response 15 of 19:

Apr 25 17:40 UTC 2002

Re #11:  Only if by "percussive" you mean "loud and bangy."  As Lumen's
pointed out, there's some nice quiet contemplative percussion music out there.
It still sounds like percussion; nobody would mistake it for a brass quintet
or a pipe organ.  And good piano music -- even Chopin -- is the same way. 

Uhm, what am I trying to say here?

In music for strings or winds, you can get by with a nice sustained melody
and good tone color and intonation.  On a piano, that's not enough -- the
tuning's fixed, there's not much sustain, and the tone color's pretty
constant.  Piano music, as a rule, relies more on rhythm and figuration than
wind or string music -- and you can't tell me that's not true of Chopin and
Prokofiev both.