On 11/8/2010 7:38 AM, Fred Sturm wrote: > Actually, my vote for Cecil Taylor does not apply to "making the piano > go out of tune," just to really getting maximum motion out of all the > strings in the piano. I didn't find that his playing made the piano go > particularly out of tune, while the technique of other pianists is > more apt to do so. I think it has to do with a more brittle attack, > lack of fluidity in the technique - which is also the kind of > technique that will lead to broken strings and piano parts, and to > ugly sound as well. Leon Bates one evening a long time ago now got far more sound out of the Baldwin SD-10 (always a big piano already) than I knew it had in it. He even started a new buzz, which I investigated. I found that the piano had a humidistat in it, and a piece of electrical cord coming from it ending in bare wires where it had been destroyed. Never even knew that piano had had a DC system installed! I removed it, and seated all the treble strings on the bridges (gently) and tuned it hard to get it back into some kind of stability. The tuning hadn't sounded TOO terrible after he played, but I knew it had taken damage. On the other hand, I've tuned many times for Leon and had the tuning fresh as a daisy afterwards. He's not really a tuning-buster, IMO, so long as the tuning is decent to begin with. Well, one day mine wasn't. Leon once totally destroyed what I imagined was my most stable tuning just while practicing. AND that was the day I discovered that after the piano was rebuilt two years before (not by me), the sostenuto passed three tests but totally failed the fourth (which I had been too dim to try), when Leon said it wasn't working. I struggled a few minutes with it, (the screw heads had made divots in the aluminum so it kept sliding back to where it had been) then adjusted it with card shims so the middle pedal gave him a sustaining in the bass, and an unaffected treble. I apologized. He was a true gentleman about it all. I came back the next week and spent most of a day on the thing. Filed the aluminum, installed washers, fiddled with the adjustment. Finally got it right. Just shows how few people use it, that it took this long before anyone noticed. Alexander Lee Frick adored that piano, and said very complimentary things about it in the pre-concert talk. On the other hand, he played it so hard he demolished the tuning over and over. He talked about how wonderful the voicing was (and I had worked a lot on it) but I realized that his playing was the kind which destroyed voicing in short order. I sweated a lot over the tuning just before he played, and the piece was only twenty minutes long (and I forget what it was!) The tuning made it by a hair in the performance, but if he'd played it twice -- it doesn't bear thinking of. I just checked on how he was doing ... and found that he died in 2006, far too young, only 52. That's really bad! He had a lot to offer, which he did very generously. http://obits.oregonlive.com/obituaries/oregon/obituary.aspx?n=alexander-lee-frick&pid=18191347 Big, big players who don't drive things out: I have observed this a lot, too. Constantine Orbelian, nice wide bear paws for hands, very firm flexibility. Really wonderful hands. He was rocking the rafters in the Schnittke concerto, scared me half to death, then it has soft passages -- everything was still immaculate, he made it sound clear as anything. Some evenings one NEVER forgets. I love great big players with flexibility in their technique, who draw huge sounds without driving the tuning out. I've learned over time that there is a kind of poking, nervous playing where the pianist is trying to assert dominance, and THAT can drive notes out, even when they are well tuned. Big bodybuilding pianists play incredibly loud, and just get a big sound and all is well; then a little energetic cheerful Chinese lady who seems to weigh about 90 pounds pokes at a note -- and out it goes. I make a distinction in my mind between pianists who destroy tunings but produce musical results and those who destroy tunings from a lack of understanding the instrument or from a need to release anger. You can tell by the tone -- either it just gets bigger and bigger, or it breaks and gets nasty and tight. I don't have a lot of sympathy for those who are proud of beating up on pianos but don't get musical results from it. There's a kind of pointillist technique which can find any instability in the tuning, but which (I was about to say, "has its points" <grin>.) Kind of a repetitive jabbing can get notes sour. One time I tuned for a French pianist (who shall remain nameless), once in Newport then two days later in McMinnville, at Linfield College. (chamber music) I couldn't understand it -- his playing in concert was lovely, interesting, and somehow he managed to make New York Steinway D's sound like French pianos. Part of what NY D's are good at, I assume, hiding many varied pianos inside a single black case. Anyway, I couldn't understand it. He managed to drive out my tunings, which I had to tidy up right before both concerts, yet his playing wasn't brutal or brittle or any of that -- but before the second concert I heard a little of his practicing. It was very nervous, with lots of stuttered repetitive notes. There was one other time that a pointed, jabbing kind of technique had me struggling, but it was SO musical! "Trio Solisti", Maria Bachmann, violin, Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello, Jon Klibonoff, piano. That was a genuinely FUN concert! The same music they played is in their CD, "Cafe Music." That punctuation was truly indispensable for what they were doing. I don't mind extra work for a good cause. I've learned over the years that my tuning will usually hang in there, but that for someone now and then -- well, it won't. (Benny Green, jazz pianist, quite fun to listen to, but oh my.) I've stopped wondering how the stability of my tuning stacks up against everyone else's. I just try to do them as well as I can. My tunings are possibly above average on the bulletproof front, certainly they have improved over the years, but who's counting? Susan Kline -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20101108/a7cf77f4/attachment.htm>
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