(b Totis [now
Tata], 2 June 1856; d Constantinople, 17 March
1919). Hungarian musician
and engineer. A mathematician by training, he made a
study of the question of temperament (‘Über mehr als zwölfstufige
gleichschwebende Temperaturen’, Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft,
iii, 1901, pp.6–12). Possibly as a result of this, in 1882 he patented a
radical attempt to systematize the piano keyboard (retaining 12-note equal
temperament, however). Based on the premise that the hand can barely stretch
more than a 9th on the piano, and that all scales are fingered differently,
Janko's new keyboard had two interlocking ‘manuals’, with three touch-points
for each key lever, so that it appears to have six tiers of short, narrow keys
(see illustration). These six tiers constitute one
keyboard operating on the same set of strings; odd-numbered tiers produce a
whole-tone scale from C, even-numbered ones a whole-tone scale from C
. Accidentals are marked
with a black stripe. The advantage of this system is that all major scales are
fingered alike, as are all minor, and an octave span is only 13 cm instead of
the standard 18·5 cm, so widely spaced chords are possible. Huge arpeggios can
be negotiated with barely any arm movement, by moving the hand up or down the
tiers. The system is unique in that it compensates for the unequal lengths of
the fingers (see also Keyboard, §3).
Despite the keyboard touch being rather stiff, the invention met with some enthusiasm, notably from the American Alfred Dolge. A short-lived Paul von Janko Conservatory was established in New York about 1891, and a Janko Society was founded in Vienna in 1905. A number of piano makers in Austria, Germany and the USA made Janko keyboards and Paul Perzina even produced a reversible double keyboard – ‘standard’ on one side, ‘Janko’ on the other. E.K. Winkler in the Musical Courier (1891) blandly declared that ‘On the old keyboard … the hand is forced to defy its anatomical construction. We hear of a great many instruments and devices to train and shape the fingers and wrists in opposition to what nature has intended. … It seems to be somewhat wiser trying to overcome the difficulties in a different way – namely, by changing the keyboard to suit the hands’. The Janko keyboard never caught on, because few were prepared to relearn their repertory on a strange keyboard with totally new fingering. It was a far more radical change for the pianist than, for example, for the clarinettist to change to the Boehm system.
MGG1 (H.H. Dräger)
P. von Janko: Eine neue Klaviatur (Vienna, 1886)
A. Dolge: Pianos and their Makers (Covina, CA, 1911–13/R)
C. Ehrlich: The Piano: a History (London, 1976, 2/1990)
E.M. Good: Giraffes, Black Dragons and Other Pianos (Stanford, CA, 1982)
MARGARET CRANMER