Yes, the traditional piano is well established and thus, teachers keep teaching and perpetuating its disadvantages. Somewhere I read a list of advantages the Janko Kbd enjoys over the traditional piano Kbd. I mean, if A. Rubinstein and F. Liszt OK'd the Janko Kbd, there must be something great about it. The only bad thing is that one needs to relearn it.
Here are some more Info about, I just found:
Demonstration of the advantages of the Jankó Keyboard by Paul Vandervoort, considered to be the world's foremost player of the device. Program: "Kitten on the Keys" by Zez Confrey; explanation of the Janko note arrangement and advantages over a standard keyboard; demonstration of musical passages which are difficult or impossible to play on a standard keyboard; "C#-Major Prelude" from the Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach; Boogie-woogie rendition of "Bye Bye Blackbird".
It is a development of the chromatic fingerboard and had numerous technical advantages when it comes to playing: The fingering is the same for all tonalities, the hand position is more natural and the span for playing intervals is larger than on standard fingerboards. In addition, it is possible to play glissandi in all tonalities and in chords.
The advantage of the Janko keyboard is that it allows the pianist to span a wider range of notes with each hand. The keys are much smaller than on an ordinary keyboard, and stacked in tiers, and the keys arranged so that a scale is arranged over a much shorter distance than on the conventional keyboard. Janko demonstrated the keyboard himself, giving recitals of works by major composers of the 19th Century. His keyboard was, of course, developed from similar ones by earlier inventors going back to the early 18th Century.
On the Janko keyboard tenths, and twelfths, can easily be produced by reaching a finger to the keyboard above or below that on which the hand is traveling. Arpeggios through the whole compass of the keyboard can be executed with a sweep of the wrist, which on the ordinary keyboard would hardly cover two octaves. Indeed, with the Jankó keyboard, the hand and arm of the player can always remain in their natural position, because to sound an octave requires only the stretch of the hand equal to the sounding of the sixth on the ordinary keyboard.
It is difficult to realize the manifold possibilities which this keyboard opens up for the composer and performer. Entirely new music can be written by composers, containing chords, runs and arpeggios, utterly impossible to execute on the ordinary keyboard, and thus does the Jankó keyboard make the piano, what it has often been called, a veritable "house orchestra". It is not nearly so difficult for the student to master the technique of the Jankó, as to become efficient on the present keyboard. This keyboard can be readily adjusted to any piano having the ordinary action.
Like all epoch-marking innovations, this great invention is treated with indifference and open opposition. That poetic performer on the piano, Chopin, refused to play on the Erard grand pianos containing the celebrated repetition action, because his fingers were used to the stiff percussion of the English action. Today, however, English makers of concert grand pianos use the Erard action which Chopin disdained!
The piano virtuoso and teachers of the present day are opposing the Jankó keyboard because its universal adoption would mean for them to forget the old and learn the new. The music publishers object to it, because their stock on hand would depreciate in value, as the Jankó keyboard naturally requires different fingering than that now printed with the published compositions.
Although the Jankó keyboard, in its present form, is thoroughly practical, and destined to inaugurate a new era for the piano industry, its universal success and adoption seem to be impaired by the appearance of the player piano, which enables the musical amateur to enjoy his own performance of the most difficult compositions with hardly any exertion on his part. It remains for a coming Titan of the pianoforte to lift the Jankó keyboard out of its obscurity and give it its deserved place in the concert hail, there to show to the executing amateur its wonderful possibilities.
Topic: Janko/6-6/Uniform/Bilinear Keyboards