Talk:Piano four hands

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Hyphen?[edit]

The article piano six hands has recently been created. Clearly four-hands (with hyphen) and six hands (without hyphen) is bad but I am unsure which way to rationalise. Google suggests that with and without hyphen are about equally common:

— RHaworth (talk · contribs) 17:23, 29 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To spell either without the hyphen feels more normal to me, though my instinct would be drawn towards "piano (four hands)" or "piano, four hands" as making more grammatical sense. Perhaps I am being influences by "piano (left hand)", which I think is more often spelt using parentheses. There are small repertoires of music for three and five hands too...! --Deskford (talk) 19:46, 29 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've done a bit more searching here, and after trawling through the first 10 pages of Google hits found a definite bias towards "piano four hands" with no hyphen, but with a good number using "piano four-hands" with the hyphen and "piano, four hands" with the comma. Very few use "piano (four hands)", which would actually be my instinctive choice, so I'm not going to argue for that. I think "piano four hands" is the most common form. I also note that (a) many of the Google hits with "piano four-hands" in the title actually use "piano four hands" in the text, (b) the hyphen seems mostly to appear in American sources, (c) although this article is headed "Piano four-hands", the text of the article begins "Piano four hands" and always has done, with, in the current version, two subsequent uses of "piano four hands", one of "piano, four hands" and none of "piano four-hands", and (d) the article was created as "Piano four hands" and then moved to "Piano four-hands". My vote would be to move it back to "Piano four hands". Anyone any strong opinions? --Deskford (talk) 20:08, 30 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No opinions expressed, so I've moved the page for consistency. --Deskford (talk) 17:37, 30 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

19th Century Social Implications?[edit]

Perhaps something should be said of the social function of 4-hands music in 19th century Europe. (i.e. providing an acceptable means for upper-class young couples to have some close moments together, even if at the piano, surrounded by their chaperones.) There must be sources that mention this specifically. A lot of crossed hand writing in the repertoire is certainly due to this social and practical function of the compositions for this medium. --szintenzenesz 22:55, 8 December 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.201.39.110 (talk) [reply]

Print layout format[edit]

The article says (in the lede): "... usually printed so that left-hand pages contain only the part for the pianist sitting on the left,...". In fact there are two standard print formats: this describes the first ("page per player", ppp); the second uses a double grand staff format (i.e. 4 staves together, primo above secondo, 4s). My guess is that ppp is the commoner format in older music, much didactic in nature. It means that each player is simply reading a regular piano score. It also has an advantage of compactness, because if one part has fewer notes here, the other part fewer notes there, the linebreaks can be staggered. The other format, 4s, makes it much easier to keep together when sight-reading more advanced pieces. I just glanced in my duet collection, and I think perhaps ppp really is more common for the classic(al) stuff like arrangements of orchestral music; for 20th century original works in particular, 4s may be more common. But not always: Barber's Souvenirs is ppp. And it's not by publisher, because I immediately found both formats in Zen-on and Alfred books. This is all "original research", so it is True, but No Good, or something. Perhaps though this could be written a bit more even-handed. Imaginatorium (talk) 06:06, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Earliest printed works[edit]

Question: this article originally stated that the first printed four-hand piano music was from 1782 in Dessau, which is not correct, since Charles Burney published his four four-hand pieces in January of 1777. I'm not experienced at editing Wikipedia so I'd like to ask someone to check whether my modification is acceptable; the citation I used was a score that's available on IMSLP, and I saw a note after I made the edit that indicated that this may not be viewed as a valid source, although you can see the facsimile of the 1777 manuscript there. Also, I wondered if anyone knows the publication date of Mozart's K. 381 in D Major - I assume it wasn't published til at least the 1780s, though it was written in 1772, but I can't find sourcing on that. 73.250.37.15 (talk) 07:02, 16 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Replying to myself to add that I found the publication date of the Mozart piece in question -- 1783. Classicalbeat (talk) 13:35, 26 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]