The first music for the piano was published in 1732.

After a two-week trip, JS Bach billed his church for beer! The amount he demanded was enough to purchase eight gallons!

By 1300, many major cities in Europe had one hundred thousand or more inhabitants. The city councils in these locales became significant employers of musicians, relying on them for practical services as well as pomp and ceremony. It seems that there might have even been some competition between bishops and city leaders in their attempts to gain prestige from their musical entourages.

The oldest surviving opera, "Euridice" by Jacopo Peri, had its premiere in Florence, Italy on October 6, 1600.

In 1711, in what was likely the first press interview with a musical instrument-maker, Bartolomeo Cristofori gave such a detailed description of his invention (the piano) that instrument makers all over Europe could duplicate his work and build their own pianos. The article was translated into German in 1725 and likely inspired pianos to be built in Germany as well.

No other instrument has figured more prominently in the long history of musical sounds as repositories of political authority and social control than the humble bell.

Early pianos were made in small workshops where a single craftsman and a few assistants produced instruments on a very small scale. Bartolomeo Cristofori was employed by a rich, music-loving prince, so he had the advantage of being able to build one piano after the next, adjusting his designs as he gained more experience. He was also able to train assistants, some of whom started their own workshops.

The first piano concert in New York was in 1773.

During the medieval period, news and music were closely intertwined. The town crier or herald came equipped with a drum, hunting horn, gong or bell. Villagers must have been especially pleased when the stranger in town was a skilled performer who could combine information and news from other villages with entertainment.

None of Cristofori’s pianos had pedals, although he developed an una corde system (soft pedal) in 1721.

Bells were a very big part of European daily life for a thousand years. The desire to have bigger bells than neighboring communities prompted tremendous investments of time and energy in metal-casting technology at a time when innovation was rarely a high priority.

In the 1660’s, a celebrated operatic “prima donna” (first lady) had the power to decide whether songs were added, cut, transposed, or edited, and in some cases, they even dictated the creation of an entirely new role.

The upright piano was invented in Philadelphia in 1800 by John Isaac Hawkins at almost exactly the same time it was invented by Mathias Muller in Germany. Hawkins was said to have also invented the ever-pointed pencil.

In the second half of the 16th century, Jean-Baptiste Lully became something of a cultural czar and controlled all of the opera performances in France. He died a very rich man.

The most prolific, versatile, and ingenious piano-inventor that ever lived was Jean-Henri Pape. He took out as many as 137 patents. His most useful ideas were the use of felt for covering piano hammers and the device of cross-stringing the piano strings. He designed the "console" piano, a round piano, an elliptical piano, and a hexagonal piano. He also developed a piano that used springs instead of strings.

Even in the 20th century, wandering blues musicians in the US were accused of making deals with the devil.

For a while, the system of white (ivory) keys for naturals and black (ebony) keys for sharps and flats was reversed. At the time, ebony was much cheaper and easier to find, so the naturals were black, and the sharps and flats were white.

Critics initially applied the term “baroque” as an insult, deriding the fussy intricacy and extravagant individualism of the aesthetic vision and contrasting it with the holistic elegance of the renaissance. The label was later legitimized and became a term of praise.