Sample Essay on:
Early Piano Development

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Essay / Research Paper Abstract

A 5 page research paper on the development of the piano. The writer describes how the first pianos, made by Cristofori in the early eighteenth century, differed from previous keyboard instruments and traces the piano's development through the innovations of Broadwood. Bibliography lists 3 sources.

Page Count:

5 pages (~225 words per page)

File: D0_khearpia.rtf

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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:

history, changing the course of European musical development (Shepp, 1995). While this revolutionary moment occurred sometime in the early eighteenth century, the idea of an instrument with string that operated by stringing strings with hammer had its genesis as early as the fourteenth century, and certainly by the fifteenth (Grover, 1998). This early predecessor of the modern piano, the harpsichord, employed strings and a keyboard, but the strings were plucked, rather than struck (Grove4r, 1998). Likewise, another predecessor, the clavichord also used a keyboard, but the strings were struck with miniature tangents (Grover, 1998). In both cases, these instruments produced a muted sound, not loud enough for concert halls, and also suffered from the limitation in that neither instruments was responsible to the players touch, that is, striking the keys harder did not produce a louder side. In the late seventeenth century, composers were becoming responsive to the possibilities contained in broad melody, specifically to the uses of a phrase growing progressively louder then softer (Grover, 1998). The demand for more expression in music provided the impetus for piano development. There fore a growing demand for a keyboard instrument that could not only produce more authoritative sound, but also give the performer greater control over dynamic expression than was possible with the harpsichord, clavichord, or organ (Leland, 1995). This need was met by a Paduan harpsichord maker named Bartolommeo Cristofori, who constructed the first piano sometime between 1709 and 1711 (Grover, 1998). Cristofori gave his new instrument the lengthy name of "gravicembalo col piano e forte," which is Italian for "harpsichord with soft and loud" (Grover, 1998). This name was soon shortened to "pianoforte," and then simply to "piano." In shape and also in its general construction, this instrument resembled a harpsichord, but it operated with ...

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