Maryaguirre

Instrument family

Keyboard

Instruments played from a row of keys that sets the sound mechanism in motion.

A keyboard instrument is defined by how it is played, not by how it makes sound. A row of levers — the keys — sits under the performer’s hands, and each lever connects to a mechanism that produces one pitch. What happens behind the keys can differ enormously: hammers striking strings, quills plucking them, pipes receiving wind, electrical circuits generating a signal.

In this library the keyboard family holds the piano, whose keys drive felt hammers against tensioned strings. Other instruments with keys, such as the accordion, are placed in the free-reed family because their reeds, not their keys, determine how they sound and behave. Both families are worth reading together: the keyboard is a way of organising pitch that has travelled across many different sound-makers.

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Rosewood grand piano with carved scroll cheek blocks, tapered turned legs on brass casters and a lyre-shaped pedal assembly, shown from the keyboard end with the lid and music desk raised against a plain white background.
Keyboard

Piano

The piano is a keyboard instrument in which felt-covered hammers strike tensioned metal strings, and in which the player shapes loudness through the speed of the touch. Devised in Italy around 1700, it grew through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into an iron-framed machine with a standard compass of 88 keys. It serves as solo voice, accompanist, chamber partner and orchestral colour, and it remains a working tool for composing, teaching and rehearsing in many musical traditions.

Renaissance–Baroque (1400–1750)

Other families

StringsWoodwindsBrassPercussionFree-reed