What musical instrument accompanies a traditional classical composition? Here's a hint - it's also the most essential in any normal musical composition.
You may not have heard of Bartolomeo Cristofori, but you definitely know his invention if your answer to the above question is the piano.
This day, May 4, 2015, is being celebrated by a Google Doodle as the 360th birthday of Cristofori, the man who is widely credited with inventing the piano.
Cristofori was born in 1655 in Padua, in what was then the Republic of Venice.
Today's Doodle pays a tribute to the brilliant inventor in a rather unique fashion. Go to www.google.com today, and you'll see a lovely sketch of Cristofori playing a beautiful melody from Johann Sebastian Bach's Jesu, titled Joy of Man's Desiring. There's even a sidebar which gives the user an option to increasing the volume.
On the blog that Google has dedicated to its doodles, it writes that one of Cristofori’s "biggest innovations" was creating a hammer mechanism that strikes the strings on a keyboard to create sound. "The use of a hammer made it possible to produce softer or louder sounds depending upon how light or hard a player pressed on the keys". In fact, that’s how Cristofori’s new instrument got its name — in Italian, piano means soft, while forte means loud. Being able to change the volume was a major breakthrough.
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