Our pianos have a peculiar configuration, with 52 white keys and 36 black keys, ranging from A, 3 1⁄2 octaves below middle C, to C, four octaves above middle C. Why not 64 keys? Why not 128?
Before there were pianos, there were pipe organs. In medieval times, some pipe organs included only a few keys, which were so hard to depress that players had to don leather gloves to do the job. According to piano historian and registered piano technician Stephen H. Brady, medieval stringed instruments originally included only the white keys of the modern keyboard, with the raised black keys added gradually: “The first fully chromatic keyboards [including all the white and black keys] are believed to have appeared in the fourteenth century.”
Clavichords and harpsichords were the vogue in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they kept changing in size and configuration— none had more than four octaves’ range. Octave inflation continued along, as the ever more popular harpsichord went up as high as a five-octave range in the eighteenth century.
Before there were pianos, there were pipe organs. In medieval times, some pipe organs included only a few keys, which were so hard to depress that players had to don leather gloves to do the job. According to piano historian and registered piano technician Stephen H. Brady, medieval stringed instruments originally included only the white keys of the modern keyboard, with the raised black keys added gradually: “The first fully chromatic keyboards [including all the white and black keys] are believed to have appeared in the fourteenth century.”
Clavichords and harpsichords were the vogue in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they kept changing in size and configuration— none had more than four octaves’ range. Octave inflation continued along, as the ever more popular harpsichord went up as high as a five-octave range in the eighteenth century.
In 1709, a Florentine harpsichord builder named Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the pianoforte, an instrument that trumped the harpsichord by its ability to play soft (piano) or loud (forte) depending upon the force applied on the keys by the player. Brady notes that the first pianos looked very much like the harpsichord but
were fitted with an ingenious escapement mechanism which allowed the tones to be produced by tiny hammers hitting the strings [the mechanism attached the hammers to the keys], rather than by quills plucking the strings as was the case in the harpsichord.
Others soon created pianos, but there was little uniformity in the number of keys or even in the size of the piano itself. Michael Moore, of Steinway & Sons, theorizes that it was a combination of artistic expression and capitalism that gave rise to the 88- key piano. Great composers such as Mozart were demanding instruments capable of expressing the range of the music they were creating. Other composers piggybacked on the expanded range provided by the bigger, “modern” pianos. Piano makers knew they would have a competitive advantage if they could manufacture bigger and better instruments for ambitious composers, and great changes were in store between 1790 and 1890, as Stephen Brady explains: By the end of the eighteenth century, toward the end of Mozart’s career and near the beginning of Beethoven’s, piano keyboards had reached six full octaves, and a keyboard compass of six and a half octaves was not uncommon in early nineteenth-century grands. For much of the middle to late nineteenth century, seven full octaves (from lowest A to highest A) was the norm. A few builders in the mid-nineteenth century experimented with the seven-and-a-quarter-octave keyboard, which is in common use today, but it did not become the de facto standard until about the 1890s. Steinway’s grand pianos had 85 or fewer keys until the mid- 1880s, but Steinway then took the plunge to the 88 we see today,and other manufacturers rushed to meet the specifications of their rival. But why stop at 88? Why not a nice, round 100? Michael Moore explains: Expansion into still greater numbers of keys was restrained by practical considerations. There is a limit to the number of tones that a string can be made to reproduce, especially on the bass end, where low notes can rattle, as well as a limit to the tones that the ear can hear, especially on the treble end. There is a type of piano, a Boesendorfer Concert Grand, which has 94 different keys, [and a full eight-octave range, with all six of the extra keys added to the bass end], but by and large our 88 keys represent the extent to which pianos can be made to faithfully reproduce tones that our ears can hear.
Even if more keys would gain the slightest advantage in tones, there is also the consideration of size and weight. The Boesendorf is almost ten feet in length, exceeded only by the ten-feet, two-inch Fazioli Concert Grand. Only a handful of compositions ever ask to use these extra keys, not enough reason to motivate Boesendorfer to add the keys in the first place. According to Brady, “The Boesendorfer company says the extra strings are really there to add sympathetic resonance and richness to the regular notes of the piano’s range.”
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