Today’s pet peeve: a piano is not “a harp in a box”.
A piano is a dulcimer in a box.
A harpsichord is a harp in a box.
To be even more pedantic, it’s a hammered dulcimer in a box. Dulcimers are a pretty broad family and not all are, well, hammered.
A piano is the result of a frustrated dulcimerist going “what I really need is to be able to wield more hammers at once. No, more than that. More.”
To be fair, I’d say a harpsichord is more of a guitar/lute/etc. in a box, given the twanginess of it.
Proposal: rescore all of J S Bach’s harpsichord concertos for six-string banjo.
One of my coworkers once described an accordion as “a piano that squashes”.
Strictly speaking, an accordion is a mutant harmonica.
slight correction: a BUTTON accordion is a mutant harmonica. a piano accordion is a box of oboes
i’m into this semantic musiciany thing going on here. are there more musical mutants?
