It's hard to remember by looking at it that a piano is a stringed instrument. Yet under the hood of every grand, baby grand, and upright piano, are wires of various lengths tuned to vibrant to the frequency equivalent of each note in one of its eleven octaves. In fact until the early 1700s when Barolomeo Cristofori created the first equivalent of the modern piano by installing hammers to hit the strings when a key was pressed, harpsichords and clavichords had hooks that plucked the string corresponding to each key.

Neither the harpsichord nor the clavichord was suited for concert settings as they were invariably  drowned out by the rest of the orchestra. The new instrument took its name of pianoforte because Cristofori's modifications gave it the ability to be able to play both soft (piano) and strong (forte). Nearly as important as the ability to control the volume, the hammers also increased the control a player had over the instrument's ability to sustain a note.

In spite of what must have been a sizeable difference in quality of tone and volume, the new instrument didn't become popular until the rise of the Romantic Movement toward the later part of the 1700's. With the movements' heavy emphasis on emotions in the arts, the piano's ability for expression made it increasingly the instrument of choice for both performers and composers. If you have ever heard a harpsichord, you'll know that there is nothing it can do to match the emotional power generated by the rolling thunder of a piano's bass keys or the ethereal, delicate tremolo that can be achieved at the other end of the keyboard.

While the emotional extravagances of the Romantic era are a thing of the past, piano players are still utilizing the instrument's diversity of expression as a means of recreating an emotional record of a time, place or situation. Using tone and sound in lieu of words artists have created the equivalent of musical poems in the hopes of creating a more direct emotional connection with their audience than is possible with words.

Sound has the ability to communicate on a universal level that isn't possible with words. For while a sound or a rhythm can be understood by anyone, a word can only be comprehended by another who understands its language. While it's true that each person might hear something different in the same note, or the same progression of notes, there's no barrier standing in the way of their attempted comprehension. Viggo Mortensen's recent recording, Time Waits For Everyone is a wonderful example of these types of creations.