On Jun 19, 2007, at 4:16 PM, johnsond wrote: > Certainly concert grands are more transparent, but this is not to > imply that somehow our standards are compromised on smaller > instruments. Sure it is. That is exactly the situation. It is impossible to maintain regulation, tuning and voicing on teaching and rehearsal instruments at the level required of a performance piano. We do indeed compromise our standards on smaller instruments. > We can tune faculty studio grands once a month and everybody is > happy to get it done that often. They would be even happier if you could touch them up once a week or more. I have a NY Times article here on the piano maintenance program at Julliard. "Even with twice the staff, it would be hard to keep up. The pianos in the teaching studios are tuned or at least touched up every day, starting at 7 am., when [the] primary assistant [technician]...makes his morning rounds." A photo caption reads: "Masaru Tsumita, left, the chief piano technician at the Juilliard School, presides over its piano workshop and supervises four full- time and three part-time assistants." (I count 8 technicians in that statement) The article title is : "274 Pianos to Coddle? You Have to Pull Strings" The article body says 247 pianos, so something is a misprint. Either way, that indicates a tech to piano ratio of either 1:34.25 or 1:30.88, and still "even with twice the staff, it would be hard to keep up". Here is how I would put it. "We are inadequately staffed to actually be able to maintain all the teaching and practice pianos to the level the faculty and students deserve. But one commitment we can make to every student, faculty member and guest artist during their time here is the opportunity to present and attend recitals at as close to the level of professional artists as possible. That means a concert piano as finely prepared as is possible on the stage. For most students, this may be their only opportunity to perform with such well prepared instruments. For others, who may pursue further education, recordings of performances may play an important part of their success at being accepted at other institutions. In either case such a commitment is worthy. To be able to maintain that commitment, a reasonable amount of time is required each day to ensure the concert piano is prepared for each day's performances, and can be reliably depended on to perform at top level." Or something to that effect. We have been in somewhat of a battle here over my ever shrinking concert prep time. The school is growing and what we really need is a second performance venue. What is happening is our little hall is being over crowded. But they want to use more of my time, and I am fighting, for their benefit, to not allow it to be consumed. They have made statements to the effect that they have always been very happy with the piano in the hall and don't see where I need so much time. My reply is that the reason they are happy with the piano in the hall is because I have enough time right now. If they take that time away, and let's say we have a major climate change the night before and the tuning goes haywire (and it will), then who suffers from the loss of piano prep time? I have never thought of larger grands as necessarily any more unstable than smaller ones. In fact, more the opposite. Rather, the performance venue is likely less climactically stable than a teaching studio, and so, change is more constant. But we expect more from the performance grands too, so they do require more work to meet that expectation. Jeff Tanner, RPT University of South Carolina -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/caut.php/attachments/20070620/340b6d0e/attachment.html
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