Ubiquity and Versatility
One of the aspects of being a collaborative pianist is playing accompaniments that are a reduction from another setting. In other words, the part that supports the soloist could have been written for orchestra, or organ, or a rock band, yet often the practical task of accompanying musicians in performance falls to the piano. Why is that?
As a preface, accompaniments are often played by 1 person as a matter of economy. Most performers can’t afford to pay for multiple musicians to rehearse and perform a single song. Even when the funds are available, partnering with just 1 other musician can simplify the coordination and create a bond of trust. And in some situations, such as organized festivals and small venues, it’s most practical to have just 1 kind of instrument accompany. So now that we know why only 1 instrument is often used, why does it usually fall to the piano?
Ubiquity (“the fact that something or someone seems to be everywhere”) has a lot to do with it. Pianos have infiltrated every level of our society, starting with a hostile takeover from the harpsichord in the 1700s and continuing through the golden age of piano construction in the early 1900s. For a while, it seemed that every classroom, every church, every public forum, and even every home had a piano. While not as common today, it’s still likely that you’ll find a piano of some type at a performance venue, school, and house of worship. This ubiquity contributed to the wide spread of piano education, a trend which still continues today. There are so many people who play the piano, so more people choose reductions for piano, so more people learn how to play…
Arguably the driving factor behind ubiquity is versatility. To imitate other instruments, you need an instrument with the ability to play multiple notes at once, a large range in pitch, the ability to hold or play rapidly, easy variation in dynamics (volume), and something capable of variation in tone color. There is no western acoustic instrument which matches these characteristics better than the piano. Even other keyboard instruments have significant drawbacks: the harpsichord couldn’t easily change volume; the clavichord didn’t have sufficient projection for the concert hall; and the organ was too expensive and large to become commonplace. Some of these issues were solved after the advent of amplified music in the mid-20th century, but by then the piano had already become ascendant in popularity. Even today, when advanced electronic music has made sequenced and sampled sounds extremely prolific, and brought the sounds of the world to a skilled keyboardist’s fingers, the specific sound of the piano is still in demand.
When Bartolomeo Cristofori first developed the pianoforte over 300 years ago, he likely didn’t foresee how prevalent it would become. His legacy of a keyboard action involving hammers and strings became the basis of an instrument with unmatched versatility, which made a playground for innumerable musicians to play, accompany, and compose. That kind of flexibility is what makes the piano so popular to this day.