[CAUT] Test Standards (was Steinway stretch)

[Susan Kline]

At 11:34 AM 12/2/2004 -0500, Jeff wrote:
>Hey Fred,
>Perhaps there is a good reason for this.  When I took the test at one of 
>the regional conferences, the room we wound up finding the piano in was, 
>shall we say, less than ideal.  The test committee was not happy with it, 
>but there was not a whole lot they could do about it, and they had a bunch 
>of tests lined up, so we basically had to deal with what we were 
>dealt.  It was your typical hotel room, complete with "under the window" 
>air conditioning -- yes, right next to where they had to place the 
>piano.  With the air off, the room temp quickly rose well above 80 
>degrees.  The piano was basically wrapped in plastic to shield it from air 
>flow.  With the a/c on, and the piano wrapped in plastic, hearing partials 
>was next to impossible.  So, you turn the air off for a while to tune a 
>bit, then turn it back on to try to cool the room down.  That piano moved 
>all over the place.  My stability was good, though I don't know how far 
>away from the original mid section measurements it was.
>But by the time he got around to measuring my unisons (that's the last 
>thing, right?), he told me my original pitches had moved quite a bit.

I had almost the same experience. The piano, a Young Chang grand about 6' 
long, arrived at the hotel just before the test. It was put in a room just 
across the hall from an indoor swimming pool. When I started the test, the 
room was cool and comfortable, but it had a west window, and the heat 
soared later on. They asked if they should turn on the air conditioning, 
and I was afraid to throw everything out, and didn't want the noise, so I 
said no. The temperature was at least 85 degrees by the time they were 
testing. I barely got by the strict temperament standards (which bothered 
me a LOT), but where the leeway was a little greater I did fine.
For the stability test, they carefully dropped a "bonker" a certain 
distance onto some notes, and carefully measured them to see if they had 
changed. My notes stayed put. But I know from my later experiences that my 
tuning stability in concert situations had a long way to go before it was 
adequate. I had barely tuned for concerts at the time I took the test.

I think it would be extremely hard to do a proper test for stability, given 
the variety of pianos, how disarranged the wire tensions had or had not 
gotten during the "detuning" phase, how good or bad the climate control 
was, how old the wire was, how balky or cooperative the rendering was, etc. 
Yet stability is, I believe, far more important than 1 cent differences in 
a temperament. Also, how does one grade the tonal quality of unisons? And 
what could be more crucial to a tuning than the musical tone of the piano?

Some qualities just do not objectify well.

Susan Kline