piano quartet
- noun
- /piˈænoʊ kwɔrˈtɛt/
- During the music festival, a talented piano quartet played a variety of classical pieces.
Examples
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Practicing the Brahms G minor piano quartet, especially movements I and IV, including some thoughts on how string players see a score differently than I do.
Blog text (32) -
The piano quartet performed beautifully at the concert last night.
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[piano quartet plays]
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She composed a new piece for the piano quartet, which includes violin, viola, and cello.
Synonyms
A group of four musicians who play or sing together
A group of four people who meet or play together
A piece of music written for four instruments
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is fully compositional: 'quartet' denotes a group of four musicians and 'piano' specifies the instrument involved, so a learner who knows both words can infer it refers to a four-person ensemble or a piece for such an ensemble. The exact conventional instrumentation (piano + violin + viola + cello) is specialist knowledge but does not block a B1 learner from deriving the general meaning from the constituents.
Etymology
Piano quartet comes from how small classical music groups were named: quartet means 'four players' and piano shows that one of those players is a piano. So a piano quartet is a group made of a piano plus three string players such as violin, viola and cello, and a piece for that group is also called a piano quartet.