[CAUT] 7th meantone for Serkin

[Aaron Bousel]

I thought I would let you all know what finally happened with this 
tuning for Peter Serkin the other week. I was scheduled to tune at 
11:30am Friday and again at 5:30 pm Saturday. On Thursday I got an 
email from Peter's manager with jpegs of four sheets of information 
from Tim Farley that included some offsets. For the record, here they are:

F:    4.5
F#: -3.4
G:   2.2
G#:-5.6
A:   0.0
A#: 5.6
B:  -2.2
C:   3.3
C#: -4.5
D:    1.1
D#:  6.7
E:   -1.1

I also got an email from my contact at the symphony telling me that I 
should be prepared to tune either the 7th meantone or ET. I arrived a 
little before 11:30 on Friday, walked out onto the stage and......no 
piano. They don't own one, they get a Steinway C&A from Steinert's. 
Shari. the production manager, told me that the piano was "on its 
way" and should arrive within about 20 minutes. We did a quick 
calculation of how long I could wait to tune it once it arrived and 
be done in time for the first rehearsal, and I went and had a cup of 
coffee for about an hour. When I came back the piano was there and 
Shari had turned the stage lights on it so it was more warmed up than 
it would have otherwise been. Oh yeah, after all that, they wanted 
ET. It had to do with the dealer wanting the piano put back to ET and 
the symphony not wanting to pay for extra tunings. The symphony 
people were feeling perhaps a bit less than accommodating because 
they only heard about the tuning issue that Monday. So I tuned, and 
when I came back the next day at 5:30 for the pre-concert tuning I 
was pleased to find the pitch pretty much right where I'd left it. I 
met Peter and we chatted a bit about tunings and he said he was happy 
with the piano. And I got there a little early on Saturday and got to 
hear the final run through of the last two movements of Beethoven's 
4th. The long and short of it is that had the tuning been part of the 
contract, it would have not been a problem, but throwing something 
like this in at the last minute didn't go over well at all. I'm sorry 
I didn't get to try the 7th meantone after all that, but at least I 
got the beginning of an education in something that I'm sure will 
come up again as the use of UETs begins to spread.

Again, thanks to all for your help.

Aaron


------------------------------------------
Aaron Bousel
abousel at comcast.net
(413) 253-3544 (voice)
(413) 253-3846 (voice & fax)  
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