Piano Invention History Easy Enough For Toddler & Joanna Hodges Homage

Piano invention history and trivia simple enough for toddlers, preschoolers and up. Tribute too to my piano teacher, Joanna Hodges, the first American woman to perform a major tour in Romania. She performed at Carnegie Hall and was listed in "Who's Who In American Women" and "International Who's Who in Music." She founded the Joanna Hodges International Piano Competition, held at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, CA, which later became the Waring International Piano Competition.
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Piano Invention History:
Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1732), of Padua, Italy, invented the piano. He was not content with musicians' inability to control how loudly or quietly the existing instrument that it seems he used to build, the harpsichord, played. (A harpsichord dated 1702, with 3 keyboards, is sometimes considered to have been built by him. It features the arms of Ferdinando and is at the University of Michigan Stearns Collection.) History attributes to Cristofori the innovation of changing the plucking mechanism to a hammer to invent the modern piano. The hammer hit the string with more or less impact to change how loudly or softly it played.
In about 1690, Cristofori had been appointed to Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici's Florentine Court to attend to the harpsichords and later to its complete musical instruments collection. The Prince had been a skilled harpsichord player. Cristofori's invention was referred to by alluding to its "soft and loud" volume levels, leading to its later name, pianoforte. "Piano"" signifies soft and "forte" means loud.
Cristofori made progress as he built pianos. By 1726, he had invented all the essential elements of the modern piano. Three examples of his pianos still survive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Museum of Musical Instruments in Leipzig, and the Museum of Musical Instruments in Rome, respectively. His pianos had considerable range. Cristofori’s invention did not receive much attention in Italy. Music dictionary articles led to its use soon in Germany.
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