I'm sure the infusion of the new Steinways will be an improvement over your present situation, but I can't help but think this is yet another sellout to a brilliant marketing campaign. I am constantly amazed at the number of educational institutions, whose very existence historically is possible because of a die-hard dedication to diversity and questioning status quo, making such a contradictory decision . Music institutions are being bought and paid for, robbing their students of the opportunity to make music on a variety of wonderful pianos, under the guise of joining the "elite." I wish more administrators had the guts to say to donors, "we would love to accept your donation and offer a complete musical education to our students by purchasing the best pianos from around the world, including Steinway." Instead, they are so excited about the money, they ignore the cornerstone of education - diversity. A sad day for music. ________________________ Rick Florence Senior Piano Technician Arizona State University School of Music -----Original Message----- From: caut-bounces at ptg.org on behalf of Wolfley, Eric (wolfleel) Sent: Fri 11/21/2008 7:59 AM To: 'caut at ptg.org' Subject: [CAUT] CCM goes "All Steinway" Hi All, Some of you may have already heard the news...Tuesday, the board of trustees at the University of Cincinnati approved a deal with Steinway that will make the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music an "All Steinway School". We will be purchasing 165 new pianos for the school all of which will be delivered before next June! This is the single largest deal in Steinway's history in terms of number of units purchased. The total price tag is 4.1 million. This deal is on the initiative of our new Dean, Douglas Knehans and is the cornerstone of a new capital campaign and just one of a plethora of sweeping moves he is making to improve CCM's global image. Here's a link for the deal...there was also a NY Times article last Tuesday, but I can't seem to make that link active. http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.asp?id=9235 I just got back from NYC where we selected the first batch of pianos, 2 D's and 8 B's and I was most happy to find the quality of the pianos in the selection room to be excellent...we had no trouble choosing our pianos. Our first shipment of 27 pianos arrives next week. While the quality of our performance pianos here at CCM has been perceived as excellent over the years, the age and quality of the pianos in the practice rooms, classrooms and studios has been a challenge. Before this deal, CCM had the largest inventory of Baldwins anywhere in the world I'm sure. The average age of our inventory here before this deal was 35 years so this will be quite an improvement for many years to come. I have no qualms or reservations about the deal...there's no question the quality level of our inventory is going way up. I am perfectly aware of the challenges that the next year will pose with all these green pianos but hey, there are worse problems to have. The nature of our jobs here will change dramatically for years to come...much less rebuilding, more tuning, voicing and regulating. I'll keep you all posted on how things go. Eric Eric Wolfley, RPT Director of Piano Services College-Conservatory of Music University of Cincinnati -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 4339 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20081121/ef07b271/attachment-0001.bin>
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