| Name | Image | Tradition | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Piccolo |  | Switzerland | The piccolo is a small flute. Like the flute, the piccolo is normally pitched in the key of C, one octave above the concert flute (making it, effectively, a sopranino flute). Because the piccolo's sound is in a very high register, it has a potential to be strident or shrill. Thus, it is often used only as an ornamental, "flavor" or "garnish" instrument, or not at all. Nonetheless, there have been many concertos and solo pieces written for the piccolo, written by notable composers such as Persichetti, Vivaldi, and Todd Goodman. Historically the piccolo had no keys, but does today, and should not be confused with the fife, or classical piccolo, which has a smaller bore and is therefore more strident. The piccolo is used in conjunction with marching drums in traditional formations at the Carnival of Basel, Switzerland. |
| Piccolo Clarinet |  | Europe | The piccolo clarinets are members of the clarinet family, smaller and higher pitched than the more familiar high soprano clarinets in E♭ and D. None is common, but the most often used piccolo clarinet is the A♭ clarinet, sounding nearly an octave higher than the B♭ clarinet. Clarinets pitched in A-flat appeared frequently in European wind bands, particularly in Spain and Italy, at least through the middle of the 20th century, and are called for in the stage-band parts for several operas by Verdi. The image shows an A♭ (left), an E♭, and a B♭ (right) clarinets. |
| Piccolo Oboe |  | France | The piccolo oboe is the smallest and highest pitched member of the oboe family. Pitched in E-flat or F above the regular oboe (which is a C instrument), the piccolo oboe is a sopranino version of the oboe, comparable to the E-flat clarinet. The instrument has found the most use in chamber music and avant-garde circles, where it is valued for its unusual tone colour. Perhaps the best-known pieces requiring piccolo oboe are Solo and Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra No. 2, both by Bruno Maderna. |
| Pidkova |  | Ukraine | The Pidkova (Ukrainian: Підкова) literarily "Horseshoe". In some Ukrainian folk instrument ensembles a steel horseshoe dangling from the end of a gut string is struck with a piece of metal wire. This produced a high-pitched ringing sound similar to a triangle. |
| Piffero |  | Italy | The piffero or piffaro is a double reed musical instrument with a conical bore, of the oboe family. It is used to play music in the tradition of the quattro province, an area of mountains and valleys in the north-west Italian Apennines. The reed used by the piffero is inserted in a conical brass tube, which is itself inserted in a pirouette. This peculiarity, which is shared with oriental and ancient oboes, is unique in Italy. The piffero has eight tone holes, one of which, on the back of the instrument, is usually covered by the left hand thumb, and ends with a bell, where a cock tail feather (used to clean the reed) typically rests during execution. |
| Pikasso Guitar |  | Canada | The Pikasso Guitar, or Pikasso I, is a custom-made instrument created by Canadian luthier Linda Manzer. This 42-string guitar with three necks has been popularized by jazz artist Pat Metheny (see image) and can be heard on his song "Into the Dream" and on the albums Quartet, Imaginary Day, Jim Hall & Pat Metheny, Trio->Live, and Metheny Mehldau Quartet (The Sound of Water), his 2007 second collaboration with pianist Brad Mehldau. The guitar can also be seen on the Speaking of Now Live and Imaginary Day DVDs. Metheny has also used the guitar in his guest appearances on other artist's albums and on a Jazz TV show, Legends of Jazz, where he reffered to it simply as 42-string guitar. When he was asked if wasn't that guitar called Pikasso, he said: "No, that's the name of the woman that made it." |
| Píob Mhór |  | Ireland | The píob mhór (also called Great Irish Warpipes, The Bagpipes, or The Pipes) is an instrument that in modern practice is identical, and historically was analogous or identical to the Great Highland Bagpipe. "Warpipes" is an English term. The first use of the Gaelic term in Ireland is recorded in a poem by Sean O’Neachtain (c. 1650-1728), in which the bagpipes are referred to as píb mhór. The Warpipes have a long and significant history in Ireland and in Scotland. The image shows a piper playing an instrument with two drones and a chanter in the usual positions. The drones are of unequal length and all pipes have flaring Medieval-style bell ends. The painting is from a c. 16th century Irish missal, now in the Bodleian Library. |
| Pipa |  | China | The pipa (琵琶) is a plucked Chinese string instrument. Sometimes called the Chinese lute, the instrument has a pear-shaped wooden body. It has been played for nearly two thousand years of history in China, and belongs to the plucked category of instruments (弹拨乐器/彈撥樂器). Several related instruments in East and Southeast Asia are derived from the pipa; these include the Japanese biwa, the Vietnamese đàn tỳ bà, and the Korean bipa. The Korean instrument is the only one of the three that is no longer used. The image shows a Tang Dynasty five-stringed pipa. |
| Pipe Organ |  | Europe | The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound when pressurized air (referred to as wind) is driven through a series of pipes. The admission of wind into the pipes is controlled by a keyboard. The size of pipe organs varies greatly: the smallest portable organs may have only a few dozen pipes, while the largest organs may feature tens of thousands. An organ pipe sounds when a key is depressed on the keyboard, allowing the wind to pass into the pipe from a chest below. The organ's continuous supply of wind allows it to sustain sound for as long as a key is depressed, unlike other keyboard instruments such as the piano and harpsichord, whose sound begins to decay immediately after the key is struck. The image shows the Hexham Abbey (Northumberland, England) organ built by Lawrence Phelps in 1974. |
| Piri |  | Korea | The piri is a Korean double reed instrument, used in both the folk and classical (court) music of Korea. It is made of bamboo. Its large reed and cylindrical bore gives it a sound mellower than that of many other types of oboe. There are four types of piri: Hyang piri, Se piri, Dang piri and Dae piri The piri's equivalent in China is the guan (also known as bili), and its counterpart in Japan is the hichiriki. |
