Things and Theories: The “Novelty Imperative” and Its Discontents

The pianoforte, the precursor of the modern piano, and a successor to the harpsichord, was the standard keyboard in the time of Bach and Scarlatti. Crisofori’s novel innovation was replacing the plucking mechanism of the harpsichord with a hammer. By about 1830, the pianoforte was eclipsed by the modern piano, which possesses greater size, volume, sonority, and control [9].

More than a few concert pianists have wondered why anyone would play Mozart on a pianoforte when they can play the same compositions on a Steinway. Yet, in recent years, distinguished performers have embraced the pianoforte, won impressive recording contracts, and delighted discerning audiences. In 2022, the celebrated keyboardist, Robert Levin, released seven hours of Mozart sonatas on the esteemed ECM label, performed on the very fortepiano that Mozart kept in his home.3 And Andras Schiff, ranked among the world’s finest living pianists [10], in 2012, recorded two versions of Beethoven’s popular Diabelli Variations, one on a modern Bechstein piano, built in 1921, and the other on a fortepiano made in 1820 by one of the “well over” the 100 piano makers in Vienna during Beethoven’s era.4

Schiff also has performed solo Bach compositions on a clavichord modeled on one built in the 1720s by a Swedish instrument maker, Jacob Specken. As Schiff explains in his own notes to this 2018 recording, “Unlike the majestic organ for the church or the brilliant harpsichord for the palaces, the clavichord is perfectly suited to the drawing room, for making music in one’s own home. Intimate and personal, it’s only meant to be heard by the player, or at most a handful of listeners. It’s a most gentle creature, ideal for playing alone, accompanying a singer, improvising or extemporizing freely.” 5

Enthusiasm for the fortepiano, and for so-called “authentic instruments” generally, is not limited to celebrity musicians or an expression of neo-Luddism either. An outpouring of scholarship on Cristofori and the engineering intricacies and cultural import of the fortepiano have deepened appreciation for the history of the piano and the technical accomplishments of overlooked innovators. As recently as 2006, Denzil Wraight, a historian and instrument maker, wrote, “It is perhaps surprising, considering the success of the pianoforte over the last 300 years, that we should still know so little about the musical character of the instrument” [11]. Gaps in knowledge have been closed; today, a 1711 account by Scipione Maffei, a contemporary of Cristofori, illuminates scholarly treatments of the birth of the fortepiano. An art critic and playwright, Maffei (1675–1755), praised the inventor’s achievement, writing, “If the value of an invention can be measured by its novelty and its difficulty, then the one we are about to describe is certainly not inferior to any others of our time” [12, p. 87]. Another contemporary, the composer, mathematician, and proficient musician Alessandro Marcello wrote of Cristofori’s fortepiano in 1724: “An instrument of great craftsmanship and value … Both for the perfection of the manufacture and the suavity of the harmony [this instrument] is considered a marvel, and it is the first of its kind to arrive in this territory” [12, p. 88].

Despite enthusiastic praise for Cristofori’s invention, the adoption of the fortepiano was sluggish. “Within the microcosm of Italian history, however, the Cristofori fortepiano was all but still born,” writes Eleanor Selfridge-Field in a landmark essay, “the invention of the fortepiano as intellectual history.” More than 30 years passed before composers began writing for the new keyboard, prompting Selfridge-Field to ask, “Why was its sound not found captivating? Why was its improved dynamic control not appreciated by a broad public?” [12, p. 81].6

Her answer sheds a fresh angle on a common riddle of innovation: that many seem to arise “ahead of their time,” in the sense that they do not solve a felt need and appear to anticipate future activities only dimly conceived or not at all. Such was the case with the fortepiano, a revolutionary keyboard instrument that, paradoxically, probably attracts more sustained interest today than 300 years ago. As Selfridge-Field explains:

