Guidelines comments

[Fred Sturm]

	I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, Wim. Administrators are willing to 
pay what it takes to hire the football coach who will win them the required 
number of games. They are willing to pay for the number of groundskeepers 
it takes to keep the flowers and grass looking pretty. They'll buy the 
computers and pay for the LANL and support staff to stay at the cutting 
edge of technology. None of those expenditures saves them money. They do it 
because it is necessary to achieve a level of excellence.
	If you want to achieve a level of excellence in music, your pianos have to 
be kept at a high level (and you need a good faculty, and a good facility, 
etc, etc). To keep your pianos at a high level, you need qualified 
technicians at a predictable ratio to your number of pianos. Just like you 
need a predictable number of groundskeepers per acre of lawn. I don't think 
this is hard to understand. Even for an administrator ;-)
	Now as to how credible our document is, that will depend to a large degree 
on the number and range of endorsements we can get. I'm hoping Steinway, 
Kawai, and Yamaha will follow through on their willingness (expressed in 
Chicago) to at least consider endorsing. And that individual endorsements 
will start to pour in from fellow CAUT's (7 so far and counting).
	There are plenty of other ways we can be more persuasive. One possibility 
is to come up with "real life stories" of institutions of various sorts 
(from large state to small liberal arts to conservatory to community 
college) which have situations we would describe as good with respect to 
pianos. They're out there, but it would take some effort to find them, 
obtain adequate data, and write them up. It would be a good project, IMO. 
But we have lots more projects than we have persistent people to carry out, 
at least at the moment.
	
Fred

--On Thursday, June 12, 2003 4:57 PM -0400 Wimblees@aol.com wrote:
>
> Unfortunately, trying to convince bean counters that the school needs to
> spend money on piano tuners is going to fall on deaf ears, if we can't
> show them it is going to save them money. Just telling an administrator
> that WE say one full time piano tuner is needed for 70 - 100 pianos,
> because WE say what needs to be done to keep piano working the way WE say
> they should work, is just not going to cut it. I think we have to show,
> with actual case studies, that investing in a piano tuner is going to
> save them money in the long run. We have to show, in writing, with
> examples, that, to paraphrase the Fram Oil Filter commercial "you need to
> pay a piano tuner now, or you will have to buy new pianos sooner."
>
> If we can show that a qualified piano tuner can postpone the purchase of
> new pianos by 20 or even 40 years, they might listen. But just telling
> them that investing in a piano tuner is going to make the pianos play and
> sound better, only a few piano professors are going to agree with you.
> But the bean counter, and maybe even the rest of the department, is going
> to say, so what, I'd rather have the money for scholarships, or some new
> music, or a new desk in my office.
>
> The new Guidelines are very good, and helpful, and hopefully it will give
> a few department chairs the ammunition they need to get a qualified piano
> tuner. I'm trying to suggest a few ways to make the guidelines even
> better. It will require some more work on our part. But we've gone this
> far, so why not go the extra mile, and make it even better?
>
> Wim