In a message dated 98-02-04 12:01:53 EST, you write: << I sat in on that session, and it was not during Council, but during a meeting that occurred later in the convention for those who were interested in the subject of standardizing pitch. IAPBT (International Association of Piano Builders and Technicians) members had the opportunity to be there as well. to the best of my knowledge, there was not a + or - tolerance discussed when voting for a resolution that A440 be the recognized pitch. Keith A. McGavern >> You are correct, of course. I was at the Council meetings, that meeting and at the IAPBT meeting and was a delegate to it. It's been long enough ago that I find it hard to seperate all the meetings in my mind. But I do seem to remember the tolerance of 1 Hz. being written somewhere. Perhaps it was in the Journal discussions of whether always tuning to Standard Pitch was correct or whether it is OK to let the pitch "drift" with the seasons the way many technicians here in the Midwest do. Having 1¢ as a tolernace for pitch seems awfully small to me. In the exam, effectively, if you are off by 1 Hz, your pitch score will be just below 80 and you will fail the Exam. That was also the Convention where the Baldwin Recital was tuned in 1/7 Comma Meantone with tempered octaves. The Japanese were crowding all around the instrument afterwards and discussing the way it was tuned. There were many people who expressed to me how thrilling the tuning sounded including Jim Coleman and the Head Technician from Yamaha, Kenzo. Each year, I receive a beautiful Japanese designed Christmas card from Kenzo who encourages me in my work and tells me to persist saying he knows that those who pioneer a cause meet with much unkindness and hateful resistance. Then there were others who made hateful, ugly and threatening remarks to me and Kent Webb. I received a hate filled, threatening letter afterwards warning me that there were those in PTG who knew what I was up to and that I had better stop it. Other practitioners of the HT's have been met with similar cowardly acts of bigotry and ignorence. Some of those perpetrators are on this very List. They feel that they hold the only opinions about temperament which are valid and correct and can say anything they please which denegrates and insults a fellow technician but if someone disagrees with them or tries anything like the punishment they freely dole out, watch out! From what I gather here, by the information supplied by those who know, PTG has never established any standard for either pitch or temperament. There are only the tolerences for the RPT Exam which, as Jim Bryant correctly states, is only a criterion for establishing the status of Registered Piano Technician. The Exam has nothing to do with any generally accepted professional standard. Outside of the context of the Exam itself, it can only be cited as a point of reference in discussion or to make a hypothetical example. As I stated in my previous post, if a tuning had to be good enough to score 100% in temperament, pitch, unisons, stability and the various octaves in order to be considered "normal" or of a professional standard, no one on earth who tunes a piano has ever done it yet! <<If it were an absolute requirement that our pitch be within 1¢ of A440 and our temperament be absolutely equal to a tolerance of 1¢, in order to sound good or even be usable with other instruments, we would all have to be far more exacting in our work and our tunings would become unusable far sooner than they actually do.>> >From what people on this List have so plainly asserted, any tuning that one does in ernest must be considered professionally done and beyond all reproach unless the person who does it actually knows what the quantitative values of its deviations from true ET are. Then it is unethical unless the technician informs the customer of the facts. On the other hand, if the technician doesn't know where and how large the deviatiions from ET are, it is not at all incumbent on that technician to find out or to make any changes in proceedure. In other words, "What you don't know won't hurt anybody, what you do, will!" Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin
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