THE AGE OF KEYBOARDS

by Ivor Darreg

Go to your favorite shopping mall or look at the pictures in the magazines and newspapers: you will see different kinds of portable keyboards that didn't exist in the 50's or 60's. What's happening?

It's a very long story, going back far longer than anybody today will believe. Keyboards existed on the Hydraulus, the pipe-organ of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Rock bands may find some comfort in the fact that the Hydraulus was used at the arena during Gladiator Contests. It must have been mighty loud! But the churches took the organ idea and tamed it till it could accompany singers and cantors. From big levers and sliders that required a hefty fist, the keys shrunk to manageable size over the centuries. Except of course on steamboats and factory-whistles and the carillons with real heavy bells, which still require forceful blows on their wide keys. Or for that matter the organ's pedalboards.

Keyboard stringed instruments clavichord and harpsichord, came much later than the organ, and the organ keyboard was their master-pattern. The white keys are olde? than the black keys -- B-flat was the first accidental to be admitted to membership and the others followed after. While harpsichord and clavichord may have suggested the invention of the piano by Cristofori and parallel experiments by some other more obscure inventors, the Hammer-Dulcimer and the Chekker (exaquir, eschiquier, and other weird spellings) were more truly the ancestors of the piano. The first pianos had thin strings and wooden frames like the harpsichords of their time (Cristofori is said to have invented his piano in 1709 or 1711 according to which book you consult) and consequently a thin tone which blended with bowed instruments much better than modern pianos do. (The Fortepiano of Mozart's time is being made again and you can even get a kit of parts to make your own.)

I hope you "read between the lines" there. The clavichord, harpsichord, and those early pianos were made in small shops in small towns in Europe with hand tools -- they should be compared with what home crafts-people do in their garage workshops today, not with huge impersonal factories of the 19th century. It was only after the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in England and Europe that the piano became a mass-produced item with a cast metal frame, much heavier strings, stretched to almost 200 pounds tension, and felted hammers producing a much louder but duller tone. Huge symphony orchestras and big-city auditoriums demanded a powerful piano to compete with them. By a hundred years ago the piano reached its zenith in the Concert Grand, 9 feet long, and no further improvements were possible, since they would have ruined its pianistic personality. Ever since, the design has been rigidly frozen, like the idols of some ultraconservative fanatical religion.

Until just lately! Electronics to the rescue. Expensive heavy machinery required to make pianos in factbries is no longer necessary, since the new portable keyboards weigh a fraction of what pianos do, cost less, and have new tone-qualities indeed, the electronic keyboard is to the piano what color TV is to black-and-white. Organ, harpsichord, piano, whatever, just push another button. At the moment, the Piano's Ghost still haunts them, for they are tuned to the piano's 12-tone tempered scale. However, a small shop or experimental lab can build them out of readily-available parts, many of which have been developed for the computer industry.

So the first real progressive step since 1870 can now be taken: Designers using personal computers can figure out new scales and tunings and program them into memory-chips which can either be used to play new music on the computers or can be implanted into keyboards and instantly convert them to new scales. Some of this has already been done and we have had access to such keyboards and recorded on them. Composers' pride will no longer be wounded by having to repeat endlessly the tired cliches of a bygone century. Nor will they flinch at the enormous piano-moving bills of today.