The Piano and Its Grand-parents.
Courtesy of Morris Steinert & Sons, Company
CHAPTER XXII
The Pianoforte Grows Up—The Ancestry of the Pianoforte
The Ancestry of the Pianoforte
We feel so familiar with the Pianoforte that we call it piano for short and almost forget that it is dignified by the longer name. We forget too, that Scarlatti, Rameau and Bach played not on the piano but on its ancestors, and that Byrd, Bull and Gibbon did not write their lovely dance suites for the instrument on which we play them today.
The Pianoforte’s family tree has three distinct branches,—strings, sounding board and hammers. First we know the piano is a stringed instrument, although it hides its chief characteristic, not under a bushel, but behind a casing of wood.
Where Stringed Instruments Came From
We have seen the stringed instrument developed from the bow when primitive man winged his arrow in the hunt, and heard its twang. Later desiring fuller tone, the sounding board grew, when early peoples sank bow-like instruments and reeds into a gourd which increased and reflected the sound as the metal reflector behind a light intensifies it.
Strings to produce sound, must be rubbed, like the bow drawn across violin strings, plucked as the mandolin or the harp is plucked, or struck with a hammer as was the dulcimer.
In the ancient times there were two instruments much alike, the psaltery and the dulcimer, both with a triangular or rectangular sounding box across which are stretched strings of wire or gut fastened to tuning pins. The difference between these two “relatives” is that the psaltery is plucked with fingers or a plectrum, and the dulcimer is struck with hammers. So the psaltery is the grandfather of the virginal, spinet, clavecin, and harpsichord, while the dulcimer is the remote ancestor of the pianoforte.