The Father of the Piano

You may not know that I have played the piano since I was 4. There were times in my life, like in college, when I was unable to play, but for the past year, I have been taking lessons again. I play primarily classical piano, but when I have time I branch out into other genres. Here is an interesting article from WIRED about the creator of the piano, which in Italian is called a pianoforte.

Who was Bartolomeo Cristofori, inventor of the piano A welcome doodle for lovers of music and its less recent history is the one with which Google celebrates today the 360th anniversary of the birth of Bartolomeo Cristofori , considered the inventor of the modern piano. Born in Padua in 1655 , in the Paduan city Cristofori was a luthier and harpsichord maker: precisely the innovations and improvements made to the harpsichord resulted in the invention of the piano, through the replacement of the hammers with the jacks , which in the harpsichord plucked the strings by means of tabs, at the in order to make the graduation of the sound possible and easy. Thus the harpsichord was born with piano and forte (gravecembralo col piano e col forte ) or today's piano, with a new intensity of vibration and a wider variety of colors . Bartolomeo Cristofori lived in Padua but also in Florence at the Medici court, summoned in 1960 by Grand Duke Ferdinando; right in the Tuscan city, where he remained even after the death of his patron, he died in 1732. His invention has been described, since 1711, in the *Giornale deiliterati d'Italia* by Scipione Maffei , strong evidence against those who dispute its primacy of invention. Three instruments still preserved and certainly attributable to Cristofori date back to 1720, 1722 and 1726.