Ed, Avery and List, I have the document, and am editing it for email transmission. I certainly agree that I find it difficult to believe that the author is giving it away, but that _does seem_ (two conditionals in a row, there) to be the case. Anway, the document downloads as an ANSI (not ASCII) document with pretty poor formatting. I will have it up in WP8 and Word7 formats by next week. Interested parties should contact me directly. Further, my initial (which is not to say conclusive or final) reading leaves me with several conclusions, one of which is that, once again, folks with a modicum of knowledge (in this cased well-intentioned MDs) are plying their trade in uncharted seas. I immediately admit to a strong prejudice, as my own tuning was disrupted (briefly, if dramatically) by a similarly well-intentioned Feldendreis/Alexander instructor. While my own injuries related to lower left arm issues (read: "I tune really, really hard"), most of the studies out their (so far) of RIS/RTS injuries are so busy dealing with a pre-existing injury situation that they manage to miss the point that, in order to produce certain kinds of results, certain kinds of movements are necessary - e.g., there is a reason why pianists/violinists/violists who desire to produce a certain kind of tone wind up with certain kinds of injuries. Further still, again from first reading, the _only_ example in which the "weight" of the action of a piano is presented as a problem is the famous Paderewski v. Steinway story (no, not litigation, but it would have been nowdays). I strongly disagree that the mere amount of mass/inertia of a given action is the specific culprit in these discussion. For many years, actually for most years of it's production, the official touchweight of the S&S was 54 grams. In my over 30 years of concert work, there has been a consistently visible phenomenon/dividing line between folks who can/cannot, do/do not appreciate this kind of action. That is, people who grew up in the more "traditional" schools of piano playing understand that there is, among other things, work involved in performance, and that the piano as perceived by the audience will be significantly different from the same piano perceived from the keyboard. The other group is, by and large, the folks who have grown up in the post-1960 era of recording, in which, somehow, listeners expect that the sound of the instrument is magically supposed to be, at all possible locations, the same as the sound of the instrument at a few inches from the strings. The damage done to live performance, let alone recording, by these changes is simply monstrous to the point of being virtually indefinable. Note that nothing in the above condones, let alone approves, the touchweight of instruments with which we have all had to fight. On the other hand, we seem to be (finally) coming to to a point where the younger pianists of some schools/teachers seem, once again, to be able to see the piano action as something other than a series of 88 on/off switches. Obviously, I have no opinions, whatsoever, on these subjects... Best! Horace At 01:57 PM 9/17/1998 -0600, you wrote: >Avery & List- > >That is the address at which I found it, several months ago. I learned >of it from one of the lists on the PianoPage, under the topic 'Music >Medicine' Since I don't have internet access at this time, I can't >follow up there. > >The document of which I wrote is a hundred page Masters Thesis on the >history of piano caused hand injuries and the various treatment modalities >being used for them. When I copied it I thought 'I can't believe this >guy is giving this away.' > >I hope someone can find it, and am sorry if I led you up a blind alley. > >-Ed Sutton > NLU- > Horace Greeley, CNA, MCP, RPT Systems Analyst/Engineer Controller's Office Stanford University email: hgreeley@leland.stanford.edu voice mail: 650.725.9062 fax: 650.725.8014
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