Lord Larehip

While stringed instruments and wind instruments and percussion instruments as drums, bells, blocks and cymbals are found in all cultures and are quite ancient, keyboards appear to be solely European/Western. Indeed, the keyboard is a strange instrument because the key being pressed does not directly make the tone. With the other instruments, the player’s input is directly linked to the sound produced—blowing into the tube makes the sound, hitting the object with a hand or stick makes the sound, plucking or bowing the string makes the sound. But with a keyboard instrument, pressing the key merely actuates the device that truly does make the sound—it activates a hammer that strikes the string or the quill that plucks it or the bellows that blows the air into the pipes making them vibrate and produce a sound. Even with a synthesizer, the keyboard merely triggers a control-voltage or a binary number that is routed through an oscillator which is what produces the tone (some synths as the Buchla don’t even have keyboards on them). In all cases, the key can be said to be a trigger for something that produces the sound but does not directly produce the sound itself.

This being established, the classification of “keyboard” is really a bit of a misnomer. The piano is both a stringed instrument as well as a percussion instrument because the sound is produced by a hammer striking the string. Really, if one removes the keyboard from the piano, it is not really any different than a hackbrett or hammered dulcimer where the player strikes a tuned string with a spoon-like mallet. A hackbrett is considered a stringed instrument yet a marimba is considered a percussion instrument even though it too involves a player striking a tuned block of wood with a type of mallet. For that matter, the marimba could also be considered a type of keyboard—a direct-action keyboard where striking the key (the tuned wooden block) actually does produce the sound. If one ignores the piano keyboard and simply strums the strings with the fingers then one now has a harp. The pipe organ is really a wind instrument.

Then what purpose does the keyboard serve? Just remove it and make the sound directly. Of course, we know the keyboard does serve a purpose. The most obvious one being that a keyboard enables polyphonic play of up to 10 voices at once. Also the strings can be stopped instantly and repeatedly allowing for lightning fast play of a highly complex and harmonically rich type. A hackbrett could do neither of these things. Also, the sound is different. A piano does not sound like a hackbrett or a harp. Its sound is distinct. With a harpsichord, one simply cannot pluck 10 strings with quills all at once without the keyboard. Nor could one blow air into even one enormous pipe much less dozens at once as with a pipe organ. So despite only being a trigger, the keyboard serves a very important function.

Some think the harpsichord is simply an early kind of piano that utilizes a quill to pluck the string instead of a hammer to strike it. While this is true enough, it does not recognize a far bigger difference: a harpsichord is tuned differently than a piano.

The problem with keyed and fretted instruments is that they must be tempered. What is tempering? Pythagoras, the Ancient Greek philosopher and musical theorist, determined that an octave had to a 2:1 or 1:2 ratio. In other words, a string divided exactly in half but maintaining the same tension played an octave higher than the undivided string. Likewise, a string extended to twice its original length and maintaining the same tension played an octave lower. This octave had to be precisely 2:1. Being even a tiny amount off sounded imperfect, out of tune. Pythagoras also discovered the ratios of other intervals than just the octave. A whole step, for example, has a ratio of 9:8, a major third has a ratio of 5:4, a perfect fourth is 4:3, a perfect fifth is 3:2, etc. So how many whole steps in an octave? Six. So raise 9:8 to the power of six, it should equal exactly 2. Does it? No. It is approximately 2.027 which may sound small but the human ear can easily hear the difference. So even though there are six whole steps in an octave, they do not fit exactly and so the octave will sound out of tune. What to do? To make them fit, they must be tempered, that is, each whole step must be shrunk by the identical amount—the barest minimum needed—to make them fit exactly into the pure 2:1 octave. No matter which intervals we use, we find we must temper them.

Because of the need to temper, a chord or interval played on a keyboard or on a fretted instrument isn’t perfect. A violin or fretless bass wouldn’t have that problem since one can finger anywhere along the length of the fingerboard to play a note. With a keyboard, we are struck with the note we have. We cannot finger a guitar fingerboard anywhere along its length or we might end up fingering on top of a fret so the notes we have between each set of two adjacent frets are the notes we have—like it or not.

In Bach’s time, the piano did not exist and he wrote for the pipe organ and the harpsichord. The harpsichord was designed to use perfect, non-tempered intervals. There were a number of ways to tune a harpsichord for this depending on which intervals one used the most. The problem was that even if one used perfect major third intervals, one was still forced to temper other intervals to achieve it. One could tune a harpsichord to have true perfect fifth intervals but other intervals would have to be stretched or shrunk to achieve it. No matter how one tempered the intervals on a harpsichord, there was going to be one interval—generally a fifth—that was going to be completely out of whack and unusable. This particular interval was called a wolf. The solution was to put the wolf where it was not going to ever be played. This was called “hiding the wolf.” There is a spot on the keyboard where fifths are not ever played so this was the ideal place to hide the wolf.

When one listens to harpsichord pieces, they sound very sweet and pure because their tunings use perfect intervals. The piano, by contrast, does not use any perfect intervals. All piano intervals are tempered. In fact, every key is off by exactly the same amount. In Bach’s day, the technology to temper in this way did not exist. The piano, however, was made specifically for this tuning which we call 12-TET or 12-Tone Equal Temperament (the term “equal temperament” was used in Bach’s day but this a different tuning). With a piano, there is no wolf to hide but all intervals sound out of tune compared to the same intervals played on a harpsichord. People in Bach’s time would find our piano music discordant and out of tune. If you play a Bach harpsichord piece on the piano, you can’t help but notice that it simply does not sound quite the same.

So these early keyboards did not use 12-TET, could not have, because it didn’t exist then except as an abstract ideal. When Wendy Carlos made her Switched-On Bach albums (there is the original, which she made as Walter Carlos, and an updated digital remake in 2000), she had to tune the oscillators to the tunings used in Bach’s time. The trouble is, we don’t know what tunings Bach used. They had various names as quarter-comma meantone, Kirnberger II, Kirnberger III and so on. Another was called well temperament. We do know Bach used this at least sometimes due to his composition The Well-Tempered Clavier.

A clavier, by the way, is generic name for any stringed keyboard including the piano. An organ, however, is not a clavier, although some say the keyboard portion of any instrument that employs one is a clavier. The term comes from the Latin clavis or key-bearer. It is related to clavichord (literally “key string”), clavicle (the collarbone), claves (a percussion instrument) and clef (key).