Toward a Historically Faithful Performance of the Piano Works of Anton´Inqweˇrt´Y

Toward a historically faithful performance of the piano works of Anton´ınQweˇrt´y

William Gunther Brian Kell Google, Inc. Google, Inc. [email protected] [email protected]

SIGBOVIK ’18 Carnegie Mellon University April −2, 2018

Concrete The great Czech composer Anton´ın Dvoˇrák (1841–1904) wrote many pieces for the piano, including the famous Humoresque No. 7 in G-flat Ma- jor [2]. Unfortunately, typical performances of these works today sound nothing like what the composer intended because most modern pianos are configured with a different keyboard layout. Through painstaking histor- ical research, we have reconstructed the original Dvoˇrák piano keyboard layout. We have applied this discovery by transposing the Humoresque so that it is playable on a modern piano, enabling the first historically faithful performance of this piece in over a century.

92 Figure 1: A Dvorak keyboard with the original or “classic” layout [3]. There are several variants of the Dvorak layout, but Dvoˇrákwas a classical composer, so this is almost certainly the one he used. Furthermore, this layout has 44 white keys (not counting the spacebar, which is clearly used only for rests). That is exactly half of the number of keys on a piano. Thus we may confidently conclude that the left half of Dvoˇrák’s piano layout was just these 44 keys, while the right half was the same keys again with the Shift key held down.

Figure 2: A modern QWERTY keyboard with the United States layout [4]. This layout has 47 white keys (not counting the spacebar), but obviouslythree of them are useless: nobody really needs the characters ‘~]}\| [1]. This leaves 44 keys in the same positions as the keys of the Dvorak keyboard, which can then be mapped to the piano in the same way.

93 7 1 0 6 = , y g l a e d t - q k m v # ) % $ * , P F R & E I H S ; K B W 1 1 ! 5 3 9 2 4 8 ? . p f c r / o u i h n s ’ j x b w z /4 ( ” /c @ + : . Y G C L A O U D T N /2 Q J X M V Z

Figure 3: The reconstructed Dvoˇr´akkeyboard layout. Although it looks strange to modern eyes, this keyboard would have looked familiar to Anton´ın Dvoˇr´akin 1894 and is unquestionably the layout for which he composed the Humoresques and his other piano works. 3 94

2 5 7 0 = w t u p a d h k ’ x v m . @ $ ˆ ( W R Y O D G J : Z V N < { 1 3 4 6 8 9 - q e r y i o [ s f g j l ; z c b n , / ! # % & * ) + Q E T U I P A S F H K L ” X C B M > ?

Figure 4: The familiar Qweˇrtýkeyboard layout, used by most modern pianos. The mapping from keys of the Dvoˇrákkeyboard 1 1 to those of the Qweˇrtýkeyboard is in most cases obvious. The main difficulty lies in the keys /4, /c, and /2 on the Dvoˇrák 1 keyboard, which do not appear on the Qweˇrtýkeyboard. While a modern Qweˇrtýpiano cannot reproduce the note /4 exactly, 1 we can come close by playing 1, /, and 4 simultaneously. Likewise, we can approximate /cand /2 with the chords c, / and 1, /, 2 ,respectively. { } { }

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104 References

[1] Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style, version 3.1. Hartley & Marks, 2005. For example, Bringhurst dismisses the tilde key: “In the eyes of ISO and Unicode, the swung dash found on computer keyboards is an ascii tilde—a character . . . meaningless to typographers.” He describes the backslash as “an unsolicited gift of the computer keyboard” with “no accepted function in typography.” And of the pipe character, he writes, “Despite . . . its presence on the standard ASCII keyboard, the pipe has no function in typography. This is another key, and another slot in the font, that begs to be reassigned to something typographically useful.” [2] Dvoˇr´ak, Anton´ın. Humoresque No. 7 in G-ﬂat Major, Op. 101, S. 123. N. Simrock, London, 1894. Reprinted in Humoresques & Other Works for Solo Piano, Dover Publications, 1994. [3] Optikos at English Wikipedia. File:KB DSKtypewriter.svg. February 10, 2010. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB DSKtypewriter.svg. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and the GNU Free Documentation License.

[4] Wikimedia Commons contributors (Denelson83, Bodigami, Bencher- lite, and Yes0song). File:KB United States.svg. December 27, 2010. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB United States.svg. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Thanks to William Lovas for his piano performance during our presentation at the SIGBOVIK conference.

105 CONFIDENTIAL COMMITTEE MATERIALS SIGBOVIK 2018 Paper Review Paper 21: Toward a historically faithful performance of the piano works of Anton´ın Qwert˘ y´

Dr. Tom Murphy VII Ph.D. Rating: BPM Conﬁdence: Fortissimo

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