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Featured Listings

  • Shackell Pianos Ltd

    Thatched Cottage
    Lew
    Witney, Oxfordshire OX182AZ
    England

    Shackell Pianos have been buying and selling

  • Reuben Katz Pianos

    R/O The Old George
    Fore St, Milverton
    Taunton, Somerset TA4 1JU
    England

    Our Stock of new and reconditioned pianos has been

  • Barry Caradine Piano Specialist

    Unit 3C
    Bull Lane Industrial Estate
    Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 OBD
    England

  • Sussex Pianos Ltd

    Unit 14a, Granary Business Centre
    Broad Farm, North Street
    Hailsham, West Sussex BN27 4DU
    England

    Located in the Sussex countryside, we are a family

  • Michael Boyd - Pianolas

    Orchards Farm
    Iden
    Rye, East Sussex TN31 7XB
    England

    Established since 1984, we are situated at the




Did You Know Piano Facts

1709
The year 1709 is the one most sources give for the appearance of aninstrument which can truly be called a "Pianoforte." The writer Scipione Maffei wrote an article that year about the pianoforte created by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1732), who had probably produced four "gravicembali col piano e forte" or harpsichords with soft and loud. This instrument featured the first real escapement mechanism and is often called a "hammer harpsichord." The small hammers were leather covered. It had bichords throughout, and all the dampers were wedge-shaped. By 1726 he seems to have fitteda stop for the action to make the hammers strike only one of twostrings. He had produced about twenty pianos by this time and thenhe is presumed to have gone back to making harpsichords,probably from the lack of interest in his pianos. Three of hispianos remain extant today: one with four octaves, dated 1720, is in NewYork; one with four and a half octaves, from 1726, is in Leipzig,Germany; and there is one in Rome from 1722. There are approximately ten plucked instruments surviving today with the name Cristofori on them.