Although there were various crude earlier attempts to make stringed keyboard instruments with struck strings, it is widely considered that the piano was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731) of Padua, Italy, employed by Prince Ferdinand de Medici as the Keeper of the Instruments.  The pianoforte made it’s first appearance in Florence in 1698,  after Cristofori  experimented with a percussion keyboard.

Like many other inventions, the piano was founded on earlier technological innovations.  The mechanisms of keyboard instruments such as the clavichord and the harpsichord were well known.  Cristofori’s piano action served as a model for the many different approaches to piano actions that followed.  While Cristofori’s early instruments were made with thin strings and were much quieter than the modern piano, compared to the clavichord, they were considerably louder and had more sustaining sounds.

Much of the most widely admired piano repertoire – for example, that of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven – was composed for a type of instrument that is rather different from the modern instruments on which this music is normally performed today.  Modern pianos come in two basic configurations: the grand piano and the upright piano.

There are several sizes of grand pianos.  The concert grand is used only in large concert halls.  The “parlor” or “classic grand” and the “baby grand” or used in homes and  recital halls.

The piano cannot sustain tone as well as the string and wind instruments, but in the hands of a fine performer it is capable nonetheless of a singing melody.  Grands have three pedals.  If the one on the right is pressed down, all the dampers are raised, so that the strings continue to vibrate.  The middle pedal (lacking on most upright pianos) is the sustaining pedal, which sustains only the tones held down at the moment the pedal is depressed.  The pedal on the left shifts the hammers to reduce the area of impact on the strings, thereby inhibiting the volume of sound; hence it is known as the “soft pedal.”