<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Nov 1, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Richard Brekne wrote:</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> " if having a degree really makes a difference, we should be seeing</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> a noticeable difference in performance of our craft. "</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Two points here...</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Number one who has shown one way or the other whether there is any truth to this statement.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>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.</DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">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 ?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>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.<BR><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">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.</FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV>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.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>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.)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>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.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>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.</DIV><BR><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>Jeff Tanner, RPT</DIV><DIV>University of South Carolina</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>