85 Key Pianos
Rvonpentz
piano and wondered whether there is ever any use for the three missing keys.
She could think of none but its hard to see the future. Any comments.
Thanks
Bob von Pentz
Rvon...@aol.com
VOCE88
Bob -
That piano has more keys then Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Haydn,
Schumann, or Mendelssohn had.
Galassini, however, composes with all 88 keys. Thats what makes his music
better.
Seriously, an 85 note piano can be a wonderful instrument. Although there are a
very few pieces of music that use the highest three notes, these were not
common on pianos until the late 19th century, so virtually all classical music
can be played with no problems.
Good Luck!
Richard Galassini
Cunningham Piano Co
Phila,. Pa.
1 (800) 394-1117
Niles Duncan
>piano and wondered whether there is ever any use for the three missing keys.
>She could think of none but its hard to see the future.
From the mid 19th Century until about the 1890's 85 keys was the standard. For
any 18th/19th Century Classical/Romantic music it will all fit on an 85 key
piano.
The primary use for those extra three keys at the top is increasing the resale
value when it is sold. Generally a piano with 85 keys will get a lower price
than an equivalent piano with 88. This has to do with buyer perception rather
than any actual inferiority.
Niles Duncan
http://www.pianosource.com
yoshizaki
had only 85 notes. Any opinion?
Yoshi
Niles Duncan <nsdu...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:19990928164537...@ng-fm1.aol.com...
dw...@cix.compulink.co.uk
> From the mid 19th Century until about the 1890's 85 keys was the
> standard. For any 18th/19th Century Classical/Romantic music
> it will all fit on an 85 key piano.
I have a collection of around twelve thousand piano rolls - classical,
show tunes, jazz. I have all the Beethoven sonatas, much rare Schumann,
the whole of Chopin except for a few Mazurkas, two-piano renditions of
all the Mozart concertos for which rolls were made, hundreds of 1920s pop
and jazz issues, smoochy ballroom pieces of the late 1930s, recent
transcriptions of Art Tatum and Errol Garner.
Out of all that lot I can think of only three rolls where silence
descends improperly when I play them using my 1912 Aeolian Co 88-note
keyboard player ("pushup") which has had the top three fingers sawn off
by some earlier owner who only had an 85-note piano.
Two of these rolls are recent jazz transcriptions from 1920s records by
roll arranger John Farrell and the third is a roll made from an
improvisation on "Ain't She Sweet", played on a MIDI-fitted keyboard by
Guy Roland.
From about 1918, many American roll makers abandoned provision of the
bottom four and the top four notes of the standard 88, because these
positions on the roll reader ("tracker bar") were commonly used to convey
finger power information on the several reproducing systems of the day.
The cheaper makes of player piano soon abandoned provision of player
action parts for these eight notes, even though the piano action and
keyboard retained them.
The bottom four notes are far more often employed than the top four,
however, and these 80-note players can often default on late classical
music.
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Niles Duncan
>had only 85 notes.
The transition from 85 keys as the standard to 88 didn't happen overnight. It
came in gradually over about 20 years from the 1870's to the 1890's. Some
makers went to 88 keys before others. Steinway for example didn't complete the
transition to 88 keys on all their models until the mid 1890's, while other
makers had completely switched to 88 keys in the 1880's.
Niles Duncan
http://www.pianosource.com
John S. Gray
1906 or so, didn't it?
JG