The Portable Electronic Keyboard

Episode Notes

In this episode of The Secondhand Podcast, Bert Jerred talks about vintage electronic keyboards. When, how, and why did they come about? How do they represent cultural change in the realm of music-making?

The Emergence of the Electronic Keyboard

In a 2010 article in Music Trades called, “A Century of Premature Eulogies for the Piano,” I read about the introduction of the portable electronic keyboard and what its successes meant for the traditional piano industry. We’re talking about Casio – and soon thereafter, Yamaha – in the year 1980. Traditionalists’ responses tended toward the morose: that the eclipsing of one music-making technology by another heralded the end of an era.

Certainly, the piano as we know it holds the musician and listener alike with a firm, emotional grip. Of all the voices and features of my ’07 “Portatone” (acquired for $5 at a local thrift store, thank you very much!), the piano alone plays from high-resolution stereo samples, versus generated, simulated tones.

A similar retrospective, “Mozart Meets the Microchip,” written in ’88 by Robert Scott, provides a more enthusiastic survey of what had been called a digital revolution – alongside the rise of video games and personal computers. Again, the sudden popularity of electronic keyboards, synthesizers, and drum machines, catalyzes a form of culture-shock. In fact, many of the articles I’ve read on the subject present, alongside the consumer shake-up, anxious ambivalence about the relationships between instrument choice, performance context, and the cultural sanctity of musical traditions.

The artifacts featured in this episode are two Yamaha “PortaSound” keyboards from the 1980s – one purchased (again) at my local thrift store, the other rescued from a dumpster. In order to understand their significance and value, I read about (and, personally, recalled) their arrival; I also looked into the Yamaha backstory with a focus on the company’s musical instruments, which – in the U.S., where I live – goes back to the 1960s. The funny thing is, these devices are, for me, nostalgic the ways pianos were for others in the pre-portable days.

More current analyses, like Malcolm Doak’s 2017 article in emusician.com, entitled, “Are Mini-Keys a Deal Breaker?,” offer a fascinatingly detaile