The piano is one of the most commonly played instruments and is often the first instrument people learn to play. However, the modern piano is only about three hundred years old. Although the piano seems like an everyday part of life to many of us, it was a technical marvel when it was invented. Before the piano became common, there were other keyboard instruments in use including the organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. While all these instruments utilize a keyboard, they employ different mechanisms to make sound. Other less common keyboard instruments include the celesta, which looks like a small piano but has a distinctive tinkly sound (this instrument was featured by Tchaikovsky in the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker) and carillons, a keyboard which controls a set of at least 23 harmonically tuned bells housed in a bell tower. Many composers played a keyboard instrument, however sometimes it is difficult, especially for early composers, such as Bach and Handel, to know which instrument they played. Often musicologists will simply say they played keyboard or were a keyboardist when we are not sure which instrument they would have played.

An ancient Greek version of a pipe organ called a hydraulis is the earliest known keyboard instrument. Built in the third century BCE, the organ featured balanced keys that could be played with only a light touch. Up until the fourteenth century CE organs were the only keyboard instrument, even though the instruments sometimes didn’t have an actual keyboard, instead utilizing buttons or levers instead. Pipe organs work by forcing pressurized air, also called wind, through pipes that are opened by pressing the corresponding key on the keyboard. Unlike other keyboard instruments, most organs, especially the largest pipe organs, feature more than one keyboard, called manuals. Organs often feature a keyboard that is played by the feet, called a pedal clavier. Each manual controls a certain set of pipes, called stops. Since the organ has a continuous supply of air, notes can be sustained as long as the key is depressed, unlike a piano or harpsichord whose sound dissipates after the key is played.

In the hydraulis water was utilized to force the air through the pipes. In later organs only air was used by attaching bellows to the organs, which until the advent of motors much later, required a person to operate them, this would often be the job of young boys. Organs can range in size from portable instruments with one manual with one to two dozen pipes to massive organs in cathedrals which can have seven manuals and over 33,00 pipes. Although often associated with churches, pipe organs were often installed in movie theaters to accompany the earliest silent films. There is still a wide variety of new compositions written for organs, as well as a substantial catalogue of music written over that past 500 years.

By the fourteenth century CE several new keyboard instruments had been developed including the clavichord, harpsichord, and clavicymbalum. Of these the harpsichord and clavichord were most common.