playing (the) musical instruments
John Wells wrote to ask: Have you discussed BrE playing the piano/violin v s. AmE playing piano/violin ? Not really, John, and it turns out that it's one of those things that's (all together now!) more complicated than you might think! The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 689 play* the piano to 309 play* piano . (The * there used as a wildcard in corpus searches; so play* gets us play, playing, played, etc.) That's more than two arthrous (fancy word for having a the ) cases for every anarthrous (fancy word for not having a the ) one--in American English. But those numbers need a bit more checking because any dialect would have playing piano music without a the . To get a better comparison, I looked at cases where piano is followed by an adverb (e.g. play [the] piano beautifully / well/loudly/tonight ...) so that we can be sure that piano is a noun on its own and not a noun modifying another noun. Doing that, there are 53 arthrous cases and 23 ...