Song or piece? ;-)

[Eusebius_dk]

Hmmmm.... 

[jazzyprof]

You sing a song and play a piece.  Songs usually have words, pieces usually don't.  Thus, for example,  Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words" are pieces, not songs.  In French you play your "morceaux" (pieces) not your "chancons" (songs), unless they are, in fact, songs.

[dlu]

I ussualy use the word "piece" when talking about Greig's Lyric Pieces, Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, Rachmaninoff's Preludes, Berio's Sequenza's etc. because they are "pieces" of a bigger whole (a Rachmaninoff Prelude is a "piece" of the entire opus of preludes).

I like to say "work" when talking about these larger works. Like, Rachmaninoff's 1st Concerto is a "work," not a "piece" because it is "self-contained(?)."

etc. etc. etc.

Buuuuuut...in the long run these words don't matter...

DLu

[Tash]

i got too philosophical with the whole concept, and then got confused when i thought ok well what happens when you arrange a song for instruments? is it still a song, or a piece? then i was like i really need to stop narking on about this...

[Rach3]

It's not philosophical at all! Pianos are not harps, Liszt was not German, etudes are not exercizes, pieces are not songs. The sky is not pastel yellow, the ocean is not black. D. Shostakovich was not a "songwriter"; he was also neither a massage therapist nor a senator. Prokofiev was not a songwriter, as far as I know. Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were all part-time songwriters. They composed Lieder. If you play a Schubert Lieder, you are playing a song (actually you're accompanying a song). But they also wrote non-songs! Brahms, for example, wrote two concerti; neither were written or adapted for singing.

https://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=song

song   Audio pronunciation of "song"  (sông, sng)
n.

   1. Music.
         1. A brief composition written or adapted for singing.[/u]
         2. The act or art of singing: broke into song.
   2. A distinctive or characteristic sound made by an animal, such as a bird[/u] or an insect.
   3.
         1. Poetry; verse.
         2. A lyric poem or ballad.

[Eusebius_dk]

The prupose of this wasn't philosophical by any means, I'm just tired to hear piano "pieces" or "works" being called "songs". 

[Bouter Boogie]

Piece if it comes to piano 

[wintervind]

That entirely depends on the Piece/Song

[mound]

Olga Kern was on the classical station the other night -  they were playing Cliburn competition excerpts, prior to her performing some Rach transcriptions of Bach Violin partitas (as I recall) and she was speaking about her family and such, her bio basically, and she repeatedly used the term "songs" rather than "piece"

[Etude]

I think the result of the poll speaks for itself...

[mound]

I think the result of the poll speaks for itself...

Yes clearly. I too voted "piece" as, well, compositions w/o words are pieces. songs are sung. I just found it humerous, so many people on boards like these get so uptight when somebody uses the term "song" to describe a piece, and here, Olga Kern herself was speaking and used the term song several times. I'm sure the interviewer must have wanted to correct her 

[pianote]

piece...

[goansongo]

It really doesn't matter what you use.  I use the word "song" all the time.  As long as you can play, it doesn't matter what comes out of your mouth.