The piano (Italian pronunciation: [ˈpjaːno]; an abbreviation of pianoforte [pjanoˈfɔrte]) is a musical instrument played using a keyboard. It 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 often expensive, its versatility and ubiquity have made it one of the 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, 36 black). The strings are sounded when the keys are pressed, and silenced when the keys are released. The note can be sustained, even when the keys are released, by the use of pedals.
Pressing a key on the piano's keyboard causes a padded (often with felt) hammer to strike strings. The hammer rebounds, 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 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, electronic, and digital pianos have also been developed.
In music, dynamics are instructions in musical notation to the performer about hearing the loudness of a note or phrase. More generally, dynamics may also include other aspects of the execution of a given piece.
The two basic dynamic indications in music are:
More subtle degrees of loudness or softness are indicated by:
Beyond f and p, there are also
And so on.
Some pieces contain dynamic designations with more than three f's or p's. In Holst's The Planets, ffff occurs twice in Mars and once in Uranus often punctuated by organ and fff occurs several times throughout the work. It also appears in Heitor Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4 (Prelude), and in Liszt's Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam". The Norman Dello Joio Suite for Piano ends with a crescendo to a ffff, and Tchaikovsky indicated a bassoon solo pppppp in his Pathétique Symphony and ffff in passages of his 1812 Overture and the 2nd movement of his Fifth Symphony.
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.
The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow states "Kelly became a major influence on pianists of the 1960s and 1970s and one can hear the genesis of many other players in these swinging performances".
HD 220105 is a star in the northern constellation of Andromeda.
HD 33203 is double star in the northern constellation of Auriga. It includes a supergiant star with a stellar classification of B2II. The two components have an angular separation of 1.617″ along a position angle of 222.1°.
51 Aquilae (abbreviated 51 Aql) is a star in the equatorial constellation of Aquila. 51 Aquilae is its Flamsteed designation. It has an apparent visual magnitude of 5.39, which means it is faintly visible to the naked eye. Based upon an annual parallax shift of 35.88 mas, the distance to this star is around 90.9 light-years (27.9 parsecs).
This is an F-type main sequence star with a stellar classification of F5 V Fe-1 CH-0.7; where the 'Fe-1' and 'CH-0.7' represent abundance deficiencies of iron and the molecule CN, respectively. It is about 1.6 billion years old and is spinning relatively quickly with a projected rotational velocity of 77.5 km/s. The outer atmosphere has an effective temperature of 6,812 K, giving it the yellow-white hue characteristic of an F-type star.