Great post, Barbara!
While the details differ, the implications match my experience exactly!
Scott
Scott E. Thile, RPT
Piano/Instrument Technician
---------------------------
Dept. of Music, Murray State University
504 Fine Arts Building, Murray, KY 42071
Office Phone: 270-809-4396
http://campus.murraystate.edu/staff/scott.thile/index.html
-----Original Message-----
From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of
Barbara Richmond
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2007 9:05 AM
To: College and University Technicians
Subject: Re: [CAUT] CAUT Endorsement (was Re: Job Opening, U. of
Michigan,Ann Arbor)
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 <mailto:fssturm at unm.edu>
To: College and University Technicians <mailto:caut at ptg.org>
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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