Marilyn's Photos - NBov 20 2025 - Black Keys and White Keys
Looking at the accordion keyboard I noticed the white and black keys and how they create an efficient space for the fingers to reach across them.
Yamaha tells us that the colours were the opposite when Mozart was alive in the 18th century. How the colours got reversed isn’t documented but by the 19th century they were switched. As the colour white stands out while black recedes, it is thought that as pianos became more widely used, a brighter keyboard was preferred.
The origin of piano keys goes way back to Greece to the third century B.C.E. with the water organ - the hydraulis. It used the power of water to blow air through the pipes of a pan flute. It had the seven white piano keys - A,B,C,D,E,F,G with no semitones.
Our piano keyboard with the black keys making a chromatic scale was created in the 14th century. I wonder how those five new keys came about. It seems to me there would have been a distinctive difference in the music being sung and played. What I find on the internet is that ancient musical systems with fewer notes and no semitones are said to sound stable and agreeable - a pleasant sound. There’s a lack of tension with no strong dissonance. The diatonic scale introduces tension and suspense with a stronger sense of direction and resolution. I was thinking about the greater harmonic complexity and how it has evolved.
In our choir, we are singing Vince Guaraldi’s best known song from Charlie Brown’s Christmas “Christmas Time is Here” - it has a pleasant rhythm and is repetitively calming. At the same time, it has many occurrences of dissonant harmonies. It makes me think of our current times and how anxious we are. Maybe music made us this way. Christmas Time is Here always “resolves” to a satisfying chord ending. Wouldn’t it be great if that’s how things turn out in our social times.
It is time to show you silly presents to buy for Christmas. Here are the silly socks. Give these with a silly sweater.
And the picture below that is part of the Painters’ Palette Series - photos of the watercolour palettes each week turned into abstracts.
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