Classical performers and listeners alike have an appetite for novel sounds, even when those sounds are resurrected from the discarded artifacts and compositions of centuries ago. Performers rank among a new generation of classicists who reside at universities, researching historical instruments and performance practices, unearthing forgotten composers, and painstakingly recreating forgotten compositions. As salaried professors, these performers need not survive on fees from concerts or recording sales. Jenny Soonjin Kim, for instance, is a specialist in fortepiano music by the neglected contemporary of Mozart, Leopold Kozeluch (1747–1818), credited with championing the fortepiano and for writing music “technically suited” to the instrument. Kim, a professor of music at the University of California at Irvine, has recorded every known sonata by Kozeluch on the fortepiano. In 2020, the Dutch label, Brilliant Classics, released her complete fortepiano recordings on 12 CDs, recorded by Kim between 2013 and 2018.7
“The apparent indifference of rank-and-file musicians to the invention of the fortepiano may well be because it was principally identified as an invention of [novelty] rather than importance. To all but those most closely associated with its actual construction, the fortepiano was in the first instance an invention for its own sake. There was no practical mandate for it use” [12, p. 83].
Kim’s achievement is not unmatched either. The Dutch classicist, Ronald Brautigam, has recorded all of Joseph Haydn’s keyboard music on a fortepiano—painstakingly made in 1992 by master instrument maker Paul McNulty in the manner of a leading maker of fortepianos some 200 years ago. The Haydn box, released in 2008 by the Swedish label, BIS Records, consists of more than 15 hours of recorded solo music. The notes to the set include photographs of the gorgeous fortepiano modeled on one of 700 made by Anton Walter (1752–1826), whose instruments were praised by both Mozart, who owned one, and Beethoven, who wanted one but could not afford it.8 Brautigam has also recorded multiple CDs of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, also performed on fortepiano.

A more dramatic revival occurred in the early 20th century with the harpsichord, which all but vanished as a classical instrument in the 19th century. Despite the embrace of Scarlatti’s sonatas by such major 20th-century pianists such as Marcelle Meyer, Ivo Pogorelich, and, recently, Angela Hewitt, Beatrice Long, Olivier Cave, and Lucas Debargue, there is growing interest in hearing the composer’s work on harpsichord, as originally performed. The late Scott Ross recorded all of Scarlatti’s 555 sonatas for the esteemed Erato label, which released the music in a set of 34 CDs! Fans of the legendary French harpsichordist, Blandine Verlet, cheered the release of her complete recordings for the Philips label in 2018: two of the 14 CDs were devoted to Scarlatti exclusively.

Scarlatti’s compositions continue to be performed, and remain popular with listeners, on the most advanced and sophisticated pianos of our time. Outstanding concert pianists, such as Angela Hewitt, whose performances of Bach and other Baroque masters are acclaimed the world over, do not perform on fortepiano because, bluntly (and I am paraphrasing here), the sound is simply not as beautiful or powerful. Richard Goode’s Beethoven, Alfred Brendel’s Bach, Leif Ove Andsnes’ Haydn, and Mitsuko Uchida’s Mozart are stunningly presented on modern pianos; nothing else will do.

Yet, alongside these celebrity concert pianists, older forms of performance thrill discerning audiences, partly because of the sheer novelty of hearing new sounds or imagining that these are the sounds that listeners (and performers) heard centuries ago. What does this coevolution of old and new technologies, and performance practices, tell us about the nature and structure of technological change?

As a subject of technological history, keyboards and musical instruments generally receive little attention from scholars, which is a puzzle, since, if we wish to disabuse people of the belief that technological change is linear or progressive, in the manner of Apple’s procession of iPhones, where each model gains additional capabilities, the revival of old instruments, and their persistence in the vocabulary of classical music, offers a vivid lesson about the possible lack of directionality in technological change.

Something more than “the shock of the old” (to borrow the title of a book by historian David Edgerton) is going on here. The primal pull of novelty works on both the creators and the receivers of the music mediated by technologies long ago surpassed in terms of the metrics of sonority, flexibility, and durability. In reviving venerable musical artifacts, novelty is the path to authenticity; for the performer, “the technology becomes his or her own material.” Thus, authenticity yields a passion for the revival of music once so obscure—so long ago left behind—as to produce a striking freshness through its resurrection [13].

The improbable example of the fortepiano, its resurgence among listeners, and the scholarly consideration it provokes demand a reconsideration of the causal role of novelty in technological change. Novelty is a critical driver of technological change, a sideshow that ignores the usual trump card of utility in favor of the human impulse, aptly described in a different context by Neil Postman, to spend our lives “amusing ourselves to death.”

The fortepiano represents a repudiation of technological change as a functional improvement, as the triumph of the enhanced, the improved, the more powerful, the more intensely engineered and complex.

