Changing Keys: Keyboard Instruments for America 1700-1830
"Changing Keys: Keyboard Instruments for America, 1700-1830" features twenty-eight eighteenth- and nineteenth-century organs, harpsichords and pianos, seven working action models that trace major developments in the harpsichord and early piano and audio recordings of several of the instruments. In September 2016, "Changing Keys" added three important and recently conserved keyboard instruments: two "organized pianos" (as they were called in the period to describe pianos in which ranks of organ pipes are also playable from the same keyboard); one of which is the only surviving organized upright grand piano and, at nine feet tall and seven feet wide, was thought to be the largest and most complex domestic musical instrument in American when it arrived in Williamsburg from London in 1799. Also to be incorporated into the exhibition is a loan from George Washington's Mount Vernon: the harpsichord that the first president ordered for his step-granddaughter, which she played at his plantation home.
The types of instruments shown in "Changing Keys" - harpsichords, spinets, pianos (square, upright and grand) and organs - were daily fixtures in the social life of eighteenth-century Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Patrick Henry and other future founders of the new nation were among the representatives in Virginia's House of Burgesses. Williamsburg, the then-capital of Virginia, was one of America's principal cultural centers and music and dance were considered necessities. The second known public performance on a piano in America took place in Williamsburg in 1771 at Raleigh Tavern. As its title suggests, "Changing Keys" traces the evolution of keyboard instruments until the advent of iron framing, which would launch the technological transformations that produced the modern piano. The transition from harpsichord to piano and the accompanying shift in taste during the period is featured, as well as the beginnings of the American musical instrument industry that eventually broke England's monopoly on their manufacture. The title also refers to the way individual instruments changed over their long history of use.
"Changing Keys: Keyboard Instruments for America, 1700-1830" is made possible in part through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Strange of Easley, South Carolina, and Dordy and Charlie Freeman of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Restorative conservation of the organized upright grand piano was generously supported by descendants of the first Williamsburg owner in memory of N. Beverley Tucker, Jr.
