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piano
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
piano
I.noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a piano/guitar etc lesson
▪ I'd just started classical guitar lessons.
grand piano
piano accordion
piano bar
piano stool
piano/cello etc practice
▪ I’ve got to do my cello practice.
piano/orchestral/organ/guitar etc accompaniment
▪ He plays folk music with guitar accompaniment.
piano/organ music
▪ I love listening to piano music.
player piano
upright piano
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
classical
▪ Franco had classical piano lessons for eight years until he was sixteen, and was self-taught on trumpet from seventeen.
electric
▪ Piano, electric piano, synthesizers, composer. b. London, 16 Sept 1938.
grand
▪ I remember the first gig I went to in Cleveland, the grand piano was two feet too short.
▪ Say they will move your grand piano any day and do it on a bicycle.
▪ We rated the Sovetskaya, the hotel with the grand pianos, which was encouraging.
▪ The essential design of a grand piano, apart from incremental technical advances, has not changed for more than a century.
▪ What business had coal-miners with grand pianos and champagne?
▪ Her house had a bathroom, and a rose garden, and a grand piano in the front room.
▪ We were entertained first by a pair of talented young men playing two grand pianos.
old
▪ An old piano was cracked in the corner.
▪ There is a battered old Steinway piano in the hotel downstairs, and I have had one or two goes on it.
▪ It was much bigger than the old piano in the classroom.
▪ The Verona instrument therefore contains the oldest Stein piano we know, if the remembered date of 1777 is correct.
▪ He also uses a modern reproduction piano, which is a shade safer than Linda Nicholson's refurbished old piano.
upright
▪ There was an upright piano in the far corner with a row of framed photographs on top.
▪ There was an upright piano and a piano bench.
▪ An upright piano stood against one wall, a row of framed photographs on top of it.
▪ So was the upright piano, that is, it would be when I finished paying for it.
▪ The room contained two hard chairs, a desk and an upright piano.
■ NOUN
accompaniment
▪ We discussed the idea of Jean-Claude setting them to piano accompaniment.
▪ A piano accompaniment being captured in a London recording studio of 1904.
▪ She had a lovely sweet voice, and always had to sing without piano accompaniment, for she alone knew the songs.
accordion
▪ Noel Bridgeman's piano accordion takes over where Dooley Wilson's piano left off, and adds just the right ingredient.
▪ I've been playing the piano and the piano accordion for about 60 years.
▪ Normally a mouth organ or a piano accordion accompanies the music and plays the melody.
bar
▪ There is a bar, lounge, restaurant and late-night piano bar.
▪ A piano bar is open twice a week.
▪ Or, if preferred, have a snack in the piano bar.
▪ This quality hotel has a piano bar, and the bedrooms are tastefully appointed.
▪ A weekly gala dinner is held with folk music, and a piano bar provides music three times a week.
▪ A piano bar operates several times a week in high season.
▪ A piano bar is open once a week and in front of the hotel is a pool and sun terrace.
▪ There is an exclusive beach club, pool, tennis courts, restaurant, piano bar, nightclub, and beauty centre.
concerto
▪ In 1773 Mozart also wrote his first wholly original piano concerto.
▪ Geneva will hear all his piano concertos in seven concerts.
▪ He is a most distinguished Mozartian, and this year is recording all 27 of the piano concertos for Chandos Records.
▪ A Rachmaninov piano concerto swept through the flat, making the problem of Ruth trivial and vague.
▪ The six finalists then played two piano concertos each with the Fort Worth Symphony.
▪ In 1776 Mozart turned his attention to the piano concerto, writing four very different works.
lesson
▪ The never-say-die 69 year-old widower is also taking piano lessons for the first time.
▪ Why was Elinor in charge of Maisie's piano lessons?
▪ I have piano lessons at school, but I can't play like you.
▪ At four o'clock he cycled to his piano lesson with Mr Gordon.
▪ Everything else was subordinated to it; piano lessons ceased, singing ones began.
▪ She now gave piano lessons, on a strictly limited basis, to suitable children.
▪ Maisie looked, as always, subtly different after her piano lesson.
▪ An unmusical person will be unable to progress beyond a certain point, nomatterhow many piano lessons he has.
music
▪ Some piano music tinkles gently in the background, a black Armani shirt clings softly to his chest.
▪ Some restaurants in the old town feature musical entertainment while you are dining, including fado and piano music.
▪ The effect of the sustaining pedal must always be most carefully taken into consideration when transcribing piano music.
▪ Excellent facilities include delightful restaurant and Clock bar with live piano music nightly.
▪ The following passages, taken from well-known or easily obtainable piano music, are suggested as exercises in scoring for string orchestra.
▪ In any case, he seemed to have lost interest in the piano music.
▪ Now we can choose from several complete sets of his piano music, and here is another.
stool
▪ But Maria was already back up to the piano stool.
teacher
▪ Danielle still plays, but the only money she makes from her talent is as a piano teacher in London.
▪ His new piano teacher, Mr Ruthling, was an actor on the side.
■ VERB
buy
▪ And so the day we bought the piano was memorable for many reasons.
▪ I might even have been able to buy the piano.
▪ But in 1783 he bought a piano by Walter, with a check.
▪ Many more of our customers now buy a piano for themselves.
hear
▪ Geneva will hear all his piano concertos in seven concerts.
▪ I heard his piano, so I assume he heard mine.
learn
▪ There's hundreds of variations you can come up with, but one thing that influenced me was learning piano in school.
▪ If you want to learn to play the piano or act, now is the time to put in the work.
