27 March 2025, 16:17
Liszt - La Campanella Played on an LED Piano
By Maddy Shaw Roberts
A standard piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. But who decided this number would be the norm, and why?
The king of instruments has played a significant role in music history. From concertos and sonatas, to nocturnes and trios, classical music would simply not be the same without the humble piano.
To celebrate World Piano Day, which always takes place on the 88th day of the year, we take a look at the history of the instrument, and how it came to he the 88-piece keyboard it boasts today.
Read more: The 16 best pieces EVER written for piano
When was the first piano invented?Before the piano was invented, composers wrote a lot of music for the harpsichord, which has just 60 keys. This meant that everything they wrote was limited to the harpsichord’s five-octe range.
But then, around the year 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori, a musical instrument technician from Padua, Italy, decided it was time to update the harpsichord – and he came up with a new keyboard instrument with a hammer mechanism.
Cristofori was hired by the Florentine court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1688 to look after their harpsichords and, eventually, other instruments.
A 1700 inventory of Medici instruments mentions an ‘arpicimbalo’ (lit. an instrument resembling a harpsichord) invented by Cristofori. The instrument had a brand-new hammer and damper mechanism, two keyboards and a range of four octes (49 keys).
Poet and journalist Scipione Maffei described it in 1711 as a ‘gricembalo col piano, e forte’ (harpsichord with quiet and loud). It was here that the ‘pianoforte’, or simply the ‘the piano’, found its name.
Read more: Why ‘All By Myself’ sounds uncannily like Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.2
Piano, made by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731).
Picture:
Getty
How did the piano come to he 88 keys?After word got out of Cristofori’s miraculous musical invention, composers started writing more and more music for the piano.
But the instrument’s four-octe range was limiting. So, piano manufacturers designed new pianos with more keys, so that composers like Haydn and Mozart could write more challenging material for a fuller keyboard.
By the time Romantic composers like Chopin and Liszt were writing music in the mid-1800s, pianos had up to seven octes, allowing them to compose pieces with an even more ambitious range like the bafflingly virtuosic ‘La Campanella’.
In the late 1880s, piano manufacturer Steinway created the 88-key piano. Other manufacturers followed suit, and Steinway’s model has been the standard ever since.
An 88-key piano has seven octes plus three lower notes (B, B flat and A) below the bottom C.
It has 52 white keys and 36 black keys (sharps and flats), with each octe made up of seven white keys and five black keys.
Read more: The 25 best piano players of all time
Steinway & Sons piano.
Picture:
Getty
Why did piano manufacturers stop at 88 keys?Today’s composers usually write piano music that fits within the range of an 88-key model. Most piano makers also accept this as the limit, because anything outside is considered too high or low for the human ear.
But there are a few exceptions. Stuart and Sons set a world record in 2018 when they created a nine-octe piano, with 108 keys.
Bösendorfer sells 97-key pianos, whose nine extra keys are coloured black so the pianist can distinguish them from the standard 88. The keys are rarely used, but the extra bass strings add harmonic resonance that contributes to the rich, overall sound of the instrument.
Here’s an idea of how they look on the rather grand Bösendorfer semi-concert grand piano, which has an extra four keys...
92-key Bösendorfer piano.
Picture:
YouTube