Yet, the fortepiano represents, for the purposes of this essay, a repudiation of technological change as a functional improvement, as the triumph of the enhanced, the improved, the more powerful, the more intensely engineered, and complex. In the world of classical music at least, the best (as in most technically advanced) pianos are no longer the best suited to play in some situations and for some music. Here is a resounding reminder of the relevance of Leo Marx’s enduring question, “Does improved technology mean progress?”

Equally intriguing is the mystery of the source of the craving for novelty. Is this craving manufactured, or constructed, by economic forces, or is the desire for novelty primal, rooted in the human psyche, and the collective stirrings of communities, of humanity writ large? Is novelty an intra or extra technological driver? Should we treat novelty as a unique casual factor from outside technological systems that shapes, influences, and constrains its spread? Or is the pursuit of novelty not a root cause, but a secondary or downstream consequence?

In The Evolution of Technology [3], George Basalla puzzles over novelty as a source and consequence of technological change. He gives a nod to the enigmatic nature of novelty in civilization by observing, wryly, that “there is no consensus on how novelty emerges in the modern Western world.” He insists, by extrapolation, that “the diversity that characterizes material objects of any culture is proof that novelty is to be found wherever there are human beings.” He further posits that “the process of innovation involves the interplay of psychological and socioeconomic factors.” On the psychological dimension, Basalla presents the plausible view that novelty is a relative of “play,” and he distinguishes between humans as makers (homo faber) and humans as players (homo ludens).9 In this idiom, Basalla emphasizes the “role of fantasy” and “technological dreams” in the process of innovation. His aim is to supplement the “conventional depiction of the technologist as a rational, pragmatic” actor. “Economic necessity” is not “the motivating force” behind “the plethora technological novelties” seen in history, but rather many are “products of a fertile imagination,” outcomes of what might be described as the novelty imperative.10

The notion that hunger for novelty, whether arising from the individual or collective psyches of a society or civilization, is a persistent object of fascination and study for economists and historians. Some of the focus is on the internal dynamics of technoscientific advances or discoveries. A typical economic reflection, published in 2025 in the journal Nature Communications, asked whether “how we explore the world in search of novelties is key to understand the mechanisms that can lead to new discoveries.” In the context of internal dynamics—the how of technological artifacts and the way they are made as opposed to their effects on society and culture—“novel combinations of existing elements” provide a basic understanding of how patentable inventions arise, argues a team of mathematicians and computer scientists led by Gabriele Di Bona of Queen Mary University in London [14].

From the focus on novel combinations within artifacts, the bridge to external effects, at least in economic terms, is short. “Novelty plays an essential role in explaining economic change,” Maria-Isabel Encinar and Felix-Fernando Munoz, economists at the Autonomous University of Madrid, wrote in a 2006 paper [15]. In their view, novelty—defined by them as “the appearance of something that is intrinsically new”—is central to Joseph Schumpeter’s model of technological change. Drawing on a neglected insight from the seminal 20th-century economist, only first translated into English in 2005, Schumpeter held the view that “novelty is the true core of everything that must be accepted as indeterminate in the most profound sense… ”

For things that function well and show no signs of failure, compelling the purchase of a replacement often requires a novel successor product.

Historians of technology and culture also have studied the pursuit of novelty. In the 16th century, the historian Sara Warneke found that “religious turmoil, political uncertainty, and deep social tensions” infected English society with a high degree of insecurity and profound confusion. “Doomed to inconstancy, the English became a people addicted to novelty, to newfangledness, an addiction that many early modern Englishmen feared would result in the destruction of English society” [16].11

This dark view of novelty emerges periodically, especially when new innovations become profoundly disconnected from functional or utilitarian benefits. Hence, the emergence in recent decade of complaints about “baroque” technologies, which are unhinged from utility and best explained as instances of “planned obsolescence.” Perhaps, the most dramatic example of our contemporary “novelty addiction” can be found in the procession of iPhones, a novel offering each year, with some pleasing tweaks but no underlying advances.

In the domain of military weapons, superfluous tweaks abound. As far back as 1981, Mary Kaldor coined the term “baroque arsenal” and persuasively argued that weapon makers preferred the novel to the useful, the new to the improved. “Modern military technology is not advanced, it is decadent,” Kaldor wrote. Rather than responding to evident battlefield needs, producers of weapons technologies place increasing sales over enhancing military readiness. Kaldor labeled novelties for their own sake as “baroque”; in the same way, the “baroque” fortepiano strikes some musicians and listeners as a triumph of exotic technology over functionality.

