Talk:Piano

Piano Duo

There are no articles on Piano duo or on Piano duet (ie music for two pianos) and hardly any discussion in the various piano articles, although there are categories for both. Am I overlooking something obvious? Sparafucil (talk) 08:59, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

You mean other than the circumstance that this article is about the instrument? (The best and easiest way to get a "piano duet" article is to write it yourself--or at least start it yourself. I think duet is probably a better term because 1) a piano trio is not a work for three pianos, but a work for piano, violin, and cello and 2) Grove has a piano duet article and no piano duo article. Bear in mind that a piano duet may involve two pianos or one piano played by two persons simultaneously.) TheScotch (talk) 10:54, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Picture

Somehow I doubt that the first main picture is truly free. The description admits that it was scanned, which either means it was taken from an old photo (back in the days when people took film photos), or a book. In the latter case, it isn't the uploader's decision to release it to PD, and in the former... well, I highly doubt it was that. Additionally, I don't particularly like it. ALTON .ıl 06:40, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, I've nominated it for deletion. Discuss here. ALTON .ıl 06:30, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Infobox

I removed the infobox because in my view it added absolutely nothing to the article, except potential problems. I found the image unhelpful (the pipe organ rather dominates the picture). The "classification" of the piano for an infobox will be necessarily over-simplistic, since its classification depends on the context in which it is used - it's a keyboard string instrument that you strike ("for some reason it was classified as percussion" wrote one editor changing it from "percussion" to "string" - although percussion is how Stravinsky and Bartok thought of it). The relationship of the synthesizer to the piano seems to me to be distant enough to be questionable for an infobox. --RobertG ♬ talk 09:35, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

I have just now edited the infobox rather than removing it because the image now seems more suitable than the previous one, and the classification less questionably put. The list of related instruments was debatable, and this requires somewhat nuanced presentation to be meaningful, so I removed it. I also removed the lists of related articles: I cannot imagine likely circumstances where a reader would need to go to list of piano makers (which is a bald list of names), piano acoustics, piano key frequencies nor equal temperament on first landing at this article - they are all linked lower down anyway. I still think the infobox adds nothing to the article's lead, but there I may be in a minority. --RobertG ♬ talk 10:19, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

68.190.224.173 (talk) 20:26, 2 November 2008 (UTC) i think that the piano deserves a infobox

Square piano action diagrams

I just noticed these were included in the article since January. I think they're at least kind of inappropriately positioned, which seems fairly clear in the image description pages and from the captions at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Square_piano That particular Broadwood action, from an 1827 piano, was called the "grand square action" because of the then newly patented addition of the backcheck in the double action used in squares - their grands had single actions and, I think, always had backchecks. The Erard drawing, from an 1830s pamphlet, is of the "double pilot" action they used starting in the 1790s - what Harding called "Zumpe's second action" in The Piano-Forte (1978) - not of the 1821 repetition action for grands. It doesn't have escapement!

They're appropriate to an expanded square piano article but I don't think they should be included here. I do think there needs to be some indication about the localized manufacturing statistics of the different types of pianos in the development section, but I don't know any succinct reference to cite. - Mireut (talk) 15:29, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Other Pianos

I was wondering if we could put a comment regarding the Bosendorfer 290 imperial grand, which has a full 8 octaves, giving it 9 extra subbass notes. Composers such as Bartók, Debussy, Ravel and Busoni did compose works with these low notes in mind. Darknessfalls2 (talk) 14:33, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Horowitz quote

I removed this (which I have cleaned up somewhat):

Vladimir Horowitz said in a 1989 interview, "Back in Russia my family was very poor, they only could afford to buy me a an upright piano. When I played on the piano I could not produce the same touch or feeling when I was to play on a grand or even a baby grand. The first couple of times I played my waltzes the crowd did not like them. People said that there was to much staccato, and the pedal change was horrible. When I finally bought a baby grand I had to almost learn the piano again. The touch and sound was totally different. When I played waltzes or even movements I almost used no pedal. That is the difference for me."

Frankly, I doubt it. Horowitz entered the Moscow Conservatory at the age of nine. His first solo recital was in 1920, eight years later. Of course, if the quote comes from a reliable reference then I have no objections… --RobertG ♬ talk 06:48, 25 October 2008 (UTC)