On Feb 24, 2011, at 8:57 AM, Dale Erwin wrote: > Can we agree that It sounds like you are as close to your opinions > as others are to theirs. Now were all even. Lets give it a rest. > Its gettin ugly. > FWIW I didn't even know Ron then. As I said earlier. I'm not a fan > of the Emperors new clothes in any genre of anything and am quite > willing to call spades spades. I have no particular desire to make things ugly, but there are some really important practical considerations at stake here. There has been all sorts of rhetoric about how wonderful various redesign elements are, how they transform pianos into something exquisite. Then you have a number of cauts, inspired by this rhetoric, persuading their departments/schools to put a sizable chuck of money into such an enterprise. And the result, in a number of cases I know about, is that the instrument is a disaster from a practical point of view: nobody will play it. Maybe the tech loves it. But that poor caut is in an untenable position of having staked his/her reputation, and has to live with the result. Faculty and students unhappy, money out the window. A number of them are subscribed to this list, and don't want to say anything for any number of reasons, embarrassment being one, desire not to embarrass someone else being a second, avoidance of controversy being a third, not wanting to making enemies a fourth . . . So I insert a discordant note into this conversation for a purpose. This is the caut list. I think cauts need to have this aired, so they can make a rational decision on how to spend their limited budgets. The rhetoric and hype is pretty compelling. The reality? Well, at best, mixed, at worst, disastrous. As I advised in an earlier post, look before you leap. Look at real instruments in real venues. I'll close by saying I am 100% for pushing the envelope, experimentation, open minds and ears. From a practical perspective, though, every day I have to please a large number of pianists. Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu http://www.createculture.org/profile/FredSturm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20110224/b80ab662/attachment.htm>
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