Fred, Yet another gripe of mine; students wearing out faculty studio Bs... They are in there 17 hours per day. As it is, we can barely keep up with tunings and broken strings there. I guess I should just grin and think of this as "job security". One faculty member made this comment, "This would be a great job (teaching) if it wasn't for those darn students". Regards, Jim -----Original Message----- From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Fred Sturm Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 7:58 AM To: caut at ptg.org Subject: Re: [CAUT] FW: Concert hall pianos On Dec 4, 2009, at 6:22 AM, Jim Busby wrote: > I would think that perhaps a reasonable compromise can be met - > perhaps with allowing only the serious performance majors controlled > access to the instruments. A criteria could be developed that would > qualify the students that would have access to the pianos. Sign-in > sheets could be used but these sheets would need to be approved by a > person that would have the authority and ownership of the schedule > and this person would be responsible for ensuring the system is not > misused. This is an excerpt from Kent Webb's very reasonable post. I'd say that if a select group of piano students is given some access, it should be made very, very plain that the purpose is highly restricted. They are not to be doing their warmup, their scales and arpeggios and exercises, or learning notes on this instrument. It is for working on interpretation _only_!!! And I would think that a maximum of one two hour session per week for the very top students would be a reasonable limit. I'd also suggest alternatives: what about the piano faculty studios in those early and late hours, when they are unlikely to be there? Lots of faculty in lots of institutions give students access. And, of course, there is the question of the condition of practice room grands. While they can't be kept up to concert condition, they should be kept as close as possible, well prepped and regulated, reasonably well voiced, tuning not allowed to get too horrible. Maybe there could be a special practice room where the piano is kept up to a higher standard, and practice times are allocated specifically to that room on a limited basis per student (not 2-3 hours a day for a given student, but maybe a couple 2 hour sessions a week max per student). The concert instrument is important to the whole department, and to the institution. It is the public face of the department. It must be as good as it can be. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu
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