<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> The main point here is simply whether or not the curriculum for a certification meant for a Head of Piano Technology Department should  include some level of formal music education. Reducing this education in one way another to something far more worthless then it in actuality is doesn't really work well as an argumentation. This time you boil it down to Music Theory 101.  I understand you are trying to sharpen your point... but we just all end up off on a meaningless tangent debating what education is or isnt. It is in my mind untenable to suppose that two otherwise equally technicians in any field are going to be equally effective if one of these can relate to the pianists, car driver, whathaveyou, reality significantly better then the other.  The only question is whether an associates degree in music with piano as the instrument can do that or not in our particular case. I'll grant that its an unproven postulate.... but I will also stand on the likelihood of its validity.  Whether one is self taught, had Mr Mozart Senior exercising extremes of discipline on a 3 year old, or one going through a school system is not as important as how much one learns to be sure... but thats a very complicated issue beyond the scope of what can be simply debated in this type of forum.  To generalize an imply that the college system is not a superior system of instruction is really meaningless... because for some students it is exactly that... for other it isnt.  We do not all learn the same way.  As to the other composers... Liszt for example learned initially from his father true... did education stints with Czerny, Salieri and Chopin later in his youth... and .... ended up being a teacher at the Budapest Conservatory of Music. Hardly a good example of someone not a product of structured education. In any case all this is basically off the point.  The whole point of a CAUT certification is to provide administrators with a very solid handle to hold onto when evaluating a Head of Piano Technology Department applicant, with the main goal from our side to improve awareness of how important our contribution is, how high we should be valued. I find it not surprising at all that the <<piano guy>> in the modern world is generally speaking an undervalued, little understood person... and the work he/she does even less valued or understood given argumentations by our own folks that reduce us to mere mechanics who need to know little or nothing about the users perspective of the product we work on.  We are not refrigerator repairmen... and the piano doesn't have a simple off and on switch.  It is an instrument of creative expression, and to service it to the degree a Head CAUT should be able to... one needs to be well down that same creative road both as a technician and as a musician. As with all things... the better start from a pure educational point of view one has... the shorter the learning path experience yeilds.  Cheers RicB   <blockquote> The main point I was debating, though, is that there are other   alternatives which, for our purposes, are just as effective at   teaching what we need to know to be good piano technicians and   communicate with pianists.  For our purposes, a college degree is a   resume filler.  What I want to know about a piano technician is   something completely unrelated to what he learned in Music Theory 101. But I would completely disagree with anyone who thinks that the   college system is the superior system of instruction of the study of   music.  It is a system and it is a generally accepted system.  But   neither Mozart nor Beethoven nor Liszt nor Tchaikovsky learned music   this way.  They could have taught our instructors by they time they   were teenagers.  And I bet if you polled a few of your instructors,   you'd see they would rather teach music via a different system. But that wouldn't provide a steady income and a benefit package. Best Regards, Jeff</blockquote> </body> </html>