▪ It was no different from learning the piano or the ukelele; it just needed practice.
▪ You would not create and focus the energy to quit smoking, diet successfully learn the piano, or revitalize a relationship.
▪ The girls and Branwell were learning to play the piano, and Branwell played the music in church.
▪ His ability to learn the piano came from his ancestors.
▪ That is one reason why I've just started to learn the piano.
▪ She made up for the difficulty by striking their fingers with a ruler when they erred, especially when learning the piano.
play
▪ The managers of the planning section talk loudly, because some one next door is playing the piano.
▪ You need more power to play the piano, but the harpsichord is about precision.
▪ When Mozart played a piano by Stein in 1777, it did not jangle, even though there was no check.
▪ We cook dinner while she plays the piano or reads the newspaper after work.
▪ Incidentally Ciccolini also plays several works for piano 4 hands, partnering himself by re-recording!
▪ If you want to learn to play the piano or act, now is the time to put in the work.
▪ One played the piano and the other the violin and they were quite celebrated.
▪ She played the piano for an hour every Thursday at a Northeast Austin retirement home.
sing
▪ Anne was playing the piano, and singing quietly to herself.
▪ My ideal night would be a group of friends sitting around the piano and singing.
▪ Everything else was subordinated to it; piano lessons ceased, singing ones began.
▪ And afterwards, she played the piano again and sang again.
▪ She would sit at the piano and sing.
▪ She had never sung ragtime on stage, she had always leaned against the piano and sung to Charlie.
▪ Mrs Lark played the piano and the children sang.
sit
▪ Instead of having a fit, it jumped up and sat on the piano, listening to the same music with great interest.
▪ One of the girls sat down at the piano.
▪ As well as speaking three languages, Danielle could listen to a tune, then sit at the piano and play it note perfect.
▪ You can sit down at the piano and play from this book.
▪ We sat round the piano with the candles in front of our music stands and played one of the trios we know best.
▪ Now; after the concerts, she and Edwin would sit at the piano, playing by ear what they had heard.
▪ She would sit at the piano and sing.
start
▪ Barron started on piano at twelve, studying with a sister of pianist Ray Bryant.
▪ She went in the house and started playing the piano.
▪ That is one reason why I've just started to learn the piano.
▪ My mum and dad bought me a piano when I started having piano lessons at the age of four and three quarters.
study
▪ Brackeen studied violin and piano in his youth.
▪ Uncle Vernon had paid for her to study the piano.
▪ Beck studied the piano at school but was largely self-taught.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
honky-tonk music/piano
mezzo forte/piano etc
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And, in any case, who can afford two pianos?
▪ It was just a man, a piano and some powerful lyrics.
▪ So he played gently enough not to make the hammers of Stein's pianos bounce up and hit the strings again.
▪ The startling image of a piano encircled by a wedding ring exemplifies the notion of affinities developed by Magritte from the 1930s.
▪ The Stick has got the same range as the piano and I can jump four octaves with one hand.
▪ There's hundreds of variations you can come up with, but one thing that influenced me was learning piano in school.
▪ There was an upright piano and a piano bench.
▪ To learn Chopin, I had been listening for more than three years to the piano of Tamas Vasary.
II.adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
bar
▪ When I graduated from music college, I began working at piano bars, while continuing to write at the same time.
bench
▪ Mavis said, sitting at the piano bench.
▪ There was an upright piano and a piano bench.
▪ Monk shares the piano bench with Horace Silver, a most extraordinary moment in jazz history.
▪ But she was advertising from the piano bench and specializing in private sessions to augment her income after her musical workday.
▪ The tea tray landed on the piano bench, and I set the empty Brown Betty pot teetering on the piano keys.
▪ We got five Little Flock hymnals out of the piano bench and picked out two songs.
▪ When she tires, she nods to her sister, who slides on to the piano bench next to her.
▪ Her sister plays until she can no more, and then another woman glides across the room and on to the piano bench.
lesson
▪ Individual singing lessons are also available, and a limited number of pupils can receive piano lessons at School.
▪ When he began taking piano lessons and identifying himself as a musician, I bought song sheets and music books for him.
▪ She listened, nodded, and then told me very shyly that all her life she had wanted to take piano lessons.
▪ Though the whole family sang, he prospered during the piano lessons he received as a birthday present at age 6.
▪ Wilson began piano lessons at age 9 and studied the standard classical repertoire of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.
▪ Maybe if I had been sent to piano lessons instead of being sent out to play, I'd see things different.
▪ The children, she said, had piano lessons.
music
▪ The apparatus included a car that kept rolling in circles, an enormous block of ice and taped Chopin piano music.
▪ Live piano music ensures a festive feeling.
▪ When piano music joins the party, white-gloved hands dance over piano keys until both are lost in a swirl of color.
player
▪ He was a dancer, a piano player, and could mix in any society.
▪ But they are like the piano player at a bordello, always playing around the action, but never getting very close.
▪ She sang, drank Southern Comfort and argued with the piano player.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
mezzo forte/piano etc
Related phrases:
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Piano

