What are pianos made of?

How often do we think about all the materials that pianos are made of? Here is a quick reminder in this list of materials:

Wood

Spruce: 
Used for the soundboard, which is crucial for amplifying vibrations, and sometimes for key and action parts. 
Maple and Beech: 
Hardwoods that are strong and rigid, making them ideal for the rim, action components, and bridges. 
Mahogany, Walnut, and Birch: 
Often used for the outer case and rim, with veneers providing the visible finish. 

Metal

Cast Iron: Forms the heavy internal plate that supports the tremendous tension of the strings. 
High-Tensile Steel: Used to make the piano's strings, which vibrate to create sound. 

Other materials

Felt: 
Used to cover the hammers and other parts of the action mechanism to cushion and control the strike. 
Plastic: 
Many modern pianos use plastic for keytops (in place of ivory) and for some action components to ensure durability and consistency, especially in humid conditions. 
MDF: 
Medium-density fiberboard, an engineered wood product, is used in some modern pianos to make them more affordable and durable. 

Teaching What You Compose and Play

 Tomoko is known for both her piano performance and her piano teaching ability. Those same skills and careers apply to several outstanding classical piano composers. Here is a sampling.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a prolific teacher who instructed both his family members and university students. His famous collections of keyboard music, such as the Inventions and The Well-Tempered Clavier, were expressly written for instructional purposes. His pedagogy focused on attentive listening, finger independence, clear articulation, and a strong understanding of harmony. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) earned a significant income from teaching piano to members of the nobility to supplement his income from concerts and commissions. His lessons combined performance practice, compositional theory, and technique training, sometimes even during informal settings like billiards. However, Mozart thought he could teach more by simply playing a piece for a student than through verbal instruction alone.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) taught piano lessons throughout his career to supplement his income, especially when he started out and before his hearing loss became severe. His most famous pupil was Carl Czerny, who documented and passed on Beethoven's methods for interpreting his piano works. Czerny's pedagogical approach is considered the foundation of modern piano technique. 

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) earned a significant portion of his income by teaching piano to aristocratic students in Paris. He was a meticulous and passionate teacher who focused on beautiful, expressive tone and fluidity, which he often demonstrated on a second piano. His method emphasized relaxation and natural hand movement, rather than the rigid, mechanical exercises common at the time. Students were taught using works by Bach, Mozart, Hummel, and Chopin himself.

Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was a legendary piano teacher who instructed hundreds of students in his masterclasses. He never charged for his lessons, which was a source of frustration for rival teachers. Rather than drilling technique, he focused on musical interpretation, and he used his lessons to discuss a piece's form, proportion, and emotional character.

Clara Schumann (1819–1896) was a highly regarded pianist and composer – and piano teacher – of the Romantic era.  Her disciplined and traditionalist style of playing, which emphasized a singing tone and clarity, influenced many students.

Hammer that Voice

 

We think of a person’s voice, and how it is impacted by how one breathes, how the vocal cords work, how the sound resonates in head’s cavities, and how the mouth and tongue work. It’s complicated!  And each voice is unique.

What about the voice of the piano? Yes, it has one, and it is unique. But is the tuning and the piano’s hammers that determine that voice.

A piano tuner adjusts the string’s tension so that the tone sociated with each key is evened out.

The piano’s tune is obviously impacted in how the player hits the keys—the strength and the speed—and how those keys physically connect with the piano hammers; each mechanical piece and its connections impact how the hammer moves. Moreover, as the hammers wear down, the voice can change.

Less obvious is the hammer’s felt coverings. The felt can vary significantly in terms of its surface area, its density, its hardness, and its quality.

AND, just as the head’s “cavities” impact a person’s voice, the piano’s own soundboard and cavity also impact how the sound resonates: producing a unique voice.

 Similarly to a person’s voice being described as lyric or dramatic, bright or deep, so to the voice of a piano can be described. A piano’s voice my be warm and mellow, which means the piano is well-balanced. A bright piano voice has a higher voice, which can seem lively and clear—or shrill. A dark piano voice is bass-heavy, and may be rich—or booming. A rich piano voice typically has enhanced treble and bass tones. Concert pianos often have a big, powerful voice, largely due to their size.

Now imagine matching a person’s voice and a piano’s voice. Yes, indeed, complicated and unique.

The Mathematical Harmony in Music

 

“Music is the mathematics of one who does not know that he is counting.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

 Tomoko realizes the preciseness and patterns of music. Not surprisingly then, math helps in reading music. The simplest task such as counting the beats uses math. Each time signature codes the number of beats per measure, and the notes represent fractions of a measure and beat – such as whole notes, quarter notes, eighth notes and so on. In turn, reading these rhythmic notations can help one read and solve math equations. 

