task of arranging would be a very simple one; but it would be a great mistake to suppose that the most literal transcription from the Score is invariably the best, or the most effective one. Many complicated passages need extensive simplification, in order to bring them within the compass even of four hands upon the Pianoforte; while the execution of many Violin passages is absolutely impossible upon Keyed Instruments. ”

“ The narrow box should be placed about where you think the keyboard belongs. (See Diagram Six, F, page 179, for making a piano from two boxes.) The music-rest is a bit of folded box rim glued to the central part of the piano above the keyboard. The keyboard is marked off with ink upon a strip of white paper and pasted upon the top of the narrow box. You can easily draw the first part of some music that you know, and place it on a tiny sheet of white paper to make a “piece” for the piano’s music-rest.
A mantel for the living-room may be made from a flat letter-paper box. ”

“ The advantage Herr von Jankó claims for his keyboard is a freer use of the fingers than is possible with the accepted keyboard, as the player has the choice of three double rows of keys. The longer fingers touch the higher and the shorter the lower keys, an arrangement of special importance for the thumb, which, unlike the latest practice in piano technique, takes its natural position always. All scales, major and minor, can be played with the same positions of the fingers ”

“ The keyboard of the piano, on the contrary, besides its purely mechanical function, also forms a sympathetic vehicle of transmission for the performer’s rhythmical and emotional feeling, in consequence of the faithfulness with which it passes on the impulses communicated by the fingers. The keyboard proper does not, in instruments of the organ and piano types, contain the complete mechanical apparatus for directly unlocking the sound, but only that external part of it which is accessible to the performer. ”