Well, if you need something to keep you busy.
Some of you old-timers may remember when I was on staff at Illinois Wesleyan. When I started there I had been a tech for 8 years and was one of those "home" tuners. Yet, I got the call and was told, "I hear you're the only game in town." I started out on a contract. When I handed the director of music and piano faculty the Guidelines, the director's response was that it was a self-serving piece of propaganda. He wanted to know what other similar schools were doing. Well, that wasn't going to work, was it? To sell IWU's school of music on a full time position (90 instruments) I had to write reports using "IWU's" numbers and data, explaining what in meant in terms for "IWU." After 5 years and umpteen reports later, the position was made full time and the rebuilding and piano purchasing plans were approved. I was there one semester with full benefits and then my husband accepted that job in Texas....
Anyway, the point is, they didn't give a you know what about my qualifications (RPT, assistant to God, whatever). What counted was the work I did and that I could explain in terms that they would understand how they would benefit from the proposals I made.
If it were up to me, which it is not, I'd concentrate on upgrading skills and finding ways for individual techs to communicate with their faculty and administration (including making reports & proposals specific to one's institution).
BTW, I know the story behind a former job ad from a major institution. A faculty member, or some faculty members wanted a certain technician, but according to law, they had to advertise. So, they wrote the qualifications to match that certain technician--RPT, Bachelor of Music, Master of Music. It turned out that the "wanted" technician found something else he wanted more, the surprise was there was another tech out there interested in the job that had those qualifications. What I do know, is that when a professor from that major institution came to visit at IWU, he told one of my faculty that he wished they had pianos like ours at his school.... I was sort of surprised because I was wrestling with mid 70's S&Ss. It's crazy out there...
Man, I've got to get to work.
Barbara Richmond, RPT
near Peoria, Illinois
----- Original Message -----
From: Fred Sturm
To: College and University Technicians
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2007 8:19 AM
Subject: [CAUT] CAUT Endorsement (was Re: Job Opening, U. of Michigan,Ann Arbor)
On Oct 9, 2007, at 7:40 PM, David Ilvedson wrote:
Most of the school listings I see, would prefer PTG membership and RPT status. Would new listings start including RPT and CAUT status preferred or possibly you think the RPT status can be eliminated as it has no meaning? I don't see the need for another "credential". Would the CAUT credential we much harder to achieve? i.e. a "real" test. Would existing College techs be grandfathered in? Besides, it's easy to talk about it...I know all the stuff concerned with RPT status was years in the making and a huge amount of work...and the politics...YIKES...who's going to take that job on? Are you guys crazy?
David Ilvedson, RPT
Pacifica, CA 94044
Are we crazy? Yep, you got that right. I guess we can pretend to be "crazy like a fox," but your assessment of how difficult this will be is spot on.
So the first question to answer is "Why?" I guess it would be accurate to say that this notion grew out of a desire to market "something" to the higher education community. [BTW, this is perhaps the most easily targeted market PTG has to go after, with 1500 - 2000 easily identified individual music departments]. We all know that most music departments are under-staffed, under-served, generally in a mess when it comes to piano condition and maintenance. We, followers of Don Quixote that we are (at least this is true of me personally), want to do something about this, for all sorts of idealistic reasons, and perhaps from some self-serving motives as well.
What to do? Well, we want to tell music departments how to take care of their piano situations, which is an awfully complex thing to try to do. The Guidelines was a first step. One possible second step is to try to tell them who they should hire. Hmm, tell them to hire RPTs? Would that work? We came to the conclusion it wouldn't. Obviously a caut needs a lot beyond RPT. I think we all remember starting work as a caut and feeling simply overwhelmed, confused, and out of our league - well, true for me, anyway, and a lot of others have said the same. So we really don't feel comfortable recommending they hire a green RPT, or even a well-seasoned one. 25 years of home service really don't prepare you for caut-dom much better than 2 or 3 years.
So if we want to market members of PTG to music departments, we need to have some way of identifying people who have something like the chops and knowledge needed. (At the same time, we need to begin to provide the training needed; hence our development of caut classes at national and occasionally regional conventions). And we've been chewing over where to go with that for a few years now. It happens that the current PTG board is, led by President Dale Probst, is strongly in favor of us getting to work and making something happen. In fact, we have been instructed to have something concrete for the mid-year board meeting this winter, and to have it include skills testing, written testing, and something curricular. Talk about ambitious! The general notion is that this will be called a "CAUT Endorsement" on top of RPT, with the possibility that other "Endorsements" might follow, as, for instance, in rebuilding.
To give a concrete example of where this may be heading, the skills testing sub-committee, consisting for now of Don McKechnie, Ken Eschete and myself, has developed the concept of a caut tuning test. I'll quote here from our working document:
"Our consensus is that we should test for the skill level appropriate for a concert tuner. What does this mean? In simplest terms:
1) Concert tuners stretch octaves quite a bit (even to the extreme), doing so in a very consistent way, demonstrating complete control.
2) They can tune extremely stable unisons that are absolutely pure with all three strings sounding.
3) They can produce a concert tuning efficiently and rapidly, generally in less than an hour (assuming a reasonable starting point).
"In addition, we believe that we should focus on the concrete ability of being able to produce a full, quality tuning in conditions as close to real life as possible. Does the candidate actually have the chops to complete a full tuning and meet these criteria? That is the question we want to answer before we can tell academia that this person is capable."
With that as the premise for a tuning test, our initial design is as follows:
"The candidate will tune a concert piano (7' to 9'), complete, with a time limit of 90 minutes at a maximum. The piano will then be checked for adequate and consistent stretch, stability, and unisons."
The stretch component is a little complex to describe here, but it involves measuring enough partials of enough notes to examine 4:1 and 8:1 matches over the top and bottom octave or so of the piano, flagging inconsistencies, and aurally verifying them. (It involves Excel spreadsheet, and if anyone with knowledge and experience in Excel would like to volunteer to help, we'd love to have some assistance). The unisons/stability component involves pounding/slamming the piano (all notes) in some way, and then checking unisons. Samples of "suspect" (or obvious) unison deficiencies would be flagged aurally, and then measured. The working notion is that the spread of pitch within notes of a unison should be within 0.5 cents, though that would have to be beta-tested.
So there you have at least a taste of what we are up to. Hey, it keeps us busy and out of other trouble <G>.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu
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