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• Instruments
• Classical
• Early Romantic

methods of construction. These are often referred to as the English and the Viennese ‘actions’, since the significant difference was in the way the mechanism for producing the notes ‘acted’. Pianoforte Makers Johann Andreas Stein of Augsburg (1728–92) was the maker of instruments that both Mozart and Beethoven knew. Stein worked to improve both the escapement mechanism and the damping of ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

The celesta is a type of keyboard glockenspiel, with a range of four octaves upwards from middle C, and a damping pedal like a piano. Inside the body of the instrument is a series of chromatically tuned metal bars, which are struck with felt hammers when the performer plays the keyboard. Creation of the Celesta The celesta was ...

• Instruments
• Brass
• Electric & Electronic
• Keyboards
• Percussion
• Stringed
• Woodwind

ousting tenor oboes in the 1720s. In domestic music, the clavichord and harpsichord remained popular, but the virginals was on its way out. A new instrument, the pianoforte, had been developed in 1709, but as yet had not generated much interest. The organ remained the king of church music and with the compositions of Bach reached ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

In one form or another, the harpsichord ruled the domestic keyboard roost throughout Europe – and later in America – from the late-sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. Apart from the organ, it was the grandest and most versatile of all keyboard instruments until the advent of the mature fortepiano in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. Rise and Fall of ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

the instrument extensively on the Physical Graffiti album, but perhaps the clavinet’s defining moment was its use in Stevie Wonder’s infectious ‘Superstition’. Grand Piano The development of the early pianoforte into the magnificent grand piano was made possible by a number of innovations and inventions that together brought the kind of power and projection that could happily compete with the ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

In 1905, and probably for several decades before that, there were more pianos in the United States than there were bathtubs. In Europe, throughout the nineteenth century, piano sales increased at a greater rate than the population. English, French and German makers dispatched veritable armies of pianos to every corner of the Earth. It was the ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Classical Era

each (sometimes three or four) of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, plus timpani. Styles & Forms | Classical Era | Classical Instruments | Pianoforte | Early Romantic | Classical ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Classical Era

Vienna during the early 1780s, he was in great demand as a composer and performer for the middle-class public, which had become the main arbiter of taste. The pianoforte was a new keyboard instrument, louder and more percussive than either the harpsichord or clavichord it had quickly replaced. Mozart wrote his mature piano concertos during his first years ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Classical Era

, elegant and lyrical. In contrast, Clementi introduced a more abrasive melodic style and laid the foundations of the piano style of the next generation. He exploited the new pianoforte, with its capacity for brilliant, dramatic effects and rhetorical gestures, and despite the predominantly light nature of his works fore­shadowed the textural richness of Beethoven and Frédéric ...

• Women in Music
• Classical
• Classical Era

As keyboard instruments, from the harpsichord to the new-fangled pianoforte, became available in a variety of European households, they were widely played by well-to-do young ladies, eager to develop what was seen as an important accomplishment. Jane Austen’s novels present illuminating portrayals of women amateurs, from those to whom playing was simply a way of attracting ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Late Baroque

Bach and sonatas by Vivaldi. Among newer sounds, clarinets were heard for the first time around 1710 and horns found their way somewhat later into the opera house. The pianoforte (or fortepiano) made its earliest appearance in Florence in 1698, when Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731) experimented with a percussion keyboard; later, in Germany, grand pianos made by Gottfried ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Early Romantic

The pianoforte was a direct development of the fortepiano: a keyboard sets in motion a mechanism which strikes the string with a hammer. The defining change that separates the two was the move towards an iron frame. Broadwood started using metal tension bars in 1808 and in the 1820s iron bracing became more and more necessary to ensure the instrument’s ability ...