----- Original Message ----- From: "Israel Stein" <custos3 at comcast.net> >> > Actually, the exact opposite is true. CAUTs will never be able to convince > anyone that the are professionals, experts, etc. deserving of higher pay > and higher status if the remain "one-trick" ponies, doing the same thing > over and over again. Rising professional status goes hand-in-hand with > expanding one's knowledge base, variety of services offered and ability to > knowledgeably discuss the options available - and offer advice. Israel, what I learned about this has been that increasing knowledge, skills and abilities might result in some higher level of respect, but in the employment system currently in place, there is no return on that investment beyond simple admiration. One who is willing to pursue expanding his/her skills base should be prepared to learn that that will simply result in higher and higher expectations, with no guarantee of that translating into higher earnings. > What I see above is the usual conceit of - well, I'll omit the adjectives. > "My solution is the best possible solution". Or the conceit could be > generational "We are the peak of development and what we do is the best > possible approach to..." The basic idea behind this conceit is that things > have now reached their peak - and will stay the same forever. No, Israel, not at all. My concern is that tuners begin to promote themselves in the area of historical application of temperament knowledge, when there obviously is no consensus on the matter among the academic community. That is completely separate from having the ability to perform or execute a tuning when requested, which I do not in any way oppose. I am struggling to put into words what I am trying to convey. Someone posted about having introduced their faculty to the idea of historical temperaments, and that was the genesis of interest among that faculty. That is lighting a spark, in my opinion, that we might wish we had never lit, lest the fire get out of control and we be blamed later for being incorrect. Several years ago I attempted to be that spark at our university. Thankfully, my interest was quickly thwarted by the faculty. "Stick to equal," was what I was told. "We assumed it [the fortepiano] hadn't been tuned," after I'd gone over it at least 4 times just before they came in to rehearse. I had consulted our faculty member who would have been the most informed on the subject, about which temperament would have been appropriate for the Hadyn piece they were rehearsing. His area was historical keyboards - harpsichord, fortepiano, clavichord, celeste, etc. But even he couldn't tell you which temperament would have been appropriate, and his knowledge was limited. He basically tuned "equal", or something close, when he tuned, but temperament just wasn't a big thing for him. At pitch, with good octaves and unisons seemed to be all he considered important. He did occasionally do a presentation for a class demonstrating the difference in temperaments, but the Baldwin SF was in roughly equal and the harpsichord was probably tuned in something harsh like Valotti/Young (which, according to what has been recently posted doesn't seem to have enjoyed widespread use). There wasn't really time to do a good demonstration with only fortepianos and harpsichords because time in the room was so limited. Dennis Johnson posted about billing oneself as a "master tuner" and becoming informed on the subject. What I am saying is that it is impossible to become ACCURATELY informed on the subject of historical appropriateness of temperament. And by promoting something erroneously, that makes us more incompetent than competent. From what I am reading and have read, very little evidence exists on the subject of the application of different tuning systems. All anyone can really do is guess at what was actually being done. Expecting the piano tuner to be an expert in the subject of historical appropriateness of tuning systems is expecting something that is apparently not possible. We must be careful that we do not erroneously recreate history by pretending to know which temperament Beethoven would have had on his piano when he composed the Moonlight Sonata, for example. We don't. No one does. And we can't find out. We can only speculate. (I actually imagine his fortepiano being out of tune more often than not, more like a practice room piano, and the composition happening inside his head, regardless of what he was hearing on the instrument. Due to the climactic instability of housing of the period, whatever temperaments would have been used likely wouldn't have remain clean enough to be able to identify more than an hour or so without needing to be retuned.) So, billing oneself as a "Master Tuner" involves just as much yielding to the reality that we can't possibly know everything as it does trying to pretend we can. Being able to perform something at a customer's request is entirely different. But promoting the implementation of historical appropriateness of temperaments is beyond the scope of the training of the piano technician -- particularly at the level of compensation CAUTs receive. Jeff
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