Piano

The piano is a musical instrument that is designed to be played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Professionals of Piano are referred as Pianist.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence.
~ Jacques Barzun

Ebony and ivory
live together in perfect harmony
side by side on my piano keyboard;
Oh lord, why don't we?
~ Paul McCartney

Quotes

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

Arranged alphabetically by author

B

• [T]he piano is the social instrument par excellence. It is drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
  • Jacques Barzun, Critical Questions (1984), p. 54

When you play, never mind who listens to you.
- Robert Schumann

(Advertisement, c.1920)

C

• Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!
  • Frédéric Chopin, as quoted in Jorgensen's Chopin and the Swedish Nightingale (2003), p. 26

F

• As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.”
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1964), p. 61

• Hannibal Lecter: I prefer the sound and feel of the harpsichord. More alive, the music arrives like experience, sudden and entire. The piano has the quality of a memory.
  • "Contorno" (2 July 2015), written by Bryan Fuller, Thomas Harris, Tom de Ville, and Steve Lightfoot, Hannibal, California: Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation

G

• I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.
  • Lady Gaga, interview with Vogue's Jonathan Van Meter, 2011.

H

• The object of the piano is to substitute one performer for a whole orchestra.
  • William Dean Howells, in Modern Italian Poets (1866), Volume 1, p. 373

L

• I never set fire to a piano. I'd like to have got away with it, though. I pushed a couple of them in the river. They wasn't any good.
  • Jerry Lee Lewis, as quoted in Esquire (January 2010), p. 89

• Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
  • Tom Lehrer, as quoted in Quotes about Life and Living, p. 45

M

• Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony
  Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh lord why don't we?
  • Paul McCartney, song Ebony and Ivory (1982).

• The piano ain't got no wrong notes.
  • Thelonious Monk, in response to a guest expert who said he, Monk, created extraordinary music, in spite of "playing the wrong notes on the piano" (March 1976), as quoted in Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Kelley, 2009), p. 444

S

• When you play, never mind who listens to you.
  • Robert Schumann, Advice to young musicians (1860), p. 10

• Play always as if in the presence of a master.
  • Robert Schumann, Advice to young musicians (1860), p. 10

W

• The piano has been drinking, not me.
  • Tom Waits, from his 1977 album Small Change

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Piano on Wikipedia