The problem of “planned obsolescence” is an inherent challenge for creators of standard artifacts: make a product too reliable, and durable, and future sales can fall. The challenge is as basic as the razor and the razor blade; the more meaningful sales come downstream, when owners must maintain their systems, or replace them with a worn-out blade. For things that function well and show no signs of failure, compelling the purchase of a replacement often requires a novel successor product.

The temptation to regard novelty as a capitalist maneuver—a technological gambit designed to stimulate discontent with the status quo by promoting products and services that are merely new and novel and not functional enhancements—seems hard-wired into the system of for-profit, innovation. As Ben Tarnoff, co-author of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do, recently wrote: “The [tech] industry needed a dazzling new invention that could attract billions of consumers and send capital markets into a froth” [4, p. 30].

The endless procession of novelties—from social media to personal devices to exotic forms of medical technologies and enhancements—devours human attention and sustains the attack on attention. Critics increasingly target distraction as the consequence of immersion in novel technological environments. Alex Pang, a historian of technology who studied under Thomas Hughes and later moved into the corporate world as a consultant on digital life, was the first contemporary thinker to pinpoint this pathology in his 2013 book, The Distraction Addiction. In my own review of the book, I observed, “Every age has characteristic illnesses. The Victorians had nervous anxieties. The Roaring Twenties had psychological breakdowns. In our age, we cannot concentrate. We battle to pay attention. We suffer from an illness spawned by our immersion in digital worlds. We are the prisoners of our distractions.” Pang identified technical remedies for distraction borne of digital novelty, concluding presciently, “We needn’t accept the idea that a future in which computers… think with and for us is inevitable,” he writes, adding: “Don’t resign. Redesign” [17].

An early critic of the novelty imperative, Neil Postman, in his foreword to his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, recalled the debate between George Orwell and Aldous Huxley over which path might carry humanity into mental slavery. Orwell foresaw violent coercion as the means, while Huxley presented a sunnier scenario for the ruination of humanity, a path lubricated by insidious technological advances, sundered from functionality and oozing with baroque novelties. Postman explains: “As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited [published in 1958] the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account [hu]man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In [Orwell’s] 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure” [18].

If novelty is presented as an autonomous, ahistorical force—an independent tetherless driver of technological change—we may not wish to cheer. Realizing—in engineered form and artifactual reality—the very dreams, fantasies, and novel desires of our species may well lead to varieties of unintended consequences far beyond the capacities to mitigate and control. Even the most conservative conclusion that would call for viewing novel innovations—creatively destroying beloved tools and ways of living that humans have grown bored with or inexplicably suddenly found unbearably tedious—would seem the very definition of ennui. If not delivering an uncomfortable postmodern technohuman condition, inescapably the triumph of novelty in the imagination, creation, and experience of everyday things, spells an end of innocence, in ways that recall Leo Marx’s phrase, “the machine in the garden.”

Yet as our brief opening tour of “period instruments” as technological history illustrates, musical machines in the garden can spawn new forms of enchantment, and novel re-enactments of innocence lost, through the discerning embrace of once-discarded tools and techniques, may well animate our spirits in rewarding ways. As Thomas Forrest Kelly, Harvard University’s “early music” historian observes, “However one approaches this music – as part of a continuum of which we are lucky legatees, or as something newly rediscovered – the music itself continues to fascinate and enrich our world, a world already so full of music that the revival of these earlier repertories is itself something of a wonder” [5, p. 122].

The sense of wonder nourished by period instruments and so-called authentic performances practices is no mere anomaly, a treat alone for music lovers in search of novelty. This essay argues for the importance of old, unimproved tools, the advanced technologies of yesteryear. To echo the historian David Edgerton, I am making “a plea for a novel way of looking at the technological world, one which will change our minds about what that world has been like.” And “implicit” in so doing, I am making (again echoing Edgerton) “a plea for novel ways of thinking about the technological present” [19].

G. Pascal Zachary is a historian, formerly with Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. He is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997) and an editor of The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush (2022). He was a recipient of the NSF grant to document the rise of computer science in East Africa (2015–2017) and chronicled the human dimension of the creation of Microsoft’s Windows NT software program in his book, Showstopper (1994). Email: g.zachary@gmail.com.