[CAUT] CAUT credential vs. academic program?

[Jeff Tanner]

On Nov 1, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Richard Brekne wrote:

>    " if having a degree really makes a  difference, we should be  
> seeing
>    a noticeable difference in  performance of our craft. "
>
> Two points here...
>
> Number one who has shown one way or the other whether there is any  
> truth to this statement.

I think the real challenge would be to prove there is no truth to the  
statement.  The fact is that there are many very respected techs at  
upper echelon schools who do not have music degrees.  In my mind, it  
would be more difficult to prove their work is inferior to that of  
someone who has a degree than to prove that it is not.

> Number two... if one attempted to show this one way or the other...  
> are you going to adequately create an "all else things being equal"  
> situation to fairly test the claim ?
>

Yeah, I was kind of wondering how we could create an "all else things  
being equal" anyway.  You find that, and you need to go buy a lottery  
ticket -- today.  The only way to create that situation would be to  
take a well skilled technician and enroll him/her in a college music  
degree program and see what comes out the other side.  But you'd  
still get a tech with four (or more) years of experience as a  
technician.


> Strikes me that if you have two techs with equal abilities and  
> talents and development in all ways but one has a far better  
> understanding and grasp of the pianists <<reality>> then the  
> other... the guy with this understanding is without question going  
> to be able to be more effective.  In fact I really fail to see how  
> anyone can question this.

I don't see how anyone can deduce that the one with the better  
understanding and grasp of the pianists will necessarily be the one  
with a music degree.  You are incorrectly labeling that someone who  
has earned a music degree is automatically a better musician than  
someone who has not pursued music at the higher education level.

With all due respect, I rather think you are basing your belief on a  
one-sided perspective.  Here's a parallel:  I don't for the life of  
me comprehend how the visually impaired can do some of this work.   
But they do.  Because I am sighted, I can't imagine being able to do  
some of this work without that ability.  But there are exceptional  
technicians who do our work who don't have the gift of sight.  (In  
fact, I've had educated people (yes, more than one, and we're talking  
doctors here) who have told me they thought you had to be blind to be  
a piano tuner.)

And I can acknowledge there might potentially be a measurable  
difference in effectiveness for someone with an extensive musical  
background, but I would think it would be so small as to be  
insignificant, and, in fact I think one has to overcome a lot of what  
he has learned about music to do this work.  What we do is completely  
mechanical.  Yes, one needs to be able to  know how to press the keys  
and make it work to be able to be an effective technician.  That's  
just common sense.  But I didn't learn to run chromatic scales in the  
couple years of piano lessons I took (heck, half the time my piano  
teacher was my algebra tutor).  Yes, of course I know what they are,  
but I developed the fingering on my own.  (and our piano department  
chair heard me do it one day and said, "hey, that's pretty good!").   
But it just makes good sense that to check for evenness of touch and  
tone one would check with chromatic runs.  I didn't need a music  
degree for that to make sense.  I did learn major and minor scale  
fingerings, but I'm so danged clumsy with those scales they are more  
of a hindrance to me than a help.  I cannot do that 3 finger trill  
thing, but I can check repetition pretty danged fast with two hands.   
What music I do play, I learn on my own, using some recordings as  
references.  I think being a technician might have made me a better  
player, but I don't think being a half decent hacker at the piano  
makes me a better technician so much.

Look, I think it's going to be a very rare case that someone is  
interested in our business without some interest or knowledge of  
music.  But let's get real -- earning a music degree does not a  
musician make.  I think musical people are born that way, but if not,  
then those qualities are developed by exposure by the time a child is  
10 or 12.  But if one is not musically inclined by at least 18, they  
never will be.  Someone who holds a music degree has merely  
demonstrated that they can absorb material long enough to regurgitate  
it on an exam, and that they have shown some degree of incremental  
improvement in musical ability over a 2 or 4 year period, that they  
have attended a certain number of performances per term and have been  
present and accounted for in at least one performing ensemble each  
term.  It has not made them musical if they were not already.  In my  
own case, I should have enough music credits to have earned a minor  
degree in music, but my degree program didn't recognize minors, so I  
never bothered to check it out.  But it's difficult for me to say  
that the information and experience I gathered in my college music  
department made me a better piano technician.  I just don't think  
that would be an accurate statement.  I had music inside of me before  
I went there.  I'm not even sure it made me a better musician -- it  
might have made me better technically (as a singer), but even so, my  
real technical improvement in my musical ability has happened in the  
years after college.  Sure, there were inspirational musical  
experiences in college, but I've had those in church choir, too.   
What has made me a better piano technician has been the opportunity  
to work with really good pianists and really good pianos, and I've  
learned a lot incrementally as I've needed to learn something new.   
What I am trying to acknowledge that there are really good  
technicians (I'm quite sure better than me) out there with little  
music background, and many with no college experience at all, and  
they improve their skills exactly the same way those of us with more  
music in our backgrounds and college degrees do.  We learn new stuff  
as we come to a need for that knowledge, and there is a point where a  
music degree just has nothing to do with managing the maintenance of  
an inventory of pianos in a college music department.


Jeff Tanner, RPT
University of South Carolina



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