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14-592: The Schoenhut Piano Company is an American manufacturer of toy pianos , dolls, and other wooden toys. It was founded in 1872 in Philadelphia as the A. Schoenhut Company by German immigrant and woodcarver Albert Schoenhut, who had begun making toy pianos during his youth in Germany. Both his father and grandfather had been toy and doll-makers. The company began with making toy pianos and soon expanded to other toys such as dolls , doll houses, and circus figures. By

28-625: A German toy-making family, introduced metal sounding bars to make the instrument more durable. One popular model used metal xylophone bars, struck by a wooden sphere thrown up by the piano key to make its sound. In 1866 he was offered employment in Philadelphia, United States, to repair German toy pianos which had been damaged in transit. In 1872 he established the Schoenhut Piano Company to manufacture toy pianos, diversifying into other instruments. By 1917, Schoenhut produced

42-415: A catalog showing 10 pages of upright and grand pianos of all shapes and sizes, with one page devoted to miniature piano stools alone. The models had nicknames beginning with "P", such as Packer, Padder, Papa and Poet. Keys were made of imitation ivory. By 1935, Schoenhut had produced over 40 styles and sizes of toy piano, with prices ranging from 50 cents to 25 dollars. In 1930, a toy piano metal rod design

56-488: A child's toy , the toy piano has been used in serious classical and contemporary musical contexts. The most famous example is the "Suite for Toy Piano" (1948) by John Cage . Other works in classical music for the instrument include " Ancient Voices of Children " by George Crumb and a number of pieces by Mauricio Kagel . "Streicher, Tasti et Bizarreries" (2019) by Bijan Olia uses toy piano and melodica in addition to piano quartet. Michelsonne Michelsonne Paris

70-628: The Tomy Toy Company offered the Tuneyville Player Piano using organ music, in which air blows through pipes. The child can play the keys manually or insert a plastic disk to play a recognizable tune. By the 1950s, the toy piano market was dominated by two main toy piano makers: Jaymar and Schoenhut, counterparts to the Steinway and Baldwin for adult pianos. Wooden keys and hammers were replaced by moulded plastic ones. In

84-594: The annual Toy Piano Festival, held in San Diego at the University of California, San Diego 's Geisel Library, features a collection of toy pianos, recordings of compositions, and live performance of existing and new works written for toy pianos. The Festival influenced the Library of Congress to designate, in 2001, a dedicated subject heading and call number, Toy Piano Scores: M175 T69. Though originally made as

98-557: The company's first products. Various models were produced beginning in 1872 until 1935. O Schoenhut, Inc. continued to make toy pianos into the twenty-first century. This article about a toy company is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Toy piano Toy pianos come in many shapes, from scale models of upright or grand pianos to toys which only resemble pianos in that they possess keys. Toy pianos are usually no more than 50 cm in width, and made out of wood or plastic . The first toy pianos were made in

112-524: The full chromatic scale , or diatonic scales in other keys . Typically, diatonic toy pianos have only eight keys and can play one octave. Other variants may have non-functioning black keys between every key (which would make it appear to play the quarter tones between E/F and B/C), but they either do not play, play the same notes as an adjacent white key, or play a special sound effect. Some toy pianos cost hundreds of dollars. Early toy pianos used glass bars to produce their sound, but Albert Schoenhut, son of

126-677: The late 1970s, Schoenhut was acquired by Jaymar, although the two retained their distinct identities. Jaymar/Schoenhut experienced difficulty during the recession of the 1980s, folding and eventually re-emerging as the Schoenhut Piano Company in 1997. Today, Schoenhut Piano Company is still the leading manufacturer, with other toy piano manufacturers: Hering from Brazil, Zeada from China, and New Classic Toys from Netherlands. From 1939 to 1970, Victor Michel improved toy-piano conception. Michelsonne French toy-pianos are known for their uniquely distinctive sound. Launched in 2000,

140-464: The mid-19th century and were typically uprights, although many toy pianos made today are models of grands. Rather than hammers hitting strings as on a standard piano, the toy piano sounds by way of hammers hitting metal bars or rods which are fixed at one end. The hammers are connected to the keys by a mechanism similar to that which drives celestas . Toy pianos ostensibly use the same musical scale as full size pianos, although their tuning in all but

154-421: The most expensive models is usually very approximate. Similarly, the pitch to which they are tuned is rarely close to the standard of 440 Hz for the A above middle C . A typical toy piano will have a range of one to three octaves . The cheapest models may not have black keys, or the black keys may be painted on. This means they can play a fixed diatonic scale (or an approximately tuned version of it), but not

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168-581: The time of Albert Schoenhut's death in 1912, Schoenhut Piano Company had grown to become the largest toy company in the United States, and the first to export its products to Germany. The Great Depression forced the company into bankruptcy in 1935, but a year later Otto Schoenhut opened a new company called O. Schoenhut, Inc., continuing the legacy. It was purchased in the 1980s by the Trinca family. Schoenhut toy pianos, designed by Albert Schoenhut, were

182-468: Was a French brand of toy piano manufactured from 1939 to 1970, and created by Victor Michel (1904–1983). They were named "bell-tone pianos" on their publicity brochure. They became very rare to find. In 1970, a fire destroyed their factory at 7 rue Duvergier in Paris 75019 , and the patents were sold to Bontempi . Bontempi has continued building the same models for a 4-year-old audience. However, there are

196-469: Was patented by Alice Violet Bennett. During the 1950s, J. Chein & Company of Burlington, NJ manufactured the PianoLodeon, a child's piano remarkable for the fact that it operated by a mechanism closely related to an actual player piano. The child could play the keys or let a small piano roll take over, the metal rods being struck by hammers propelled by a vacuum driven by a blower. In the 1960s,

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