But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt by others.1
- Aristotle
Specialism
I am not an expert. If one coerced me to categorize my responsibilities in the rather arcane occupation of piano technician, however contrary to previous assertions, I would be reluctant to rigidly designate it to the activity of a scientist, ad hoc, an acoustician, or engineer, however much these play a role in the field. This has less to do with what piano technicians do than with who I am. With all the distractedness of the dilettante, I always fancied myself much more the Renaissance man, however pretentious that is, and my profession the field for it. The image of specialists in lab coats colluding in a basement amidst test tubes respiring ostentatious expressions privy to their expertise with degree as imprimatur I would rather abdicate.
“A philosopher,” observes John Ziman, when discussing specialization, “is a person who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows nothing about everything… A scientist is a person who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing.”2 Maybe I am practicing the wrong career. I don’t know. I am more the intrepid aesthete and the philosopher than the trepid specialist and critic who impugns the creator, performer, and musician in light of his own perceived inferiority, determined to find beauty in everything, particularly, language.
The desecration of language found in specialism subverts the aesthete from finding beauty in language, however guilty of using it when I write, and as a piano technician my goal is not to impede beauty in anything. Language is for the poets, not the specialists. I learn more about piano technology from Shakespeare than books on piano technology, because I am here to make the piano sound beautiful, and learn that aesthetic from artists, not experts in acoustics.
Other translators of Aristotle claim “Aristotle was primarily a scientist. Almost all of his extant works are scientific treatises,” and go on to deny that Francis Bacon instead is the foundation for coeval empirical science.3 I think a distinction must be made, and find that Del’s contribution for all its merits did not follow Bacon’s model in that it for the most part did not give the impression that the piano is undergoing a controlled series of experiments, but has reached a stage of development where it now has been completed, though I could have got the wrong impression. I say this because Del seems to think that we need not consider that the vibrating string on the modern piano of C88 has a larger diameter than the F1 of a Mozart fortepiano, and it is here that we cannot come to terms. I cannot categorize sound apart from vibrating strings for this reason alone.
It is not just the piano industry. This stagnancy in it reflects a trend Ziman characterized throughout industry in scientific research since WW2. In his survey of “Specialism and change in scientific careers,” John Ziman observed in his book Knowing Everything about Nothing a trend since WWII toward “The collectivization of science.”4 Meeting the expectations for external forces of all sorts increasingly affects the direction of inquiry in Research and Development. It is unbelievable that Baldwin actually pulled off adding the accujust. Ziman concluded:
Until, say, the Second World War, the majority of scientific research was carried out in the traditional ‘academic’ style, where each researcher was free—at least in principle—to undertake any investigation that he or she thought worth while. In practice, many social considerations might have to be taken into account in a decision on what research problem to tackle next, but such decisions were seldom determined by external agencies… One has only to look into any modern research laboratory, and listen to scientists talking amongst themselves, to realize that there has been a profound transformation in the way that scientific work is now organized. Internal and external forces have combined to ‘collectivize’ the research process… This very expensive activity is supported by governments and commercial firms… Whether for good or ill, the fact is that, in Britain as in most other advanced industrial countries, scientists now work mainly in large ‘R&D organizations’ or ‘technical systems’ whose goals are set either by non-scientific bodies such as government departments and boards or directors of companies, or by high-level scientific bodies such as research councils.5
Securing funding for research changes the direction of scientific inquiry. The institution providing funding might assess a research project and refuse to support it because of private interest, political motives, or erroneous conclusions; the scientist then must abandon this approach and go in a direction soliciting compensation. Spin off guilds create standards that never would have existed without them. Business majors, now schoolmen as well, mobilize to manage the experts and create a huge industry.6 Or take down Baldwin. For the piano industry, this means that the CaUT list consists of pleas for pianoforte parts, and that every piano constructed by big business needs 20 tons of string tension to be accepted as a piano. It is no coincidence that with Steinway the accelerated action and the diaphragmatic soundboard developed before WW2, and that innovation at the factory ever since is scorned. Innovation in the piano industry is now reserved for toolmakers, notwithstanding a few modest changes.
Soundboard as Amplifier
Anyhow, the metaphor of soundboard as amplifier works for me, as layman’s terms or otherwise, for all its weaknesses. This is how Dr. White qualified it, indicating “The layman will better understand this amplifying function of the soundboard…” 7 I do not find it unscientific. Take for example the scientific assertion and metaphor, H2O is water. We could engage in a debate about whether this is tap water or bottled water for weeks on end. H2O will not be any less or more water weeks later. Likewise, we could go on and on about the literal application of amplifier vs. the metaphorical application. There are things that trouble me about it, one, that a volume knob sometimes will appear on an amplifier, but it still works because I do not see metaphors as unscientific, or that what the piano technician says needs to be. It sounds good. Why do we wish to make it so complicated to interact with the general public by demanding a rigorous specialized language when bouncing ideas off one another?
Recently I purchased a cord to connect my MP3 player to my stereo. I found it to be a weaker device than my phonograph and CD player. However, the MP3 player has a volume switch. When I turned it up, the music gets louder, and vice versa. I find that if we seriously entertain the metaphor of soundboard as amplifier, that this phenomenon of volume adjustment in the MP3 further interferes with our capacity to make so great a distinction between the action, as I mentioned before, and sound.
The plate, string diameter, the string tension of the modern piano is all too much of a transformation in pianoforte construction in the history of the keyboard for me to discard these as a part of sound. I grant that the speaker produces the sound, not the MP3 player. However, the measure of sound the speaker produces is intimately tied to the vibrating string, as much if not more, than the soundboard. I take the metaphor to indicate
1. Speaker is String
2. MP3 player is action
3. Amplifier is soundboard
Even if we insist on science, how do these metaphors deviate from it? Because we must interpret amplifier literally?
1 Aristotle in McKeon, R., ed., “Poetics,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House 1941 1459a
2 Ziman, John Knowing Everything about Nothing; Specialization and Change in Scientific Careers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987 p. v
3 Apostle, H. G. Aristotle, Selected Works, Third Edition. Grinnell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press 1991 pp. 5-21
4 Ziman, John Knowing Everything about Nothing; Specialization and Change in Scientific Careers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987 Ibid. p. 23
5 Ziman, John Knowing Everything about Nothing; Specialization and Change in Scientific Careers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987 Ibid. pp. 23, 24
6 Burell, G. The Management of Expertise. Ed., Harry Scarbrough Great Britain: Antony Rowe Ltd. 1996
7 http://www.steinway.com/technical/soundboard.shtml
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