| Pitu |  | Spain | The pitu is one of the traditional musical instruments in Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria. It is a kind of conical-bored shawm with seven holes in the front and one in the back, which is played in a similar manner to the bagpipe chanter. While it was traditionally made in E-flat, the instrument has been revitalized by Antón Corral, who makes them in D. A transverse flute with six holes is called a requinta; it is similar to the fife. It is usually in G, or sometimes a high C. |
| Pivtoradentsivka |  | Ukraine | Pivtoradentsivka (Ukrainian: Півтораденцівка) The Pivtoradetsivka is translated as one and a half dentsivkas. It consists of two dentsivkas joined together into one instrument. Only one of the pipes has fingerholes. The other acts as a drone. The drone pipe in a pivtoradentsivka is usually shorter than the playing pipe. The instrument has the same fingering as the standard dentsivka. |
| Player Piano |  | United States | The player piano is a piano containing a pneumatic mechanism that plays on the piano action pre-programmed music via perforated paper rolls. The true player piano was designed to be a fully interactive musical experience rather than merely an automatic instrument and hence they are fitted with interactive control levers intended for the "player pianist" or "pianolist" to create a music performance to their own taste. |
| Polish Bagpipes |  | Poland | General name of bagpipes in Polish are kozioł (buck), gajdy or koza (goat). They are used in folk music of Podhale, Żywiec Beskids, Cieszyn Silesia and mostly in Greater Poland. Four basic variants of Polish bagpipes: (1) dudy wielkopolskie (2) kozioł biały weselny or shortly kozioł biały (3) kozioł czarny ślubny or shortly kozioł czarny (4) sierszeńki. The image shows a man with a dudy wielkopolskie and a woman with a kozioł czarny. |
| Portative Organ |  | Europe | A portative organ (portatif organ, portativ organ, or simply portative, portatif, or portativ) (from the Latin verb portare, "to carry") is a small pipe organ that consists of one rank of flue pipes and played while strapped to the performer at a right angle. The performer manipulates the bellows with one hand and fingers the keys with the other. The portative organ lacks a reservoir to retain a supply of wind, thus it will only produce sound while the bellows are being operated. The instrument was commonly used in secular music from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. The portative is constructed simply in order to make it as portable as possible. It is smaller than the positive organ. |
| Portuguese Guitar |  | Portugal | The Portuguese guitar or Portuguese guitarra (Portuguese: guitarra portuguesa) is a plucked string instrument with twelve steel strings, strung in six courses comprising of two strings each. It is most notably associated with fado, a music genre which can be traced from the 1820s in Portugal. |
| Positive Organ |  | England | A positive organ (also positiv organ, positif organ, portable organ, chair organ) (from the Latin verb ponere, "to place") is a portable one-manual pipe organ that may be moved without first being disassembled. It was common in sacred and secular music between the tenth and the seventeenth centuries, when it was used in the performance of basso continuo parts in ensemble works. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was placed on a table or floor to be played, but many modern positive organs feature wheels. The positive organ differs from the portative organ in that it is larger and is not played while strapped at a right angle to the performer's body. The image shows a portable organ on wheels in a church of St. Albans, England. |
| Psaltery |  | Greece | A psaltery is a stringed musical instrument of the harp or the zither family. The psaltery of Ancient Greece (Epigonion) dates from at least 2800 BC, it was a harp-like instrument. In the Christian era a psaltery consisting of a soundboard with several pre-tuned strings that are usually plucked, came into use. The instrument is usually small enough to be portable; its shape and range vary. It is depicted in a number of artworks from the Medieval Period. The image shows a psaltery of the 14th century from the book: De Arythmetica, De Musica by M. Servinius Boetius. The image shows how the instrument is typically held: before the chest with the hands under the curves. |
| Pungi |  | India | A pungi or been is the musical instrument played by the snake charmers. It consists of two bamboo tubes with length of one to two feet each. One tube is for the melody and the other is for the drone. The tubes are attached to a dried hollow gourd or coconut which has two reeds in it. |
| Putipu |  | Italy | The putipu is a traditional folk percussion instrument of Naples (a historic city in southern Italy.) It consists of a membrane stretched across a resonating chamber, like a drum. A handle attached to the membrane compresses air rhythmically within the chamber; the air then spurts out of the not-quite-hermetic seal that fastens the membrane to the wooden body of the instrument to produce a "burping" sound. |
| Pyeongyeong |  | Korea | A pyeongyeong is a traditional Korean percussion instrument, a kind of stone chime or lithophone formed of sixteen L-shaped stone slabs suspended from a frame. Although all the stones have the same shape they vary in pitch according to thickness; the thinner stones are lower in pitch and the thicker stones produce higher pitches. The pyeongyeong is derived from a Chinese instrument, the bianqing. |
| Pyeonjong |  | Korea | The pyeonjong is an ancient Korean musical instrument consisting of a set of 16 bronze bells, played melodically. The bells are hung in a wooden frame and struck with a mallet. Along with the stone chimes called pyeongyeong, they were an important instrument in Korea's ritual and court music going back to ancient times. Although all the bells have the same shape they vary in pitch according to thickness; the thinner bells are lower in pitch and the thicker bells produce higher pitches. Several sets of Chinese bianzhong were imported to the Korean court from China during the Song Dynasty. The instrument is still used in Korean court music. |
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