About Historic Keyboards
Historic Keyboards is a global, ever-growing catalogue of surviving pianos, harpsichords, spinets and virginals — built to be browsed, not just searched.
Serious research on historic keyboard instruments already has excellent homes. MIMO (Musical Instrument Museums Online) documents instruments held by European museums. Clinkscale Online is the definitive scholarly register of pianos built before 1860. Boalch-Mould Online (BMO) — which we link to throughout this site — is where you go for deep, footnoted provenance on a specific instrument.
Historic Keyboards exists for a different moment: the curious pianist who wants to spend an afternoon discovering what's out there. We're not limited to one country, one era, or one instrument family — our catalogue spans pianos, harpsichords, spinets and virginals from collections and museums around the world, plotted on a single interactive map so you can see, at a glance, what survives near you or anywhere you're headed.
What you'll find here
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A growing archive of historic keyboard instruments, each with photographs and the story behind it
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A world map you can explore visually, instrument by instrument, country by country
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A starting point for the curious, with links out to BMO and other specialist archives when you want to go deeper
Mission
We're working toward a catalogue of instruments, adding one at a time, drawing on museum collections, private archives, and contributions from owners and institutions across the world. Every entry is added by hand, which is slower — but it's how we keep the collection accurate as it grows.
Our aim isn't to compete with the scale of institutional databases, but to make historic keyboard instruments visible and explorable to anyone with curiosity, not just specialists — one instrument, one photograph, one story at a time