Week 10: Period Instruments: Keyboards
Essay Titles
Discuss the development of the pianoforte in Europe during the nineteenth century. How does piano music of that period reflect the changes made to the instrument?
The fortepiano evolved gradually from the seventeenth century until the nineteenth. Discuss how its evolution gave rise to the virtuoso pianist.
Discuss the revival of the ‘fortepiano’ in the second half of the twentieth century. Should earlier versions of the pianoforte remain inventions of the past?
Reading
Bombager, E. Douglas., and James Parakilas, Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
Cole, Michael, The Pianoforte in the Classical Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
Dragulin, Stela, ‘The Pianoforte: Three Centuries of Life’, Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov, Series VIII: Performing Arts, 8 (2015), 45–56
Ehrlich, Cyril, The Piano: A History, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
Gill, Dominic (ed.), The Book of the Piano (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1981)
Good, Edwin M., Giraffes, Black Dragons, and other Pianos: A Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert Grand, 2nd edn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)
Hildebrandt, Dieter, Pianoforte: A Social History of the Piano (London: Hutchinson, 1998)
Isacoff, Stuart, A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians from Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between (London: Souvenir Press, 2012)
Kentner, Louis, Piano (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976)
Loesser, Arthur, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (London: Constable Publishers, 1990)
Pollens, Stewart, The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Todd, R. Larry (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Piano Music, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004)
Witten, David (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Piano Music: Essays in Performance and Analysis (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997)