They
all failed, of course. The new musicians and new music never materialized. The reasons are as murky and complex
as with QWERTY. Some people suggested it was a conspiracy of piano teachers; others that many projects were perhaps
too ambitious – redesigning not just the piano, but the entire musical notation, or even the tuning (akin perhaps to a typewriter with a new keyboard that’d also propose
a new alphabet).
Also, it’s always been hard to build prototypes and – in the pre-radio and pre-internet days – to travel with them. Many inventors, just like Dvorak, were also perhaps not the best marketers, believing that the abstract supremacy of their layout should be enough for the market to embrace it. And, in recent years, there have also simply been fewer piano players, just as there have been fewer professional typists.
Despite chances to reboot – many assumed synthesizers will undo the damage, just like we hoped to finally ditch QWERTY when an entire generation sat down to first computers – we still use the same piano keyboard. Mirroring typing, the only room for innovation is size, materials, and software. The layout might as well have been cast in stone.