Why do you love the

p i ano?

First, it’s very accessible

Unlike with a violin or a flute, producing a perfect note on a piano is easy: you just need to press a key. It won’t sound like you’re slaughtering your cat, and you won’t end up lightheaded after trying to blow in the instrument for 5 minutes without producing a single sound. Now, not everyone can be a Yuja Wang or a Lang Lang. But there is something satisfying about being able to sit down at a piano and casually play Für Elise to your crush, or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to your kids.

It can play anything 

Like we just said, kids’ songs, or classical pieces. But really, the piano can be used to play anything, from jazz to pop, from romantic music to rap samples. So, whatever your favourite musical genre is, there’s a good chance piano is involved. And it’s also the perfect instrument to improvise and mix styles!

Beyond musical genre, the piano can also take on different roles, be it as a member of a duo, trio, quartet and more, as a soloist with or without an orchestra, as an accompanist for other instruments… it can do it all! Maybe that’s because it has the widest range of any instrument, spanning over seven octaves?

It expresses a wide range of emotions 

We all have this image of someone being sad, looking out a window, watching the rain fall, with soft melancholic piano music in the background. Or you’ve heard the lively Ragtime by Scott Joplin, that immediately brings joy into the room! That’s the piano’s strength. Depending on how you play it, you can convey the full palette of emotions. Pressing a key softly feels like the music is brought to you by the wind. A sharp and harsh push and you can feel the anger – like when you frantically type on your computer’s keyboard. You’ll always find a piano piece that suits your mood!

It’s a masterpiece of engineering

Do you know how many parts there are in a piano? We mentioned the 88 keys, but there are actually over 12 000 individual pieces in a grand piano!! They all work together to produce the beautiful sound that we hear. When you press a key, it activates a little hammer – a soft one obviously, not like the one you use on nails – that hits the strings, making them vibrate and thus producing the note. How many strings are there? Not 88, as you may have thought, but around 230, because one key can be linked to a group of up to three strings. And they are very tightly strung: each individual string carries a tension of 70 to 90kg! So, the overall structure of the piano has to withstand around 20 tonnes of tension… a true engineering masterpiece, we tell you!

It’s a beautiful work of art 

A sleek black surface, hiding a true power inside, a symbol of elegance and refinement… we’re not talking about the latest car – though there are 3 pedals too – but still about the piano! If you don’t care much for the technical prowess behind the making of the instrument, maybe you’re more in tune with its absolute beauty. Back in the day, piano makers were real artists, choosing carefully the type of wood, carving it, and adding little ornamentations to the instruments they crafted. Some pianos even had paintings on the lid! 

It’s an important part of our culture 

Finally, we can’t deny that the piano is a staple of our musical culture. Invented around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence, Italy, the pianoforte is an evolution of earlier keyboards like the harpsichord. While the new instrument didn’t gain popularity immediately, with later improvements and endorsements it spread around Europe and America during the 18th and 19th century, becoming a cornerstone of Western classical music by the late 1800s, before reaching the whole world. And composers seemed to love the piano, as it is the instrument they most wrote for! Perhaps because many of them were also accomplished pianists, like Mozart?