Notes · No. 3
September 24, 2026
The instrument's everyday name is an abbreviation of an abbreviation. Piano is short for pianoforte, which is short for the phrase an early writer used for the new invention: gravicembalo col piano e forte — a harpsichord with soft and loud. The piano is named, quite literally, after the one thing its predecessor could not do.
Bartolomeo Cristofori built the first pianos in Florence around 1700, as keeper of instruments at the Medici court. In 1711 the writer Scipione Maffei published an account of the invention, and his description of it became its name. Gravicembalo was a word for harpsichord; piano and forte are the Italian for soft and loud — the same words that stand under the notes of every printed score as p and f.
Over the eighteenth century the phrase wore down to fortepiano and pianoforte, and the nineteenth century wore it down again to piano. The longer form hasn't disappeared: today fortepiano usually means the lighter pianos of Mozart's and Beethoven's time, to tell them apart from the modern grand.
A harpsichord key is a lever. Pressing it lifts a slim wooden jack, and set into the jack is a small plectrum — originally cut from a bird's quill, today usually a tough plastic — which catches the string on its way up and plucks it. The string is let go at the moment the plectrum's tip slips past it. That moment depends on the stiffness of the plectrum and the tension of the string. It hardly depends on your finger at all.
Press gently or strike hard: the string leaves the plectrum from almost the same displacement, and it sounds at almost the same loudness. A faster finger makes the pluck happen sooner, not louder. That is not a defect a better builder could fix. It is what plucking is.
Cristofori's idea was to hand the job to a hammer instead. A hammer isn't dragged through a pluck; it is thrown. His action included an escapement that lets the hammer fly free just before it meets the string, then fall away so the string can ring. The hammer's speed is your finger's speed, and the loudness follows it. That escapement is the heart of the invention, and every grand piano today uses a descendant of it.
Listen to a fine harpsichordist and the music doesn't sound flat. The expression hasn't vanished; it has moved.
The harpsichord had a quiet cousin that could respond to touch. In a clavichord, a small brass blade called a tangent strikes the string and stays pressed against it for as long as the key is held, so the player controls loudness and can even add a gentle vibrato, called Bebung, by rocking the key. But a clavichord is so quiet that it was mostly a private instrument, for practice and small rooms. The piano offered something new: a touch-sensitive instrument big enough to fill a hall.
Piano 1024's Harpsichord voice keeps the pluck's indifference. It ignores the dynamics steps altogether: every note sounds at the same fixed strength, with only a hair of random variation, because no quill ever plucks exactly the same way twice. Its tone is built from more upper partials than the piano voices, it fades faster, and a short burst of bright noise marks each pluck. (How the voices are built is on the sound page.)
To play it louder or softer, you use the harpsichordist's tools: thicken or thin the chord, spread it, lengthen the note you want heard.
Try the old tricks. Select Harpsichord (tab cycles the voices). Play a C major chord with all its notes together, then spread the same chord quickly from low to high, and hear which sounds bigger. Then switch to Piano 1024, press the ↑ arrow a few times, and play the chord once more. That difference in loudness is the thing the piano was named for.
Cristofori's other gift, the sideways-shifting keyboard, has a note of its own.