Greetings again all,
I suppose it will help some on the CAUT list to see my observations as somewhat less recalcitrant, though to some extent only vanity would lead someone to this conclusion in the first place, if I explain further the hiring process I was subjected to.
Before CCM hired me, they decided to advertize for the position in local media and on their website. CCM designated four people to participate. Three people, including Eric, participated in the committee, and above these three, there was an appointed head of the committee. I was informed that the head insisted State law, i.e. equal opportunity, required this of a State institution in Ohio. Others have insisted this is not the case; the head of the committee was relatively new to the school, as well as the state, and may have just been told this. The last person to get my job was not subjected to this process, but was hand-picked by Eric with the full approval of CCM. The one before him claimed to work for the State, and soon left the profession after Eric took over. One applicant, an RPT, claimed to me the opening remained absent from the CAUT list because Eric was embarrassed that it paid what it paid as head of the CAUT committee. At any rate, the State was involved.
One of the faculty members who presided on the search committee is of the conviction that at a Conservatory, degrees do not matter as much as in a division like medical school, she explained to me while regulating her studio piano. Then she provided examples of faculty without degrees. Beyond that, I think that faculty at a conservatory are more impressed by performance experience than degrees. We should not exaggerate the benefits of a CAUT endorsement. One of the piano technicians at Oberlin College described his music theory degree to be good as toilet paper in less candied terms. He’s never even been a member of the PTG. For the most part, professors at Oberlin preferred not to be called Dr. even if so. I am not expecting improvement in my position to develop, from the endorsement at least, due to these observations from the search committee, on par, I believe, with the convictions of Eric, and I do not think from my experience so far working more intimately with Eric it will convince him I know how to do anything the testing or training is for. Why should it for anyone else? It could make me more knowledgeable.
In a state not including organ technician training, the endorsement sounds self-aggrandizing to me. This week I serviced a piano in the home of a high school student studying with someone on the piano faculty at CCM. Gifted as she must be to have this opportunity, her mother told me that in the process of applying at Rice, admissions told her that organists have a job waiting for them upon graduation. This is not the case for piano students or period instrument specialists. I think we owe it to the families of students investing in education at the schools we work at to show more interest in the instrument as CAUT technicians if expanding the range of responsibility for PTG members beyond the piano.
Eric has mistakenly called me by his son’s name countless times, who is 26 years younger than me. Eric is fairly open about his atheism; I have tried to make it painstakingly clear now that our values are profoundly different and based on entirely different set of beliefs. It’s a free country. I suppose you could say we should play piano poorly. I agree to disagree. I am definitely not perfect. As for piano technology, my real father is a piano tech. I did not take this job in search of a surrogate father figure in the area of piano technology, sociology, or what makes the world go round. I am always willing to learn.
- Ben
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