15 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 Dvoˇr´ak (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 Dvoˇr´ak 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. 1 92 Figure 1: A Dvorak keyboard with the original or “classic” layout [3]. There are several variants of the Dvorak layout, but Dvoˇr´akwas 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 Dvoˇr´ak’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. 2 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 Qweˇrt´ykeyboard layout, used by most modern pianos. The mapping from keys of the Dvoˇr´akkeyboard 1 1 to those of the Qweˇrt´ykeyboard is in most cases obvious. The main difficulty lies in the keys /4, /c, and /2 on the Dvoˇr´ak 1 keyboard, which do not appear on the Qweˇrt´ykeyboard. While a modern Qweˇrt´ypiano cannot reproduce the note /4 exactly, 1 we can come close by playing 1, /, and 4 simultaneously. 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