[CAUT] Piano juries on concert instruments

[Graves, Tony J.]

We have piano juries on our concert grand too and once those are done other areas have juries in there also.  There are also 4 piano studio classes for 2 hrs each week of the semester and a few of the strings have studio classes too each which I'm sure have piano accompanists on occasion. Plus  the dress rehearsals and recitals.  One of the piano faculty last year made a comment that the piano wasn't up to concert standards.  The same faculty member who lets students practice when he's not teaching made a comment that his studio piano wasn't up to teaching standards.  I think you can guess what I said in a polite way to each comment.

Tony Graves
Piano Technician
Ball State University
Muncie, IN
________________________________________
From: Israel Stein [custos3 at comcast.net]
Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 4:37 PM
To: CAUT at ptg.org
Subject: [CAUT] Piano juries on concert instruments

Hello all,

Well, the fecal matter has hit the air recirculation device here at ole SFSU. It seems that a couple of the piano professors have managed to prevail upon the Director (of the School of Music and Dance) to hold piano juries in the concert hall (two days, all day). Of course there was a Senior piano recital scheduled on each one of those evenings, and we (the piano techs) pointed to the Director that it probably would not be a good idea for the juries to be played on the instrument both chose to perform on - our Hamburg Steinway D - especially since there would not be time to even tune the piano for the recitals (never mind to reverse the voicing havoc of such abuse). Being a reasonable fellow, the Director instructed the piano faculty to use the other two Steinway Ds for their juries.

Today I found out that the two faculty members in question wrote a nasty e-mail to the Dean (of the College of Creative Arts - of which the SMD is a component) objecting to such scheduling of concerts that prevents their students from being able to play their juries on the best available piano. They still haven't gotten the message that using it in this way will make it the worst available piano in no time, since its general overuse has gotten those hammers to the edge (I dread needling them at this point)  - and there's no budget for replacement or major upgrade work, this being a California State University campus and the Governator getting ready to short us a few more zillion dollars next budget year...

To her credit, the Dean's Admin. Asst. sent them a rather snippy reply essentially telling them that they have no business holding juries in the concert hall in the first place (she is a graduate of this program from the days when we apparently had a lot smarter policies in place) and they can't have it both ways - get the prime concert piano for juries and have it available for everyone who wants to perform on it. But I suspect that we haven't heard the end of it.

The point of this story is to ask, what kind of policies regarding venues and instruments for piano juries prevail elsewhere in CAUTdom? Is there any other place that allows this sort of use (abuse?) of their prime stage instruments? Or any stage instruments?

Thank you,

Happy holidays (this campus closes tomorrow until January 5),

Israel Stein