By Keith Gramlich – Piano Tuning & Repair, Long Island & the NY Metro Area
📞 Got a piano with roots in the past? Keep it sounding its best.
Call or text (917) 757-4207 or email Wurli1@live.com today.
🎹 Serving Queens, Long Island, and the NY Metro Area with expert care and 30+ years of experience in piano tuning and repair.
Before the piano, before the baby grand, even before Grandma’s upright in the parlor—there was the harpsichord.
A strange, beautiful creature of an instrument, the harpsichord ruled the music world for over 200 years. And while it’s no longer in the spotlight, it deserves a standing ovation for its role in getting us to the modern piano.
🎶 What Is a Harpsichord?
A harpsichord might look like a piano, but under the hood it’s doing something very different.
Instead of hammers striking strings like in a piano, the harpsichord plucks them—more like a mechanical guitar. Each key pulls a tiny plectrum (originally made of quill or leather) that plucks a string, giving the harpsichord its bright, metallic, almost harp-like tone.
What you gain in sparkle, though, you lose in dynamics. A harpsichord doesn’t care how hard you hit the keys—the sound is always the same volume. That’s why early composers, like Bach, had to be creative with rhythm and harmony instead of volume and nuance.
🎵 Why Was It So Popular?
From the 1500s to the mid-1700s, the harpsichord was the keyboard instrument of choice. It was the backbone of Baroque music, appearing in everything from royal courts and cathedrals to public concert halls and private salons.
Composers like Bach, Scarlatti, and Handel wrote massive volumes of music for the harpsichord. It was the soloist, the continuo in ensembles, and the orchestral “glue” before conductors were a thing.
If you were alive back then and could play keyboard, you probably played harpsichord.
🎹 Enter the Piano
So what happened?
Well, remember that lack of dynamics? Musicians eventually wanted more expression—something that could whisper and thunder. That’s where Bartolomeo Cristofori’s invention came in around 1700: the piano.
With its hammer mechanism, the piano could finally do what the harpsichord never could—change volume with pressure. This blew everyone’s powdered wigs off.
By the late 1700s, the piano had started to take over. By the mid-1800s? The harpsichord was nearly extinct in everyday music.
🎼 But Wait—It Came Back!
In the 20th century, with the rise of historical performance practices, the harpsichord got a second wind. Artists and scholars wanted to hear Bach and Handel the way their audiences originally did. Builders started making new harpsichords—some modern, some based on original designs—and the instrument found new fans in classical circles, film scores, and even a few rock bands (looking at you, The Beatles).
🧰 Why This Matters to Me
As a piano tuner and technician, I love the harpsichord because it shows just how much humans care about sound. We built this crazy, complex machine to express ourselves—and then we kept improving it, century after century.
Even though I don’t tune harpsichords professionally (different toolset, different beast), I have nothing but respect for them. They’re the grandparents of every piano I touch.
📞 Care for your piece of piano history like it matters—because it does.
Call or text Keith Gramlich at (917) 757-4207 or email Wurli1@live.com today.
🎹 Proudly serving Queens, Long Island, and the NY Metro Area with tuning, repair, and decades of experience honoring the legacy of music.