Toy piano
Wooden keys and hammers were replaced by moulded plastic ones. A typical toy piano will have a range of one to three octaves.The toy piano, also known as the kinderklavier (child s keyboard), is a small piano like musical instrument. Other works in classical music for the instrument include Ancient Voices of Children by George Crumb and a number of pieces by Mauricio Kagel.
The Cure used a toy piano during 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 features a toy piano played by Fred Schneider as both an essential musical plot device and live prop. In the Peanuts cartoon strip, one of the characters, Schroeder, plays classical music (principally Beethoven) on what appears to be a toy piano. The hammers are connected to the keys by a mechanism similar to that which drives keyboard glockenspiels.
This means they can play the diatonic scale (or an approximately tuned version of it), but not the chromatic scale. Toy pianos are usually no more than 50 cm in width, and made out of wood or plastic.
Keys were made of imitation ivory and a dozen pianos could be bought for US$ 348. By the 1950s, the toy piano market was dominated by two main toy piano makers: Jaymar and Schoenhut - counterparts to the Steinway and Baldwin for normal pianos. By 1917, A Schoenut produced a catalogue showing 10 pages of upright and grand pianos of all shapes and sizes, with one page devoted to miniature piano stools alone.
Schoenhut conceived of the toy piano as it is known today in 1872, when he substituted durable steel plates for the traditional fragile glass bars. Toy pianos come in many shapes, from scale models of upright or grand pianos to toys which only resemble pianos in that they possess keys. Steve Beresford has used toy pianos (along with many other toy instruments) in his improvised music. British experimental composers use the toy piano frequently, especially 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 four matched French Michelsonne toy pianos and Hohner reed organs.
He worked as a repairman at Wanamaker s department store, repairing broken glass sounding pieces in German toy pianos damaged in shipping. Some new toy pianos are electronic. Toy pianos ostensibly use the same musical scale as full size pianos, although their tuning in all but the most expensive models is usually very approximate.
Typically, diatonic toy pianos have only eight keys and can play one octave. Albert Schoenhut conceived of the toy piano with metal sounding bars in 1872 and established the A Schoenhut Company to manufacture the new instrument. The most famous example is the Suite for Toy Piano (1948) by John Cage.
The cheapest models may not have black keys, or the black keys may be painted on. Their music was, broadly, repetitive minimalism, often of great technical difficulty (Hobbs s Working Notes (1969) for four toy pianos), great dynamic power (Shrapnel s 4 Toy Pianos (1971)), were used in various combinations with reed organs, and used compositional techniques that were either specific to British experimentalism (such as systems music, invented by John White), or borrowed from other disciplines (such as Alec Hill s use of change ringing systems). A pioneer of the toy piano is the German composer and pianist Bernd Wiesemann (b.
1938). In the late 1970s, Schoenhut was acquired by Jaymar, although the two retained their distinct identity.
However, given the technical difficulties of the music he is playing, it is unlikely he actually played on a toy piano. In 2005 Matt Malsky and David Claman sponsored The Extensible Toy Piano Project for Toy Piano and CD playback. The instrumental Calliope, on Tom Waits album Blood Money, features a toy piano, as well as the calliope of the title. The London band Athlete used a toy piano for the intro of their track Superhuman Touch . . He also uses the toy piano to musically recreate the childhood of the main character in the French movie Amélie, which features a soundtrack composed mostly by him. Some jazz performers—John Medeski and Larry Goldings, among others—have used toy pianos. The toy piano has been used extensively by alternative rock and post-rock bands such as Agitpop, Evanescence, Chapi Chapo et les petites musiques de pluie Radiohead, Warren Zevon, Tori Amos, Sigur Rós and The Dresden Dolls.
The models had nicknames beginning with P , such as Packer, Padder, Papa and Poet. On it, she plays a number of pieces written specially for the toy piano as well as arrangements of other pieces, including Ludwig van Beethoven s Moonlight Sonata and The Beatles Eleanor Rigby .
In 1993 he released the CD Neue Musik für 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. He played many concerts with the toy piano in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.
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 end. The present form of the toy piano was invented in Philadelphia by a 17-year-old German immigrant named Albert Schoenhut.
Jaymar/Schoenhut experienced difficulty during the recession of the 1980s, folding and eventually re-emerging as the Schoenhut Piano Company in 1997. In 2004 he released the SACD Das untemperierte Klavier ( the not-so-well-tempered piano , a play on Bach s Well-Tempered Clavier), containing new contemporary works. In 1997, pianist Margaret Leng Tan released the CD The Art of the Toy Piano .
A documentary directed by Evans Chan entitled Sorceress of the New Piano explores the music making 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 Disease which became popular in 2005 and won several awards. Another famous artist who uses a toy piano is French musician/composer Yann Tiersen, who played the instrument already in his first album La Valse des Monstres ( Monsters Waltz ). The first toy pianos were made in the mid-19th century and were typically uprights, although many toy pianos made today are models of grands.
The punk rock band Matty Pop Chart has a song on their Good Old Water CD composed entirely on a toy piano. The experimental pop band Br er use toy pianos as a characteristic sound on many of their recordings. Today there are two other major toy-piano manufacturers - Haring from Brazil, and the Zeada from China. Though originally made as a child s toy, the toy piano has been used in serious classical and contemporary musical contexts.
Similarly, the pitch to which they are tuned is rarely close to the standard of 440 Hz for the A above middle C.
