Around 1900, more American homes had a piano than a toilet. Music came mostly from informal gatherings in living rooms and on front porches. Sheet music sold for a penny on street corners.

Jazz pianist Art Tatum used to practice away from the keyboard by running filbert nuts across his fingers like a magician.

Irving Berlin, one of America’s greatest songwriters, could only play the piano in the key of F#. He owned a piano that would transpose his music into other keys for him.

When they were both seven years old, Mozart proposed marriage to Marie Antoinette. She turned him down.

All of us have had problems reaching some of the notes in JS Bach's keyboard compositions. Historian Dr. Charles Burney says that Bach sometimes used a stick in his mouth to hit a key that he couldn't reach with either hand.

Dizzy Gillespie’s trademark bent trumpet came about by accident. In 1953, a fellow musician tripped over Dizzy’s horn, and the bell ended up at a 45-degree angle. Gillespie liked the sound, and used bent horns for the rest of his career.

Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921) was the earliest-born pianist ever to record.

John Broadwood of England made pianos from 1770 on. He invented the sustain pedal, strengthened the case and strings to increase volume, and added an octave, extending the keyboard to six octaves.

Although the piano was an Italian invention, it was the German, Austrian, English and French instrument makers who would come up with the design and structural improvements that would greatly improve the piano’s capacity by the end of the eighteenth century.

Jazz was the first musical style to originate in the United States. It was first heard in New Orleans in the late 1800's.

St. Cecilia is the patron saint of music.

George F. Handel composed his great “Messiah” in less than three weeks.

In the eighteenth century, there were no keyboard tuners as such - keyboard owners and players were expected to tune their own instruments or have someone on their premises who did it for them. During the nineteenth century, piano tuning gradually turned into a profession.

By the 1870s, piano tuning was sufficiently established that it began to be treated as an attractive opportunity for classes of workers with disadvantages in the workplace. The Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind in England offered training in piano tuning to the blind, as did the New England Conservatory for women.

Franz Josef Haydn's compositions have more nicknames than those of any other composer in the history of music. It's no wonder when you realize that he wrote at least 22 symphonies in D major.







To the best of my knowledge, the "trivia" items are true, but I can't guarantee it.