[CAUT] Piano juries on concert instruments

[Jeff Tanner]

Re: [CAUT] Piano juries on concert instrumentsHi Richard,
My experience was that it wasn't the piano majors who had procrastinated and not gotten their recitals scheduled before juries. It was others, particularly those in studios where the professor had too many irons in the fire.
Jeff Tanner

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Richard Murphy 
  To: caut at ptg.org 
  Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2009 9:15 AM
  Subject: Re: [CAUT] Piano juries on concert instruments


  We too have used our best instrument for piano juries.  It is a Steinway B about 20 years old and is not heavily used.  There are no recitals scheduled during finals week.  The piano majors are too busy accompanying all the other voice and instrumentalist for their juries as well , so why wouldn't they want to have their own recital out of the way already?
  Richard


  On 12/21/09 3:37 PM, "Israel Stein" <custos3 at comcast.net> wrote:


    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 



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091222/8a56cfed/attachment.htm>