HT's

[Horace Greeley]

Tom,

Drop by Carmel Sunday afternoon (3 pm, Sunset Center) to hear
Dubrovka Tomsic play Beethoven 5 with the Monterey
Symphony and hear for yourself.  My treat - call Joan or Diane
at the Symphony office and ask them to hold tickets for you.
Parking is truly appalling.  Dubrovka is the best thing to hit
the ivories in many years.  She's appeared on the East coast
and in SF to rave reviews.  This is a warm up to her LA
debut at UCLA.  Too bad Ambassador is closed, she has to
play at Schoenberg. 

And, yes - although, I must say that I personally prefer to think
of the work in terms of the German "intonierung"  (yes, I know,
there is a missing umlaut, depending on to whom you listen), as,
for me, it conveys much more of the sense of an overall
picture of the instrument - tuning, "voicing" (as differentiated
from "tuning"), regulation, etc.

"Divine" is close to accurate, although I do think that there is
a great deal of reductive effort - the problem (read "art") in
this (as in much else in life) is the knowledge of when to let
go of the reductive, and allow one's artistic sense to dictate
policy, if not procedure.

If you can make it - let's see if you can identify what, if indeed
anything at all, I do.

Bye-the-by, my personal temperament is _anything_ but Victorian...

I'm offline until at least next Tuesday, as I'll be in Carmel
until then, and make a point of not even looking at computers
while there.  (Rather like not looking at pianos whilst at
Stanford...a most pleasant compromise.)

For Les, Rich, and anybody else who gets too far into Jim's
branch water before I get back - PHTBPHTBPHTB!

Have a great weekend.

Best to all.

Horace



At 08:26 PM 3/19/1998 -0800, you wrote:
>Horace,
>
>The art of tuning, then, is to divine the right tuning for the
>performer/music/piano/hall. A challenging profession we have.
>
>When you say that you used a variety of HTs, are you meaning Victorian
>temperaments or earlier ones, too?
>
>Tom
>
>Horace Greeley wrote:
>> 
>> The "ideal" piano is transparent to the performer.  This is true whether
it is
>> used for private practice at home, for the church performance of the local
>> MTA branch recitals, or at Carnegie Hall.  For me, as a technician who has
>> _actively_ used a variety of HTs for many years in many settings, if the
>> performer notices the temperament at all, it is not transparent enough.
>> 
>> That is to say, virtually any temperament can be made to work, so long as
>> the octaves make sense, and the unisons are solid.  The temperament,
>> per se, should merely provide some difficult-to-define psycho-acoustic
>> element of freedom to/for the performer.  To the extent that the performer
>> is/becomes aware of the temperament _as such_, the tuning is, for me,
>> anyway, a failure.
>>
>-- 
>Thomas A. Cole, RPT
>Santa Cruz, CA
>
>
>
>
Horace Greeley, CNA, MCP, RPT

Systems Analyst/Engineer
Controller's Office
Stanford University

email: hgreeley@leland.stanford.edu
voice mail: 650.725.9062
fax: 650.725.8014