The piano's big idea was volume
Before about 1700, the main keyboard instrument was the harpsichord, which plucks its strings with tiny quills. However hard you pressed a key, the note came out at the same volume. In Florence, an instrument maker called Bartolomeo Cristofori solved that with small hammers that strike the strings and bounce straight off: press gently for a quiet note, firmly for a loud one. He described his invention as a harpsichord that could play soft and loud — in Italian, piano e forte — and the soft half of the name is the one that stuck.
A modern PIANO has 88 keys and around 230 strings. Pulled tight, those strings tug on the frame with a combined force of roughly twenty tonnes, so every grand and upright is built around a heavy iron frame hidden inside the wooden case.
A brass instrument that counts as woodwind
The SAXOPHONE is made of brass but belongs to the woodwind family, and that is not a trick. Orchestras sort wind instruments by how the sound starts, not by what they are made of. When the Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax patented his instrument in 1846, he gave a metal body the same kind of single reed that a CLARINET uses, and a vibrating reed makes it woodwind.
The rule works the other way too. A concert FLUTE is usually metal and has no reed at all, but it is woodwind as well, because its sound comes from air split across the edge of a hole. A TRUMPET or TROMBONE is brass because the player's own buzzing lips start the note.
Everyone tunes to the oboe
Before a concert, the whole orchestra usually tunes to one note, an A, played by the OBOE. Its sound is bright enough to cut through everything else and its pitch is hard to bend, which makes it a steady reference for the violins, then the cellos and the rest.
Players still argue about the most famous instruments of all: the violins made by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona, Italy, around three hundred years ago. About 650 of his instruments survive and the best sell for millions. Yet in blind tests in the 2010s, top violinists playing behind screens could not reliably tell a Stradivarius from a fine modern VIOLIN, and more of them preferred the new ones.
Bagpipes get around
BAGPIPES are not only Scottish. Versions are played in Ireland, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey, India and plenty of places in between, and the clever part is the same everywhere: the bag. The piper blows or pumps air into it and squeezes it with one arm, so the air keeps flowing through the pipes even while the player breathes in. That is how the sound carries on without a gap, and why a single piper can fill a hillside, or a very small room, whether anyone wants them to or not.
The first instrument played in space
In December 1965, the crew of Gemini 6 told Mission Control they had spotted something odd in orbit — an object apparently piloted by someone in a red suit. Then Wally Schirra played 'Jingle Bells' on a small HARMONICA while Tom Stafford shook a handful of bells. They had smuggled both on board. The harmonica, the first musical instrument played in space, is now kept at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.