> Is a piano a string or percussion instrument? It has strings, but you strike them, rather than plucking them or running horse-hair over them.

I was taught that the piano was a percussion instrument, due to the hammers striking the strings. I decided to look it up in my textbooks, however, and this is what I found:

W. Piston's "Orchestration" lists it as keyboard.
C. Forsyth's "Orchestration" lists it as either string or percussion, but thenceforth refers to it as a string.
H. Berlioz's "Treatise on Instrumentation" lists it as a stringed instrument with keyboard.
S. Adler's "Study of Orchestration" lists it as keyboard.
"The New Harvard Dictionary of Music" lists it as a stringed keyboard.

The reason for using "keyboard" as an independent instrument class makes some sense; otherwise, the pipe organ would be a woodwind instrument (and quite an unwieldy one at that), for example. In the end, it's just a matter of semantics; the piano, along with all the keyboard instruments, bridges two instrument classes.

Counter"Hmm...the dulcimer seems to be classified as percussion..."point