In fact, mathematics lies underneath much musical composition and reflects the very nature of music itself. Even the concept of octaves is mathematical. An octave is the distance between a given note with a set sound frequency (that is, the string’s vibration) with another note with double that frequency. A perfect fifth is 1.5 times the frequency of the octave’s base note. Ratios help make music harmonious.

Music compositions reflect patterns, just as math does: symmetry, repetition, transposition, inversion.  The process for perceiving and generating those patterns mirrors mathematical processes. Johann Sebastian Bach very consciously incorporated mathematical principles into his keyboard compositions. His work “Musical Offering” is comprised of ten canons, in which each canon is a mathematical transformation of the principal musical line. In fact, a mathematical breakthrough enabled Bach to write “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Keyboard instruments used to be tuned using a just-toned scale, which made shifting to keys other than the tonic sounded “off.” The equal (even)-tempered scale, popularized by Bach, evened out the frequency ratios between all 12 notes of the chromic scale so that shifts of harmonies to other keys would sound the same.

Tomoko rightly asserts that reading and playing music require good discipline, improve listening and collaborative skills, and strengthens mental and muscle memory.  Those practices can also build math skills and recall of math details. A harmonious blend!

 

European Influence on Japanese Music

Tomoko’s favorite piano music continues to be European classical compositions. That taste was started early in her life as she heard European classical music on the radio and the organ pieces that her brother played. These habits reflected the earlier Japanese interests in Western   (generally European) music.

Traditional Japanese musical tonality differed from its Western counterparts; it uses a Phyrgian scale of E-F-A-B-C-E instead of C-D-F-G-A. The Phyrgian scale is also used in modern blues minor keys. The oldest forms of Japanese music include Buddhist chant and orchestral court music. Traditional folk music included religious songs and songs for gatherings, work songs, and children’s songs. Typical instruments were stringed instruments, drums, flutes, bells. The first piano wasn’t heard until the opening of Japan, but by 1875 the Japanese were manufacturing their own pianos and other Western musical instruments.

Emperor Mutsuhito, who adopted the title Meiji – or Enlightened Rule – in 1867, pushed for modernization with an eye to the West to avoid becoming dominated by other countries. In 1868, the government issued the Charter Oath: a five-article document outlining the principles of the Meiji administration. It declared that “knowledge shall be sought throughout the world.” Meiji curiosity about Western culture included absorbing foreign classical and religious music. On the bureaucratic side, the Meiji government created the Music Study Committee, which encouraged Western music. They wanted Japanese composers to write in the Western style, and the committee required the German model of music instruction for all students. The committee also led to the founding of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, which Tomoko attended. 

Combining Western and Japanese music could be challenging though. For instance, Christian religious tended to be Western based, which was sometimes hard for Japanese to intonate. And when missionaries tried to translate their hymns into Japanese, they found it hard to match the rhythm to Japanese text. 

The tension between Western and Japanese music and their currents continued to flow through Tomoko’s families. During World War II at school Tomoko’s class sang nationalistic music with Japanese lyrics set to European music. Tomoko’s mother played and sang Christian songs, and Tomoko’s brother became a composer in the more Japanese mode. 

Nevertheless, Tomoko brings her Japanese sensibility as she performs music from around the world.

Organs versus Pianos

The first keyboard instrument Tomoko played was the organ, not the piano. Therefore, she had to learn two different ways to use those keyboards. 

The most obvious difference between the two instruments is the way that the sound is produced; the piano is technically a percussion instrument while an organ is technically a woodwind instrument. Instead of piano hammers striking a set of strings as a pressed piano key releases the action mechanism level, organ pipes project the pitches based on the level of pressure that each key signals to its linked pipe. Organs also have stop knobs to adjust sounds by controlling the amount of pressurized air flowing to the pipes. 

For the piano, three pedals on the bottom can change the sound; one pedal shifts the action so that the hammer strikes just one of the three strings for the same note.  The other pedals lift the damper so that the string can vibrate longer.  On the organ’s bottom, a pedalboard produces pitches out of the pipes. 

In terms of the keyboard itself, the five-octave organ has 61 keys while the piano has 17 more; an organ with fewer octaves have fewer keys. Furthermore, organs have two levels of keys, called manuals. The organ’s controls enable the instrument to produce a greater variety of sounds than the piano.  Organ keys are also shorter and narrower than piano keys, and the player uses a lighter touch on the organ – and may need to develop a specific touch for some pieces.  

Knowing the techniques of both piano and organ has helped Tomoko broaden her performance options – and listeners’ enjoyment.