Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each one links straight to the page it comes from.

The piano's full name is a volume control. The pianoforte — soft-loud — got its name "because the volume of sound was under the control of the performer," which no earlier keyboard could claim. Read it in the book →
A grand piano is a "piano with a tail". The French call it piano à queue — literally "piano with a tail" — and the Germans Flügel, "wing." Both named the shape; English named the size. Read it in the book →
A scherzo is literally a jest. The dictionary defines it as "a piece of music of a sportive, playful character" — and teaches the sound: skert'-zo. Read it in the book →
M.M. is a man's initials. In the abbreviations table, M.M. stands for Maelzel's Metronome — the clockwork beat-keeper whose patentee's name is still stamped on tempo marks. Read it in the book →
Opera comique is comedy, not comic. The entry insists on the distinction — "Comedy (not comic) opera" — a parenthesis doing a century of musicological work. Read it in the book →
A cornamusa is a bagpipe. It shares its page with the whole corno family: corno di caccia, the hunting horn; corno di bassetto, the basset horn. Read it in the book →
"Pulsatile" is the third kind of instrument. The dictionary classifies all instruments as string, wind, and pulsatile — struck — with the strings subdivided down to those struck by hammers, where the piano secretly belongs. Read it in the book →
A rote is a hurdy-gurdy. The wheel-cranked fiddle of street musicians, also called the vielle — not to be confused with rota, Latin for a round. Read it in the book →
Some sounds defeat English entirely. A pronunciation note admits one French vowel "cannot be reproduced in English; it resembles oo, but is not so broad" — the book's phonetic system confessing its limits. Read it in the book →
The dictionary is also a who's-who. Between the terms sit capsule biographies — composers, pianists, writers, with births and deaths — so that looking up "presto" also introduces you to Peter Prelleur, English organist, died 1758. Read it in the book →