I got a call today to let me know that Owen Jorgensen died yesterday, Friday August 7. His family was with him. Some of us saw him briefly in Grand Rapids where he was given the Golden Hammer Award. Some of you know Owen well, and some may not know his name. The following is the speech read for him at the Golden Hammer Banquet just a few short weeks ago. Golden Hammer Award 2009 This year's recipient of the Golden Hammer Award began studying the piano as a young boy. He studied with the best teachers available and went on to study at the state university. He began to learn piano tuning from the correspondence course by William Braid White. A year after he began his own tuning business, he became a Craftsman Member of the American Society of Piano Technicians. He has been a member of the Piano Technicians Guild since the American Society and the National Association of Piano Tuners merged in 1957. He soon found himself employed by a piano factory as the head tuner and voicer. Shortly after that, he found himself working full time for the State University. In addition to servicing the hundreds of pianos there, he continued his study of piano performance. Five years later, he was teaching a course in piano tuning at the University. His accomplishment as a teacher continues to be testified to by numerous of his piano tuning students, many of them quite accomplished and successful themselves. Many of them, I am happy to see, are here with us tonight. He has also taught classes at over thirty PTG Seminars and Technical Institutes. In addition to this he has traveled to teach at many local chapter meetings. Our Golden Hammer recipient has also taught through his writing. Since 1970 he has published twenty six articles for the Piano Technicians Journal. To share the discovery of his scholarship with all of us, he has also written three books. Any serious student of our craft owns at least one of these books. They have opened new vistas for our work and have also had a significant influence in piano performance. It takes a keen intellect and diligent work ethic to look at what has come before and find significantly different conclusions and truths, from those commonly accepted, as a result of painstaking research. His accomplished musicianship at the piano has also introduced to us the proof of the pudding, known as the Temperament Recital. Ladies and Gentlemen: tonight we honor a quiet giant amongst us. The author of Tuning the Historical Temperaments, and of The Equal-Beating Temperaments, and his masterpiece Tuning: containing The Perfection of Eighteenth-Century Temperament, The Lost Art of Nineteenth-Century Temperament, and The Science of Equal Temperament, complete with instructions for aural and electronic tuning. We honor the man who changed the understanding and practice of historical temperament tuning. We honor the man whose students, in the US, Canada, and Mexico love him for his generosity and high standards of excellence and for teaching and practicing the most solid tuning lever technique and finest equal temperament. Tonight we honor Owen Jorgensen. Bruce Dornfeld, RPT bdornfeld at earthlink.net North Shore Chapter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090808/ee92df50/attachment-0001.htm>
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