Piano facts
By Gabriel

I am going to tell some weird and cool facts about piano and piano players:

• Did you know Chopin only gave 30 public performances during his entire lifetime?
• Did you also know some of Mozart’s fame wasn’t from piano; it was from toilet humor?
• Did you know Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the first piano? He was born on May 4, 1655, in Padua, Republic of Venice, and died January 27, 1732, in Florence, Italy.
• Some people think that the piano is part of the percussion section because you tap it, but it’s actually part of the strings.
• The piano took the harpsichord’s place as the dominant keyboard instrument during the Romantic era.
• Did you know Bach wasn’t famous until 100 years after he died?
• Beethoven was totally deaf by the time he wrote the famous 9^th Symphony.
• Beethoven was important because people thought his music was “reasonable” and a bridge between the Classical and Romantic eras.
• Black keys on the piano play sharps and flats, but white ones typically play normal pitch.
• The keys on the piano are usually made out of plastic or ivory, which is elephant tusk.
• The dynamics (this is how soft or high you play) on the piano sheet music look like p for soft, f for loud, mf for medium loud, mp for medium soft, ff very loud, and pp very soft.
• There is also something called legato and stacato. Legato is smooth and stacato is bumpy.

Thank you for reading the facts I found. The end!