[Harold G]

what was the piano called before piano?

[HaphazardJoy]

The full name of the piano is the pianoforte (alternately fortepiano), or even more elaborately, the gravicèmbalo col piano e forte, or harpsichord with soft and loud [sounds]. That full italian explanation isn't exactly correct either though since the harpsichord was a stringed instrument producing sounds by plucking the strings via a keyboad, and the modern piano is a percussion instrument where sound is produced by soft hammer striking the strings.

[rinoa_tonks]

The pianoforte came before the piano but it was a different instrument in the way that I viola and I violin are similar but not the same. To my knowledge the piano has always been called a piano.

[cooky1073]

Piano, stringed keyboard musical instrument, derived from the harpsichord and the clavichord. Also called the pianoforte, it differs from its predecessors principally in the introduction of a hammer-and-lever action that allows the player to modify the intensity of sound by the stronger or weaker touch of the fingers. For this reason the earliest known model (1709) was called a gravicembalo col pian e forte (Italian for “harpsichord with soft and loud”). It was built by Bartolomeo Cristofori, a harpsichord maker of Florence, Italy, who is generally credited with inventing the piano. Two of his pianos still exist. The case of one, dated 1720, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the other, dated 1726, is in a museum in Leipzig, Germany.

www.pianorestoring.com

[Gregory B]

People refer to it as "Some big box with metal strings plus makes a hell-of-a-lot of noise when i try to sleep inside of it" kind of contraction.

[better]

I am amazed not on the knowledge of the people on the forum but on the questions that they are putting here. Tell me how a person would ever know what it is called before the Piano.

[AllieK]

Piano, i really don't know what was it called first?

[jenilo]

I think Piano was called Piano only.

[silvister]

the name piano is an abbreviation of Cristofori's original name for the instrument: piano et forte or soft and loud.