In a message dated 98-04-20 00:44:22 EDT, you write: << In the movie "The Competition" with Richard Dreyfus, a piano tuner is seen checking the tuning of a piano being used in a Van Cliburn type competition. Every note sounds right on until he gets to one unison that is so horrible that it is hard to imagine this note existing in the context of an otherwise in tune piano. He whips out a pocket size lever and pulls the string up to pitch (in a trichord unison) without any checking to see which string was low....(snip) Any way, it didn't come off as a realistic tuner situation. They probably felt that the lay persons in the audience should be able to hear the out of tune string. I think it would have played much better if the pitch deviation was small enough that the audience could'nt hear it, then being much more impressive that the tuner could hear something that they couldn't. Such is the movies. Dave Bunch>> As I remember this, it was actually the pianist who was checking out the tuning. He found the out of tune note and tuned it up himself. But this really doesn't change the portrayal of piano maintenance in this film. Our own Golden Hammer Award winning Norman Neblett, RPT was actually the technician who tuned these pianos. But do you think they put his name in the credits? NO!!! There was also a voicing incident in the film. The young lady wanted to play a Mozart Concerto on a certain piano but that instrument had one note with an extremely bright and harsh-sounding note. It was so bad as to not really have been a realistically occuring problem (although accidentally dropping some CA glue on the striking surface might have done it). The pianist had a fit. The judges said they would get a technician to "tune" it. She asked, "but not voice it too?" The reply was, "No". This goes along with Dave's idea about what Hollywood does. They often portray things to go along with what they think a general audience might already believe or accept. Tuning up one very bad string from very flat to pitch is something everyone could get, so they think. Showing someone banging on keys and making imperceptible differences wouldn't be effective. Same with the voicing. They figure that most people don't really know what a voicing problem is so they have to make it overly obvious. The pianist went on to another piano and decided to play a Prokofiev concerto instead. This reminds me of two other films in which pianos were depicted but blatently falsified: Amadeus and another about Beethoven, I forget the name, Immortal Beloved or something. The point is that in neither of these films did we hear the piano that we saw. Mozart's fortepiano was just some tinny sounding modern piano in ET. In the Beethoven movie, we heard a modern Steinway D in ET instead of the Broadwood. As Dave does, I think in both cases it would have been far more effective to use the actual sound of the period instruments, tuned the way they would have been tuned. The Beethoven movie used a lot of speculation about a number of things. And true to Hollywood, steamy sexual scenes were de rigeur. There just had to be a scene where a woman ripped open her blouse to expose her breasts to Beethoven. The Napoleonic wars (which Beethoven was known to have opposed) were also depicted. Everyone knows that soldiers are apt to rape women during time of war. But do they HAVE to show it in a movie about Beethoven? And so graphically? Twice? This same movie magic was of course part of the famous film, The Piano. We saw a square grand or something like that. But instead of that kind of sound, we heard what was probably a Yamaha and the music played on it was most definitely not period music but some phony New Age stuff. Then of course there is the scene that out of context, would make you think you were watching an X rated porno flick. There was also the blind tuner who came to tune that piano which had been left out on the beach for a couple of weeks and hauled up the muddy hill by movers from hell. He had no trouble at all bringing it right up to pitch, though. There wasn't a single sticking key! But as Dave says, "Such is the Movies". Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin
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