Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
2people
2022–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yes, in fact that's how it started. The 'upright' was a way to sell pianos to lower income families because it's cheaper to manufacture and easier to situate in a small home. Prior to 1825 all pianos were made of just wood, and played reasonably soft, usually with just one or at most two strings per note (that's where the term Una Corda originally comes from, now it denotes a pedal that (on grand pianos) causes the action to shift a bit to the right so it will miss a string in the higher register).
That also made them pretty finicky, changing moisture and temperature would have a significant effect on the pitch of the piano. At that time 'standard pitch' was about A4@423 Hz, considerably below what it is today (A4@440), which lessened the problems somewhat but if you wanted to have your instrument well tuned you had better learn how to tune it yourself.
For harpsichord players (the predecessor to the piano) today self tuning is still the standard.
Piano history is fascinating, if you are interested in the subject I'd recommend reading 'Of men, women and pianos' by Arthur Loesser. It's an old book but a fantastic source of historical information about the development of the piano/grand piano.
- Yeah, regarding your comment about people playing music together before, I’m reading “Men, Women, and Pianos” after seeing it mentioned here on HN and it’s a great read about that (obviously centered on keyboard instruments).
And regarding your comment about bars and musicians, I was reminded about a scene from “El Mariachi” in which the guy walks into a bar trying to get a job and is faced with the bartender saying “why would I need a mariachi when I can get the full band”, followed by the demo from a digital keyboard :)
So yeah, the point I tried to make was that despite the changes brought about by technology, the social aspect to music still lives on, and I personally love the private side of it that came thanks to technology. Not going to argue about the difficulty of making a living as a musician, but life is all about change and careers come and go.
- There is a great - and probably out of print - book called 'Men, Women and Pianos', by Arthur Loesser, 1954. Highly recommended to get better insight into how the piano was invented, worked its way into society and how the various composers rose to the spotlight and/or were forgotten again. It's the best researched book on the subject I've read.
