Stuart Isacoff pianist, critic and teacher explores the history and evolution of the piano: how its sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. Isacoff takes the reader from Mozart, the first piano superstar playing his monumental concertos in Vienna s coffeehouses in front of audiences that would have numbered a mere 150 people to describing how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington to the innovations of Oscar Peterson and Glenn Gould and the eerie silences of jazz icon Thelonious Monk serving like portals to an alternate universe. A Natural History of the Piano distils a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. Throughout Isacoff draws on the insights of a range of living musicians, as well as providing photographs and paintings of the major composers and musicians he describes.