Photo: Kai Pilger

Why do some pianos have more than 88 keys?

Composers wanted to expand the range of their music But the instrument's four-octave range was limiting. So, piano manufacturers designed new pianos with more keys, so that composers like Haydn and Mozart could write more challenging material for a fuller keyboard.

classicfm.com - A standard piano has 88 keys. But why? - Classic FM

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Do pianos always have 88 keys?

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A standard piano has 88 keys. But why?

By Maddy Shaw Roberts

A standard piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. But who decided this number would be the norm, and why?

Before the piano was invented, composers wrote a lot of music for the harpsichord, which has just 60 keys. This meant that everything they wrote was limited to the harpsichord’s five-octave range.

Then, the first piano was invented.

Around the year 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori, a musical instrument technician from Padua, Italy, decided it was time to update the harpsichord – and he came up with a new keyboard instrument with a hammer mechanism. Cristofori was hired by the Florentine court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1688 to look after their harpsichords and, eventually, other instruments. A 1700 inventory of Medici instruments mentions an ‘arpicimbalo’ (lit. an instrument resembling a harpsichord) invented by Cristofori. The instrument had a brand-new hammer and damper mechanism, two keyboards and a range of four octaves (49 keys). Poet and journalist Scipione Maffei described it in 1711 as a ‘gravicembalo col piano, e forte’ (harpsichord with quiet and loud). It was here that the ‘pianoforte’ found its name.

Composers wanted to expand the range of their music

After word got out of Cristofori’s miraculous musical invention, composers started writing more and more music for the piano. But the instrument’s four-octave range was limiting. So, piano manufacturers designed new pianos with more keys, so that composers like Haydn and Mozart could write more challenging material for a fuller keyboard. By the time Romantic composers like Chopin and Liszt were writing music in the mid-1800s, pianos had up to seven octaves, allowing them to compose pieces with an even more ambitious range like the bafflingly virtuosic ‘La Campanella’.

Steinway created the 88-key piano

In the late 1880s, piano manufacturer Steinway created the 88-key piano. Other manufacturers followed suit, and Steinway’s model has been the standard ever since. An 88-key piano has seven octaves plus three lower notes (B, B flat and A) below the bottom C. It has 52 white keys and 36 black keys (sharps and flats), with each octave made up of seven white keys and five black keys.

Why did piano manufacturers stop at 88 keys?

Today’s composers usually write piano music that fits within the range of an 88-key model. Most piano makers also accept this as the limit, because anything outside is considered too high or low for the human ear. But there are a few exceptions. Stuart and Sons set a world record in 2018 when they created a nine-octave piano, with 108 keys. Bösendorfer sells 97-key pianos, whose nine extra keys are coloured black so the pianist can distinguish them from the standard 88. The keys are rarely used, but the extra bass strings add harmonic resonance that contributes to the rich, overall sound of the instrument. Here’s an idea of how they look on the rather grand Bösendorfer semi-concert grand piano, which has an extra four keys:

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yamaha.com - Trivia:The White Keys and Black Keys Were Reversed on Pianos in ...

On modern piano keyboards, the seven "natural" notes of each octave are the white keys and the five half-tones are black keys in between. But, on pianos dating from the 18th century when Mozart was alive, the colors of the keys was exactly reversed: the white keys were black and the black keys were white. This was true not only for pianos, but also for the keyboards of organs and cembalos of the time. They were the opposite of the white/black arrangement that predominates today. However, when pianos became the dominant keyboard instrument in the 19th century, somewhere along the line, the positional relationship between black and white switched. Why this happened is not well understood, but because visually, the color white stands out while the color black recedes into the background, the reason is said to be because making the half-tone keys that stick out black presents an image of stability to the eye. Also, it is said that as pianos became more widely used, a brighter keyboard was simply more preferable.

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