Commercial Keyboard Instruments

Our music has been profoundly influenced by the keyboard: Its influence extends from the texture of the sound to the innermost processes. The future of keyboard instruments depends as much upon maintaining the present good relation between instrument potentialities and the musical structures composers and audiences find interesting as it does upon the absolute efficiency of the performer-keyboard combination in handling information. Both aspects of this relation will be discussed. To give a broad picture of the keyboard, radical electronic music instruments of today, which use keyboards in surprising ways, and experimental instruments of earlier years will be included.