Toy piano
♫ Thursday, April 28th, 2011Toy piano
Post by hi joiney
CharacteristicsToy pianos come in many shapes, from scale models of upright or grand pianos to toys which only resemble pianos in that they possess keys. Toy pianos are normally no far more than 50 cm in width, and made out of wood or plastic. The very first toy pianos had been created in the mid-19th century and were usually uprights, despite the fact that a lot of toy pianos made nowadays are models of grands. Rather than hammers hitting strings as on a standard piano, the toy piano sounds by way of hammers hitting metal bars or rods which are fixed at one particular finish. The hammers are linked to the keys by a mechanism related to that which drives keyboard glockenspiels. Some new toy pianos are electronic.Toy pianos ostensibly use the same musical scale as full size pianos, even though their tuning in all but the most pricey models is normally really approximate. Similarly, the pitch to which they are tuned is rarely close to the normal of 440 Hz for the A above middle C. A common toy piano will have a range of 1 to 3 octaves. The cheapest models may not have black keys, or the black keys may possibly be painted on. This implies they can play the diatonic scale (or an roughly tuned version of it), but not the chromatic scale. Typically, diatonic toy pianos have only eight keys and can play one octave. HistoryAlbert Schoenhut conceived of the toy piano with metal sounding bars in 1872 and established the A Schoenhut Organization to manufacture the new instrument. By 1917, A Schoenut made a catalogue showing 10 pages of upright and grand pianos of all shapes and sizes, with one page devoted to miniature piano stools alone. The models had nicknames beginning with “P”, such as Packer, Padder, Papa and Poet. Keys had been created of imitation ivory and a dozen pianos could be bought for US$ 348.By the 1950s, the toy piano market was dominated by two major toy piano makers: Jaymar and Schoenhut – counterparts to the Steinway and Baldwin for typical pianos. Wooden keys and hammers had been replaced by moulded plastic ones. In the late 1970s, Schoenhut was acquired by Jaymar, even though the two retained their distinct identity. Jaymar/Schoenhut experienced difficulty in the course of the recession of the 1980s, folding and at some point re-emerging as the Schoenhut Piano Organization in 1997. Today there are two other significant toy-piano manufacturers – Haring from Brazil, and the Zeada from China. Use in musical performanceThough originally produced as a child’s toy, the toy piano has been utilized in serious classical and modern musical contexts. The most popular instance is the “Suite for Toy Piano” (1948) by John Cage. Other operates in classical music for the instrument incorporate “Ancient Voices of Children” by George Crumb and a range of pieces by Mauricio Kagel. Steve Beresford has utilized toy pianos (along with a lot of other toy instruments) in his improvised music.British experimental composers use the toy piano regularly, specially the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (1969-73), a quartet of composer/performers (members included John White, Alec Hill, Hugh Shrapnel, and Christopher Hobbs, whose central instrumentation consisted of 4 matched French Michelsonne toy pianos and Hohner reed organs. Their music was, broadly, repetitive minimalism, often of wonderful technical difficulty (Hobbs’s Operating Notes (1969) for four toy pianos), great dynamic power (Shrapnel’s 4 Toy Pianos (1971)), had been used in different combinations with reed organs, and used compositional methods that were either distinct to British experimentalism (such as systems music, invented by John White), or borrowed from other disciplines (such as Alec Hill’s use of adjust ringing systems).A pioneer of the toy piano is the German composer and pianist Bernd Wiesemann (b. 1938). He played many concerts with the toy piano in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1993 he released the CD “Neue Musik fr Kinderklavier” (“New Music for Toy Piano”), containing compositions by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ratko Delorko, Andreas Kunstein, Frank Scholzen, Joachim Herbold, Carlos Cruz de Castro, Francisco Estevez and himself. In 2004 he released the SACD “Das untemperierte Klavier” (“the not-so-properly-tempered piano”, a play on Bach’s Nicely-Tempered Clavier), containing new modern performs.In 1997, pianist Margaret Leng Tan released the CD “The Art of the Toy Piano”. On it, she plays a quantity of pieces written specially for the toy piano as well as arrangements of other pieces, like Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”. A documentary directed by Evans Chan entitled “Sorceress of the New Piano” explores the music generating of Tan and will have its American debut at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival in 2005.Ben Lee used a toy piano in the song Catch My Condition which became well-known in 2005 and won a number of awards.One more well-known artist who makes use of a toy piano is French musician/composer Yann Tiersen, who played the instrument already in his initial album “La Valse des Monstres” (“Monsters’ Waltz”). He also uses the toy piano to musically recreate the childhood of the primary character in the French film Amlie, which functions a soundtrack composed mainly by him.Some jazz performersohn Medeski and Larry Goldings, amongst othersave utilized toy pianos.The toy piano has been utilised extensively by option rock and post-rock bands such as Agitpop, Evanescence, Chapi Chapo et les petites musiques de pluie Radiohead, Warren Zevon, Tori Amos, Sigur Rs and The Dresden Dolls. The punk rock band Matty Pop Chart has a song on their Good Old Water CD composed completely on a toy piano.The experimental pop band Br’er use toy pianos as a characteristic sound on numerous of their recordings. The Cure utilised a toy piano throughout their MTV Unplugged Set.A toy piano provides the pulsing chime in the song “I Belong To You” by Lenny Kravitz from his “5″ album.The B-52′s song “Dance This Mess Around” characteristics a toy piano played by Fred Schneider as both an essential musical plot device and reside prop.In the Peanuts cartoon strip, 1 of the characters, Schroeder, plays classical music (principally Beethoven) on what seems to be a toy piano. Nonetheless, offered the technical difficulties of the music he is playing, it is unlikely he really played on a toy piano.In 2005 Matt Malsky and David Claman sponsored “The Extensible Toy Piano Project”, which consisted of an extensive set of freely-available, high-high quality toy piano samples, an international composition competitors, and a festival at Clark University. One of the winners was Karlheinz Essl with his piece “Kalimba” for Toy Piano and CD playback.The instrumental “Calliope,” on Tom Waits’ album Blood Money, capabilities a toy piano, as well as the calliope of the title.The London band Athlete utilized a toy piano for the intro of their track “Superhuman Touch”.The rock band, Primus utilized they toy piano (played by Exxon) in the song “Sathington Willoughby” on their album, Frizzle Fry. References Categories: Struck idiophones | Experimental musical instruments | Keyboard instruments | Piano
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