player piano, an upright piano incorporating a mechanical system that automatically plays the encoded contents of a paper strip. This strip, perforated with holes whose position and length determine pitch and duration, is drawn over a pneumatic device that shoots streams of air through the holes. The air is guided through a tube to the corresponding hammer, which strikes the string. The pieces used in player pianos often reproduced performances by famous pianists. Although popular during the late 19th and early 20th cent., the player piano was eclipsed by phonographs and radios.

piano or pianoforte, musical instrument whose sound is produced by vibrating strings struck by felt hammers that are controlled from a keyboard.

The piano's earliest predecessor was the dulcimer. The first piano was made c.1709 by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731), a Florentine maker of harpsichords, who called his instrument gravicembalo col piano e forte. (One of the two existing Cristofori pianos is in the Metropolitan Mus. of Art., N.Y.C.) It differed from the harpsichord in that by varying the touch one could vary the volume and duration of tone. This expressive quality was shared by the clavichord, but the latter was far more delicate in tone.

During the 18th cent. changes in musical taste gradually favored the piano's greater volume and expressiveness, and the instrument had largely supplanted the harpsichord and clavichord by 1800. C. P. E. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Clementi were the first major composers to write for the piano. The main body of its enormous literature, from the 19th cent., includes the works of Beethoven, Czerny, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Franck, Tchaikovsky, and Liszt. Debussy and Ravel used the special effects peculiar to the piano in highly original ways. In the 20th cent. some composers, notably Bartók, have emphasized the instrument's percussive qualities.

The piano was originally built in the shape of a harpsichord, and this style, the grand piano, has always been the standard form. It was greatly improved by the 19th-century innovation of an iron framework, best applied by the Steinways of New York City. The square piano, with strings parallel to the keys, was the most popular domestic piano until the early-19th-century perfection, in Philadelphia, of the upright piano. The English piano maker John Broadwood (1732-1812) was the first to develop the present heavier, more sonorous instrument. In 1810 the double-action striking mechanism, which permits rapid repetition of a tone, was perfected.

In the late 19th cent. a mechanical player piano was developed. A perforated paper roll was passed over a cylinder containing apertures connected to tubes that were in turn connected to the piano action. When a hole in the paper passed over an aperture, a current of air passed through a tube and caused the corresponding hammer to strike the string. The electric piano was developed in the 1930s. In the 1980s computer and compact-disc technology made possible the invention of a "reproducing piano," an instrument designed to recreate a pianist's playing, accurately capturing the nuances of the performance. Innovative developments of the 1990s include the disklavier, a computerized grand piano that uses optical sensors to produce sound, and the two-lid piano, which opens from the top and bottom to better project sound.

Piano, Renzo, 1937-, Italian architect, b. Genoa. Piano attended architecture school at Milan Polytechnic, graduating in 1964. He worked with architects Louis I. Kahn and Z. S. Makowsky from 1965 to 1970. Piano came to worldwide attention when he and Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou Centre (1977), Paris. The Beaubourg, as it is popularly known, is an "urban machine" that reveals its engineering basis by having brightly colored pipes, escalators, and other service elements on the outside of the structure. The prolific Piano has been lauded for responding to the needs of each building site rather than cleaving to a single architectural style and has also been praised for his command of engineering technology.

Piano's other buildings include the Menil Museum, Houston (1981-6), known particularly for its leaflike ferroconcrete louvers that filter the light from its transparent roof; the vast Kansai Air Terminal, Osaka (1994); the long, low, and elegantly simple Beyeler Foundation museum, Riehen, Switzerland (1997); and the Tjibaou Cultural Center, Nouméa, New Caledonia (1998), featuring wooden staves reminiscent of local Kanak huts. His 21st-century projects include the naturally illuminated Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Tex. (2003); the innovative Padre Pio Church, San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy (2004); the undulating Paul Klee Center, Bern, Switzerland (2005); the light-filled addition to the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City (2006); the sharp-edged 52-story New York Times Building, also in Manhattan (2007); and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, an addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008). In recognition of his achievements, Piano was awarded the 1998 Pritzker Prize.

Carpini, Giovanni de Piano, c.1180-1252, Italian traveler and Franciscan monk, b. Pian del Carpini (now Piano della Magione), Umbria. He was a companion of St. Francis of Assisi and spread Franciscan teachings in Germany and Spain. In 1245 he was sent by Pope Innocent IV to the court of the Mongols. With a Pole, Friar Benedict, he started from Lyons, went to Kiev, then across the Dnieper to the Don and the Volga, where he found the camp of a Mongol prince. He then traveled across central Asia to the imperial court at Karakorum in Mongolia. A journey of c.3,000 mi (4,830 km) was accomplished on horseback in 106 days. At Karakorum he witnessed the installation (1246) of Jenghiz Khan's grandson as the great khan of the Mongols. Carpini returned to Lyons in 1247, and his careful account of the journey, known as Liber Tartarorum, proved invaluable. It is a full record of Mongol manners, history, policy, and military tactics; it was the first of such works to appear in Europe.

or thumb piano

African musical instrument consisting of a set of tuned metal or bamboo tongues attached to a board or resonator. The tongues are depressed and released with the thumbs and fingers to produce melodies and song accompaniments. The mbira dates to at least the 16th century in Africa, and it was imported to Latin America by slaves.

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Piano that mechanically plays music encoded as perforations on a paper roll. An early version, patented in 1897 by the American engineer E.S. Votey, was a cabinet placed in front of an ordinary piano, with wooden “fingers” projecting over the keyboard. A paper roll with perforations corresponding to the notes passed over a tracker bar to activate the release of air by pneumatic devices that set the fingers in motion; the user could control tempo and loudness by levers and pedals. Soon this mechanism was built into the piano itself. The later “reproducing piano” could reproduce the nuances of tempo and dynamics in great performances, the roll having been produced by the performance itself. After the 1920s the phonograph led to the instrument's quick decline. Modern versions, such as the Yamaha Disklavier, are operated by digital memory on a computer disk.

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(Italian: “noble floor”) In a Renaissance building, the first floor above ground level. In the typical palace erected by an Italian prince, the large, high-ceilinged reception rooms were in this upper, main story. Often a grand exterior staircase or pair of staircases led from ground level up to the piano nobile.

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or pianoforte

Keyboard instrument with wire strings that sound when struck by hammers operated by a keyboard. It was invented in Florence by Bartolomeo Cristofori before 1720, with the particular aim of permitting note-to-note dynamic variation (lacking in the harpsichord). It differs from the older clavichord in that its hammers (rather than tangents) are thrown at the strings and bounce back, permitting the struck string to vibrate loudly. A cast-iron frame is needed to withstand the strings' tremendous tension. Pianos have taken various shapes. The original harpsichord (or wing) shape has survived in the modern grand piano; the less-expensive square (actually rectangular) piano, standard in the early 19th century, was replaced by the upright piano, in which the strings are vertical. For at least 150 years the piano was the most important instrument in Western music.

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