Piano \Pi*a"no\, a. & adv. [It., even, smooth, soft, fr. L. planus even, level.] (Mus.) Soft; -- a direction to the performer to execute a certain passage softly, and with diminished volume of tone. (Abbrev. p.)

Piano

Piano \Pi*an"o\, Pianoforte \Pi*an"o*for`te\, n. [It. piano soft (fr. L. planus even, smooth; see Plain, a.) + It. forte strong, fr. L. fortis (see Fort).] (Mus.) A well-known musical instrument somewhat resembling the harpsichord, and consisting of a series of wires of graduated length, thickness, and tension, struck by hammers moved by keys.

Dumb piano. See Digitorium.

Grand piano. See under Grand.

Square piano, one with a horizontal frame and an oblong case.

Upright piano, one with an upright frame and vertical wires.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
piano

1803, from French piano (18c.), Italian piano, shortened forms of pianoforte (q.v.). As an adverb, "softly," in musical directions (superlative pianissimo), attested from 1680s. Piano wire attested from 1831.

Wiktionary
piano

a. 1 (context music English) soft, quiet. 2 In extended use; quiet, subdued. adv. (context music English) softly, as a musical direction (abbreviated to ''p.'' in sheet music). (from 17th c.) n. (context musical instruments English) A keyboard musical instrument, usually ranging over seven octaves, with white and black keys, played by pressing these keys, causing hammers to strike strings.

Related phrases:
WordNet
piano

adj. used chiefly as a direction or description in music; "the piano passages in the composition" [syn: soft] [ant: forte]

piano

  1. n. a stringed instrument that is played by depressing keys that cause hammers to strike tuned strings and produce sounds [syn: pianoforte, forte-piano]

  2. (music) low loudness [syn: pianissimo]

piano

adv. used as a direction in music; to be played relatively softly [syn: softly] [ant: forte]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Piano

The piano is a musical instrument played using a keyboard, which is a row of keys (small levers) that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands. Invented in about 1700 (the exact date is uncertain), the piano is widely employed in classical, jazz, traditional and popular music for solo and ensemble performances, accompaniment, and for composing and rehearsal. Although the piano is not portable and is often expensive, its versatility, wide range, ability to play chords, ability to play louder or softer, the large number of musicians trained in playing it and its ubiquity in performance venues and rehearsal spaces have made it one of the Western world's most familiar musical instruments.

An acoustic piano usually has a protective wooden case surrounding the soundboard and metal strings, and a row of 88 black and white keys (52 white keys for the notes of the C Major scale and 36 shorter black keys, which are higher than the white keys, for the " accidental" notes, which are the sharp and flat notes needed to play in all 12 keys). The strings are sounded when the keys are pressed or struck, and silenced by a damper when the keys are released. The notes can be sustained, even when the keys are released, by the use of pedals at the base of the instrument. Unlike two of the major keyboard instruments that preceded the piano, the pipe organ and the harpsichord, the weight or force with which a performer presses or strikes the keys changes the dynamics and tone of the instrument.

Pressing one or more keys on the piano's keyboard causes a padded hammer (often padded with firm felt) to strike the strings. The hammer rebounds from the strings, and the strings continue to vibrate at their resonant frequency. These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a soundboard that amplifies by more efficiently coupling the acoustic energy to the air. When the key is released, a damper stops the strings' vibration, ending the sound. Although an acoustic piano has strings, it is usually classified as a percussion instrument rather than as a stringed instrument, because the strings are struck rather than plucked (as with a harpsichord or spinet); in the Hornbostel-Sachs system of instrument classification, pianos are considered chordophones. With technological advances, Electric pianos (1929), electronic (1970s), and digital pianos (1980s) have also been developed. The electric piano became a popular instrument in the 1960s and 1970s genres of jazz fusion and rock music.

