Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning [tuning] toy pianos (was: scala chromatic clavier???)

genewardsmith@juno.com Fri Apr 12 17:03 PDT 2002 wrote:

> Are there such things as high-quality kiddie keyboards available, with
> smaller keys?

This may be a little off topic for this list, but anyway:

I read somewhere that Steinway & Sons made a piano with smaller keys for
Josef Hofmann. Certainly high-quality, but perhaps a little more than
you wanted to spend? ;-)

It's odd that all the toy pianos made by Schoenhut (the largest maker,
started in 1872) have full-size keys (allegedly "to ease your child's
transition to full-size piano")--so its a sure thing little fingers won't
be playing any 7 chords. Goes to show it's parents that buy the things.
(On the same principle, pet food has to smell good to people.)

The hammers on all Schoenhuts strike metal bars, so whether or not it's a
piano is debatable. On the plus side, you won't have to worry about
humidity or tuning it. If you get tired of it, you can take it apart
and make a xylophone.

You can hear what a Schoenhut sounds like on CD-ROM: "The Art of the Toy
Piano" by Margaret Leng Tan. She's a Julliard Ph.D. graduate that goes
around the country giving concerts on one of these things, God knows why.
When she's not playing toy pianos, she's playing the works of John Cage,
which is pretty much the same thing in my book. :-)

Of course, another way to look at this is: you can easily pay 600 times
more for non-toy grand piano. Will it really sound 600 times better?
I seriously doubt it. Maybe everyone should play toy pianos like Ms. Tan.

Frankly, for a child why just buy an inexpensive electronic keyboard, like
a Casio? Many of these have reduced size keys. The timbre stinks, but it
stays in tune even better than the Schoenhut and is a whole lot more
portable. Nowadays even the cheap ones have 8 or more voices. If it
breaks, you just buy a new one. And most important of all, you can turn
down the volume! (Of course, an electronic keyboard is very blue collar
and won't impress the neighbors or help get little Billy into prep school.)

Too bad nobody makes a mechanical keyboard-size-reducing-attachment for
standard pianos. It would be easy to do: just a smaller keyboard with
bent levers that go where fingers would normally go, and some kind of
clamp to hold it in place.

But I forgot: grown-ups are hopelessly conservative about the standard
keyboard. It will be the last thing on earth to change. Look at the
typewriter: QWERTY (designed to be slow so mechanical typewriters wouldn't
jam) still reigns supreme.

Also, the market expects instruments have to be "works of art"--exotic
materials, inefficient low-volume manufacturing, fancy finishes--with snob
appeal. Otherwise they would be as cheap as typewriters or computers (which
are a whole lot more complicated and difficult to make)--or toy pianos.

Good luck in your search!

🔗David Beardsley <davidbeardsley@biink.com>

🔗Mark G. Ryan <mgryan@cruzio.com>

davidbeardsley@biink.com Sat Apr 13 12:35 PDT 2002 wrote:
> > The hammers on all Schoenhuts strike metal bars, so whether or not it's a
> > piano is debatable.
>
> The piano is a percussion instrument.
>
> So is a Fender Rhodes electric piano not a piano?
>
>
>
> * David Beardsley
> * http://biink.com
> * http://mp3.com/davidbeardsley

As I said, it's debatable: mostly just semantics. But glad to see the
debate has started.

The classification of musical instruments into families is pretty much
an empty academic exercise, reeking of Aristotle. However, just for
laughs, I checked a few authorities--

List the piano as a "stringed instrument":
Culver, Musical Acoustics
Forsyth, Orchestration

List the piano in a special group (along with harp and celesta):
Kennan, Technique of Orchestration

List the piano as a percussion instrument:
Rimsky-Korsakov: Principle of Orchestration

So, everybody is right! Guess it depends on what one chooses as the
"essential" feature:
How the instrument is played
How the instrument is used in the orchestra
What is the sound-producing mechanism

A similar problem comes up in biology all the time in the area of
taxonomy. There are two camps: "lumpers" and "splitters". Today
we regard DNA as the "essential" attribute, but counter examples
exist that make this awkward (for example, the actress Jamie Lee
Curtis happens to a genetic male, but you won't catch her using
the Men's restroom).

The problem of what makes a lemon a lemon is a huge one in modern
Anglo-American philosophy: see Quine "Natural Kinds", Kripke,
Putnam, Donellan, etc. (Meanwhile, I'll go make music.)

A man-made object like a musical instrument is an even more
difficult classification problem. It may be quite arbitrary.

As far as whether an electric piano is a piano, one could be
misled by language. Sometimes adjectives are "differentia" defining
a subcategory (e.g, "red rose"), but sometimes they create a new
category altogether:

German silver (copper-zinc-nickel alloy)
fool's gold (iron pyrite)
Osage orange (tree and fruit)
Jerusalem artichoke (plant)
Jerusalem cricket (insect)
Oregon grape (plant)
skunk cabbage (plant)
miner's lettuce (plant)
mountain ash (plant)
mountain cranberry (plant)
dumb waiter (machine)
horseless carriage (machine)
Jaw harp (musical instrument)
electric eye (machine)

(In common names of plants, adjectives like "Indian", "mountain",
"desert", "horse", or a geographical proper name, very often mean
the plant is unrelated to the plant name that follows.)

Is the electric eye an eye? Not to a biologist.

To sum up, just because their is mock turtle soup, one shouldn't go
looking for Mock Turtles (remember the one in _Alice_ that sang:
"Soup of the evening, beautiful soup..."?).

🔗jpehrson2 <jpehrson@rcn.com>

--- In tuning@y..., "Mark G. Ryan" <mgryan@c...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_36379.html#36379

>>
> It's odd that all the toy pianos made by Schoenhut (the largest
maker, started in 1872) have full-size keys (allegedly "to ease your
child's transition to full-size piano")--so its a sure thing little
fingers won't be playing any 7 chords.

***Mark is quite right about this. My Schoenhut (why, of *course* I
own one) has the white keys at 7/8" diameter, same as the piano.

> You can hear what a Schoenhut sounds like on CD-ROM: "The Art of
the Toy Piano" by Margaret Leng Tan.

***Or I would recommend her only real "competition" (yes, there's
even competition amongst toy piano executants) in New York, my friend
Wendy Mae Chambers:

http://www.wendymae.com/toy_piano.html

She's a Julliard Ph.D. graduate that goes
> around the country giving concerts on one of these things, God
knows why.

****It's one of those "catchy" things that are easy to publicize.

Media people go "wild" over things like this, *regardless* of what
music is being played...

J. Pehrson