All there in black and white
A brief history of the piano keyboard
Hello!
I have no recollection of my first piano lesson.
I was five-years old and very (very!) shy, my teacher was a grumpy old nun, and I don’t think I’d even touched a piano before I found myself sitting down at one, scary nun looming at my side.
Ballet was always my true love, you see, but I couldn’t imagine dancing in front of anyone—ever!—so piano it was.
But despite not really choosing it in the first place, I kept going, mostly because I didn’t have the courage to say I didn’t want to do it, and also because my parents, I suspect, worked out for themselves that the whole nun situation wasn’t working out (she’d rap my knuckles with a ruler when I made a mistake), and found me someone much nicer.
I can imagine how bewildered I must have felt when first confronted with the piano keyboard. If you’ve never really looked at a piano before it can take a while before it looks like anything more than a jumble of black and white keys swimming before your eyes.
These days—and I pride myself on being a nice teacher, too!—I see what I assume must be the same look of bewilderment on the faces of many of my students when they first sit down. And this is definitely the case for so many adults who, in the beginning, are almost universally afraid of doing the wrong thing.
Because let’s face it, when you’re faced with a piano keyboard, about which you know nothing but which you’re going to actually have to touch, the chance of doing the ‘wrong’ thing is pretty high!
Of course, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the keys follow a pattern, with groups of two and three shorter black keys positioned in-between the longer white keys, and that this pattern repeats (and for more on patterns in music, go to Maths and music: patterns in play).
It still takes a bit to get used to navigating the pattern, as well as getting to grips with the names of the keys. The white notes are named for the first seven letters of the alphabet—ABCDEFG—and these names repeat with each round of the pattern (and for a quick summary of how we came to be using the alphabet to name notes, go to Letter Names).
When you move from a white key to an adjacent black key the sound rises or falls by what is called a half step or a semitone (different countries use different terminology), the smallest distance possible, on a piano, at least. When you move up to a black note we call it sharpening the note, and when you move down it’s flattening the note.
Note: If you look closely you’ll see that there are also white notes with no black notes in-between. The same principle of sharpening and flattening applies, and I’m going to leave it at that for now, because that’s a discussion for another time.
We can all thank our lucky stars that the piano keyboard has moved on from how it used to be.
Early keyboards (around the 14th century) only had the equivalent of the white keys. This was called a diatonic keyboard, and you can think of this as being a bit like only having the main colours in a paint box.
Later on (16th century), black keys were added. Now, instead of only seven notes in the pattern, there were twelve, with much greater scope for creating melodies and harmonies, and our paint box has expanded to include many more shades and variations in colour.
Monochrome, really?
But wait!
In 1882 a Hungarian engineer and musician called Paul von Jankó had the bright idea of not only rearranging the pattern of white and black keys, but also making them all the same colour…
Luckily this never really took off, mostly because musicians didn’t like the idea of having to relearn everything from scratch. (For more on Paul von Jankó and to see a picture of his invention, go to Houston Piano Company).
Try it out for yourself
There’s a lot more to a piano than just the keyboard, and there’s a lot more to how we can use the arrangement of black and white keys. But, it can be very freeing to take a step back from all the theory and other stuff and just play around with what you can see, and that’s what I suggest you do.
There are many free piano keyboard apps you can download for your phone or tablet. I have Perfect Piano, available for both android and iPhone. You can experiment with the keys —both black and white!— play around with the pattern of notes, and come up with your own patterns.
Even if you already have a piano or keyboard at home, I think using an app can provide a different perspective. This way, you can really study the keyboard without feeling pressured to play or worrying about playing the ‘right’ notes.
So go forth and play those black and white keys. I promise you there will be no scary nun with a ruler ready to rap your knuckles at the first wrong note, because there are no wrong notes.
Let me know if you enjoyed this post! And let me know if there's anything you're curious about or would like me to explore further. You can comment on this post or send me a message at katepainediscoveringmusic@substack.com ❤️