[CAUT] CAUT Endorsement

[Israel Stein]

At 10:59 AM 10/19/2007, Mike Magness wrote:

>Another area addressed by a few people was the seat of the pants 
>repairs, finding that elusive rattle or getting that damper to stop 
>creating that overtone. I came late to the Guild, I am now very 
>ashamed to say, I spent the first 30 years of my 38 years in this 
>craft outside the PTG. I had a mentor who was a member and invited 
>me from time to time but I never felt the need for some unknown 
>reason. So I came up, remember this was before the internet and cell 
>phones, figuring out a lot of things for myself and what I couldn't, 
>I discussed with Paul my mentor and he usually had an answer or idea 
>for me to try. Consequently I became very good at coming up with 
>plan A repairs and while I was performing plan A, formulating plan B 
>just in case, I never got beyond plan D without one of them 
>working!<g>My point is a tech can go to the best school, read all of 
>the books but if he/she doesn't have that seat of the pants spirit 
>of,"OK, I've never seen this before but I'm here, alone so I HAVE to 
>figure it out"! She/He will not make the best tech and perhaps that 
>should be a consideration on a CAUT test. Throw some "out of left 
>field" problems at them and see what they come up with. My mentor 
>used to be one of the testors for the RPT test, back when they used 
>to lay out a table full of objects and the testee would have to name 
>them for the nomenclature test. Paul liked to put a non-piano item 
>on the table, something fairly obscure, usually an antique tool from 
>his collection just see what the person would say, for fun but I 
>think it was also to see if they exhibited something that is lacking 
>more and more these days, common sense. Having the ability to deal 
>with an unexpected problem that develops in an instrument that you 
>are preparing for a concert without going into a panic strikes me as 
>the epitomy of a good concert tech and CAUT.

Mike,

You beat me to the punch. I have just finished catching up with all 
the posts on this subject, and what struck me as incongruous is that 
the CAUT task force - and everyone else who posted on this subject - 
create the impression that the CAUT's position starts and ends with 
the quality of the concert tuning. You correctly noted that skills in 
repairs and troubleshooting are perhaps even more important than the 
ability to produce the perfect tuning.

I have been doing CAUT work off and on for some 17 years now - first 
as a contractor, then as a half-time employee at a university for the 
past 3 years or so. I managed to put in a couple years in between all 
that as the primary Steinway C & A tuner in Boston. I have tuned for 
some big name performers along the way - and I just do not understand 
this obsession with "the highest quality concert tuning" as the 
primary qualification for the CAUT. Not that it isn't important - it 
is. But try and survive in this profession if you can't keep those 
teaching studio pianos in good repair, do the rebuilding work when 
necessary, quickly spot problems - and fix them - on all kinds of 
pianos (not only the ones in the concert hall), get a stable tuning 
on a piano in a pitch raise situation, need I keep going? Then there 
is inventory control, organizational and recordkeeping skills, 
knowledge of current industry conditions and resources...

A CAUT endorsement (and I favor this concept for reasons that I will 
outline later)  in order to be meaningful to a hiring manager has to 
represent a variety of skills - and an exam that results in this 
endorsement must sample a good representation of such skills. But to 
be practical, it also has to be capable of being administered in a 
reasonable amount of time - or you will find no willing takers and no 
willing examiners. Then there are some legal requirements of 
objectivity that must be met in order to avoid anti-trust issues. And 
in the anti-trust area since the CAUT marketplace is theoretically 
national in scope, the problem is even more complex than in the RPT 
area. Perhaps these issues need to be studied a bit more carefully 
before a commitment is made to some of the test guidelines I have 
seen propounded here...

Israel Stein