The word piano is a shortened form of pianoforte, the Italian term for the instrument, which in turn derives from gravicembalo col piano e forte and fortepiano. The Italian musical terms piano and forte indicate "soft" and "loud" respectively, in this context referring to the variations in volume produced in response to a pianist's touch on the keys: the greater the velocity of a key press, the greater the force of the hammer hitting the strings, and the louder the sound of the note produced.

Piano (TV series)

Piano is a 2001 South Korean television series starring Cho Jae-hyun, Go Soo, Kim Ha-neul and Jo In-sung. It aired on SBS from November 21, 2001 to January 10, 2002 on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 21:55 for 16 episodes.

A melodrama about a father's love for his children and a forbidden romance between stepsiblings, Piano received high ratings during its airing, as well as acting recognition at the year-end network awards ceremony.

Piano (Wynton Kelly album)

Piano, also released as Whisper Not, is an album by jazz pianist Wynton Kelly released on the Riverside label featuring performances by Kelly with Kenny Burrell, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones recorded in 1958.

Piano (disambiguation)

A piano is a keyboard music instrument.

Piano may also refer to:

  • piano, a dynamic direction in music, often appearing in sheet music as p, and indicating that the performer should play softly
  • Piano, Haute-Corse, a commune of the Haute-Corse département on the island of Corsica, France
  • Piano (play), a stage play based on the movie An unfinished piece for mechanical piano
  • Piano: The Melody of a Young Girl's Heart, a 2002 anime series
  • Pianos (club), a live music venue in New York City
  • Renzo Piano (born 1937), Italian architect
  • The Piano, a 1993 film starring Harvey Keitel, Holly Hunter and Sam Neill
  • The Piano (Herbie Hancock album), 1979
  • Piano (Wynton Kelly album), 1958
  • Piano (George Shearing album), 1989
  • "The Piano", a song from PJ Harvey's 2007 album White Chalk
  • "Piano", a song from Ariana Grande's 2013 album Yours Truly
  • "Piano", a 1918 poem by D. H. Lawrence
  • A Piano: The Collection, a 2006 five-disc box set by Tori Amos
  • Piano (TV series), a South Korean television drama
  • Grand Piano (Narada Anniversary Collection), a 1997 compilation release by Narada
  • Grand Piano (album), 1985 album by George Shearing
Piano (play)

Piano is a 1990 play by Trevor Griffiths, adapted from the 1977 film An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, itself based on the incomplete and untitled early Anton Chekhov play usually known as Platonov. It premiered at the Royal National Theatre.

Piano (George Shearing album)

Piano is a 1989 solo album by jazz pianist George Shearing.

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "piano".

They are like the colossal strides of approaching Fate, and this awfulness is twice raised to a higher power, first by a searching, syncopated phrase in the violins which hovers loweringly over them, and next by a succession of afrighted minor scales ascending crescendo and descending piano, the change in dynamics beginning abruptly as the crest of each terrifying wave is reached.

It may be apocryphal that some families dressed their piano legs in little skirts to avoid moral distress to visitors, but it is certainly true that chamber-pots came with a crocheted cover to serve as a baffle so that anyone passing without would not hear the unseemly tinkle of the person passing within.

The picture was framed in aspidistras like a nightmarish valentine and across the lower margin was the top of a piano.

By this time the piano was in position with the drapery and aspidistras on top.

When the chauffeur had gone, Georgie re-pinned the bunting over the open top of the piano, replaced the aspidistras and decamped.

The table was laid for thirty, but before dinner Madame Goudar seated herself at the piano, and sang a few airs with the voice of a siren, and with a confidence that did not astonish the other guests as they knew her, but which astonished me extremely, for her singing was really admirable.

He is conducted by the beadle and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, where he puts his hat on the piano and takes a Windsor-chair at the head of a long table formed of several short tables put together and ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots and glasses.

She hit the power button on her small stereo system in the bookcase, conjuring up a bluesy piano number.

As the Princess lifted the lid of her white piano in the ring while Mignon flounced her lacy skirts, Buffo, babbling obscenities, was loaded into a waiting cab, leaving the circus for the last time, as he had never done before, in the way that gentlemen did, by the front entrance.

Hank Busche, the pastor, and this flower sitting at the piano is my wife, Mary.

She was singing at the piano, but as soon as she saw me she rose and came to meet me.

Most of Cimarron had settled down for the night, except for the bang of the piano echoing from the saloon.

Romantic orchestra for the small ensemble, using pianos, cimbaloms and percussion instruments to create a simpler, more mechanistic sound.

All removed some piece of covering to unveil a moving hand coiling and uncoiling its snake-tail subcutaneously, its fingers moving softly as if it played their nerve-ends like a piano.

A four-piece combo of volunteer musicians were grouped around the big Steinway piano.