Op-Ed: The Acoustic Piano and Home Entertainment in the Digital Age

Gadgets, games, laptops, speaker systems, multi use phones and flat screen televisions are once again vying for the prime attention, as the most popular holiday presents of the year are selected from an endless array of supplies. Santa's many gifts to the kind children will blink and beep from Apple iPhones to CDs and DVD movies, not to forget the Xbox 360. These digital wonders turn every home jolly and make the semi-edutainments the center of precious family time next to the christmas dinner. They are undeniably impressive products for escaping from reality, and certainly serve the core meaning of modern entertainment. "Home entertainment" as a definition has, however, undergone a professionalization, much like take-out has taken over at the expense of cooking. Similar to home cooking and knitting skills, creation of music and singing used to be natural phenomena in many homes. Family members and neighboring friends would be trained in a choir, and memorize songs of the season. At home, their singing would be centered around the most respected piece of furniture, the piano. The pianoforte, a keyboard instrument which produces sounds from soft to loud, also enabled homes in the remotest villages to hear the music of the masters. The sheet music was often reduced from a symphony orchestra score to one or two players at the keyboard. Every able amateur musician was the centerpiece after dinner, before the dessert, allowing him or her to echo the sounds of the symphony, chamber orchestra and church organ.

The invention of the pianoforte is credited to the Italian harpsichord maker expert Bartolomeo Cristofori, who in the early 18th century experimented with a new pleasant sounding keyboard instrument. In contrary to earlier keyboard instruments, the piano would initially allow the hammer to strike the string, but release it gently while the string sustained the sound, thus producing a percussive attack with a promise toward a more singing aftertaste compared to the previous - more harsh and nasal - harpsichord and clavichord amplitudes. In the Mozart-era, the engineering of the piano developed rapidly, and would eventually lead to the modern technique of the instrument's sound production. In the mid and late 19th century, makers such as Theodore Steinway and Julius Blüthner would lead the development of the piano to become a concert instrument as it is known today. While these massive handcrafted pieces of art would project a grand sound in theaters and concert halls, it was an impractical and expensive instrument for the common home. Smaller versions, such as the square piano, console piano and upright piano, were subsequently developed, with space and budget as priorities. The earliest version of the fully automated home entertainment system was also piano-centered. The player piano was first introduced in 1863 by Henri Fourneaux. It played itself with a pre-programmed perforated paper roll representing "the sheet music". The Disklavier, manufactured by Yamaha, is a modern equivalent of the player piano.

Today, due to less demand for acoustic pianos everywhere, the piano manufacturers' and technicians' professional skills are an endangered human craft. The skills, previously present in every town, are concentrated to a few survivors, who defend centuries of important development and knowledge. Steinway & Sons, Yamaha, Bösendorfer, Schimmel and a few others are strongholds of the precious tradition.

Every profession has certainly undergone many changes due to the computer and internet revolution, but there is no other phenomenon which compares to the deterioration of human activity and knowledge as the concept of "Home Entertainment". And while earlier an engaging activity mainly triggered by inevitability, today the home entertainment system provides a passivating, yet widely accepted and honored landscape for audio and visual pollution. A resurrection of the home acoustic piano phenomenon would seem an unrealistic and even a backward ideal. It is therefore mostly the tragic loss of common musical engagement which needs a vitamin injection in order to allow layman musicianship to bloom again. Fortunately, Apple Computer, one of the major providers of today's home entertainment, has developed a software program bundled with its operating system, called GarageBand. Many amateur musicians have turned to the attractive samples, rhythms and loops, but the new era of home musicianship is still waiting for its heyday.