[CAUT] Re. Flight of Broken Bass String

[Susan Kline]

At 11:32 PM 3/26/2006 -0500, I wrote:
>>Others with a tight, nervous, poking kind of style manage to
>>give me a lot more work. The sound is usually a lot smaller and tighter,
>>but their blows seem to throw a tuning out a lot more easily.

Jim wrote:

>So you're saying, in effect, that one type of player is performing three 
>finger, eight pound test blows, but using only one finger? <G>


Not quite that -- it's the abruptness which is the problem, I think. The 
big Russian bear paws are heavy as all get out -- but they have a 
resilience in spite of how massive they are, and they don't seem to be as 
much trouble, for unisons at least, as a 98-pound Chinese girl with that 
nasty habit of jabbing "POKE!!" with stiff little fingers.

I tuned twice for the same French pianist last year, different towns and 
pianos, same program, a few days apart. The first concert I only had a few 
minutes after he rehearsed, and the unisons were all over the place. Well, 
not HORRIBLE, or anything, but almost all of them had those little smears. 
I thought I hadn't settled the piano well enough.

The second concert made everything much more clear. The pianist wanted all 
the time he could get on the piano just before the concert, and I just 
waited around until we got up to the (minimal) time he had promised me, 
when he quit graciously enough. But the eye-opener was what he considered 
warming up. He had a nervous, stuttering approach, loud non-stop, never 
getting through even a bar without jumping back several times, with lots of 
drum repetition. It was obvious as soon as I heard what he was doing that 
the "warming up" was really just pandering to his nerves. His playing in 
the concert was just fine. It showed the versatility of a Steinway D -- 
when he played it, it sounded like a French piano.

Then there have been a couple of pianists who seemed to have whipcord or 
little steel cables in their arms -- sort of whiz-BANG. Sort of the 
trebuchet or spring-loaded crossbow-quarrel school of piano playing. The 
way they approach a piano will ferret out the tiniest vulnerability in the 
tuning. I don't think it's good for instruments to be exposed to much 
playing like this on a regular basis. I can hardly imagine the condition of 
their studio pianos.

It seems to come down to whether they let their nerves have free reign over 
their playing. The Russians don't seem to do that, at least the ones I've 
heard. They approach the piano from a position of strength, but not anxious 
jerking coercion.

In my mental model of how a piano works, I don't see what a poke or a jab 
does to the mechanism which a massive but relaxed WHAM doesn't -- but I've 
seen the differing results too often to say that it's all my imagination.

sssssnn