The first meeting with the Jankó piano

My background is playing jazz drums and bass guitar. Later I also taught myself to play the guitar. Only many years later, inspired by bands like GoGo Penguin, I started learning the piano. From the guitar I was used to be able to simply move chord shapes to the left or right to transpose them and thus, playing the same song in different keys was not really a problem. On the piano it turned out to be much more difficult because its layout strongly favors the key of C major and every key has its own chord shapes and scale fingerings. I thought this fact made the learning process unnecessarily complicated. So I was wondering why the piano layout is the way it is and whether there exist more logical layouts that fit better to the symmetry of western music theory.

After a quick Google search I stumbled upon the Jankó piano. I was immediately fascinated. I wanted to know as much as possible about this, in my eyes, totally logical layout and find out whether it is produced anywhere.

The first website I found was by Paul Vandervoort, where he sells his Daskin piano, an adaption of the Jankó piano to a midi keyboard. Of course, I immediately wanted to buy one, so I sent him an e-mail. He replied in a very kind mail that unfortunately, they are currently not available, but he sent me a list of contacts of people who are active in the Jankó scene. The two most important ones for me were the Jankó Facebook group and Peter Reinert.

Peter Reinert turned out to be a piano maker both for classical and Jankó pianos. He is one of the very few ones (if not the only one) who built and sells an acoustic Jankó piano.

That time I was visiting my family and Peter Reinert's shop was 3 hours car drive away. My vacations were coming to an end so it seemed a bit far away and I thought 'Okay, one day I'll visit him and try out his Jankó piano'. The next morning my girlfriend woke me up very early and told me that we are going somewhere but she wouldn't tell me where. I had to pack my swimming shorts (they turned out to be a smart trick for confusing me) and off we went. Three hours later we were standing in front of Peter Reinert's shop and I couldn't believe my eyes - what an incredible gift. She even made sure that we would meet Peter personally. He turned out to be a very kind and creative man and we had a very interesting conversation about the Jankó piano scene. He then kindly invited me to try out his acoustic Jankó piano.

After having the idea of an isomorphic layout only in my head, it was an amazing experience to be able to actually play it. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to it, in fact it felt pretty intuitive. So intuitive that I started improvising, forgetting any feeling of time.

This experience would be the beginning of a long and exciting journey.