One of the great things about electronic keyboards is that many of them can transpose easily and quickly. If a song is in the easy-to-play key of G and you want to do it in the much harder key of Gb, without having to do the work of transposition, you can just flip a switch, play it as written, and it will sound a half-step lower than it’s played! Piece of cake.
Now, look at the strings and hammers in a piano. They’re all (with about 4 exceptions, at least on my piano) equally spaced, maybe about 1/4 of an inch apart. On some pianos, the soft pedal works by moving all the hammers sideways just slightly, so they don’t hit as many strings. Well, what if they moved further, like 1/4 of an inch, for example. Then every note would sound a half-step higher or lower, depending on which direction the hammers moved. You could transpose quickly and automatically, on a real piano!
Does such a mechanism exist, even in the planning stages or as a prototype? If not, then… I realize there are some problems to work out, probably including some I haven’t thought of, and it would require a lot of moving parts (as if the piano doesn’t have enough already) but is there any reason that it would be absolutely impossible (or definitely not worth it) to build such a piano?
Considering that a piano such as you described could only transpose to one other key–and that one just 1/2 step above or below the standard key–I can’t see much of a reason why anyone would have any interest in designing/building/using such a thing.
If you could make a piano that could transpose to any key (by mechanical means) that might have some value.
Still, most accomplished pianists can easily transpose from one key to any other so I don’t see a big demand for this feature.
It would just have to move further and further. Most electronic ones only go up or down about a 5th, I think. That would give you a range of over an octave.
I’ve heard that the composer Irving Berlin had a transposing piano specially made, but take this with a grain of salt, since the account in which I heard it was fictionalized.
Irving Berlin’s favourite transposing piano had a wheel to move the mechanism - he called the piano “My Buick”.
He could not read music, and preferred to play on the black keys, thus putting the songs into the remote keys of Db or Gb/F# or B. But often the songs had a surprising musical and harmonic sophistication.
F# major is a nice comfortable key to play in. So is F# minor for that matter. I can see his point.
Now, I don’t sightread, never got much past the “lessee, every good OK that’s an A and there’s a flat in the key sig so that’s this key here” stage of reading sheet music, but I used to play Sibelius’s Romance, written in the horrid key of D flat major, in D major instead. You just pretend the key sig is different from what it actually is, and treat naturals as sharps and flats as naturals. Admittedly it would be more of a challenge to play it in B major or something, although I suspect once my fingers and ears knew the shapes and patterns I could transpose just by putting my hand down at a different starting point.
