What is Music?
Music is one kind of sound. All sounds, whether musical or not, are the
result of sound waves in the air. They travel almost exactly like the
waves of the water. They go in circles in all directions at the same
speed and will go on forever unless they meet something that has the
ability to stop them. If you drop a pebble into the exact center of a
basin of water, you will see the ring of waves produced start from the
point where the pebble entered the water and travel to the sides of the
vessel, which stop them. Also the pebble as it falls into the water
will make ring after ring of waves.
When you shout or ring or strike one of the keys of the piano you start
a sound wave or a series of them, which you can hear as soon as the
sound wave strikes your ear. When the series of waves is regular the
sound produced is a musical sound, and when the sound waves are not
regular in length we call it some other kind of a sound.
Acting on the knowledge so learned, man has devised numerous
instruments with which he can produce musical sounds, such as the
piano, phonograph, and many others.
Who Made the First Piano?
The first real piano was made by Bartolomeo Christofori, an Italian.
He invented the little hammers by the aid of which the strings are
struck, giving a clear tone instead of the scratching sound which
all the previous instruments produced. It took two thousand years to
discover the value of the little hammers in making clearer notes. His
first piano was made in 1709. The word by which we call the instrument
pianoforte has, however, been traced back as far as 1598, when it is
said to have been originated by an Italian named Paliarino. The first
piano made in America was produced by John Behnud, in Philadelphia, in
1775.
How Was the Piano Discovered?
~THE DISCOVERY OF STRINGED MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS~
The piano is a stringed musical instrument. The name pianoforte comes
from two Italian words meaning _soft_ and _loud_, and is accurately
descriptive of the piano because the notes can at will be made soft or
loud. The piano is a development of the simplest form of making regular
sound vibrations by snapping or hammering a string of some kind which
is stretched tight and fastened at both ends. We must go far back into
history to find the earliest traces of stringed instruments, and even
then we do not know where and when they originated, for there seem to
be no records which help us to trace their origin. We know that the
Egyptians as far back as 525 B.C. had stringed instruments, but we only
know they had them--not where they got them or who made them. There
is a legend that the Roman god Mercury, while walking along the Nile
after the river had overflowed its banks and the land had again become
dry, stubbed his toe on the shell of a dead tortoise. He picked it up
to cast it aside and accidentally touched some strings of sinew with
his finger. These strings were only what remained of the once live
tortoise. At the same time Mercury heard a musical note and, after
vainly trying to find a cause for the musical sound, twanged the string
again and discovered the music in tightly-stretched strings. He set
about making an instrument, using the tortoise shell for the sound box
and stretching a number of strings of sinew across it. This is only a
legend, of course, but if we examine the early musical instruments of
the Greeks, which was the lyre, we always find the representation of a
tortoise upon it.
Other nations, such as the early Chinese, the Persians, the Hindus and
the Hebrews, had stringed instruments much resembling the lyre. In the
tombs of the great rulers of Egypt are found representations of harps,
and one harp which had been buried in one of the tombs for more than
3000 years was actually found to be in good condition.
[Illustration: Picture by courtesy Browne & Howell Co.