Klarinet Archive - Posting 000089.txt from 2004/09

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Stretch octaves
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 22:21:15 -0400


Tony Pay wrote,
> A part of that might be to explain to me why I'm perhaps wrong to have
> assumed that modern pianos need *more* stretch. I'd always assumed that
> higher tensions need more correction, and that we're less 'stretched' in
> another sense on period instruments.

Interesting discussion. Another (nebulous, ambiguous, anecdotal) factor:
people. I think *people* are getting more "stretched." It seems to me
that stretch tuning has become more extreme during my lifetime. Whether or
not the instruments require it, the people who pay for the tuning seem to
want a really sharp high end. My husband plays in several advanced amateur
chamber groups. When someone calls for an A, it almost always turns out
that everybody is sharp, relative to the piano or the tuning fork. Someone
will complain, "Guys, we're drifting flat," and then the meter or the fork
will show unambiguously that *nobody's* flat -- they're all *sharp*. The
one they suspect of being flat is just a little bit less sharp than the
others!

When I was nine years old, my family bought a house and replaced our
battered old piano (painted turquoise) with a less battered, younger one,
with three pedals that all worked, varnish with no initials carved in it,
and keys that were all the same height. All 88 keys sounded, too, and they
all had their key caps. So this was a big deal, and Mom decreed that from
now on, she was putting away her tuning hammer and hiring a real,
professional piano tuner.

When the fourth or fifth new piano tuner came to the house for the first
time, Mom noticed his little leather bag didn't have much in it besides a
pair of tuning hammers, a C fork, an A fork and a half-full bottle of beer.
In the kitchen, meanwhile, my younger brother told me that there were empty
beer bottles, food wrappers, clothes, shoes and even underwear all over the
floor of the tuner's car.

I heard my mother, out in the living room, ask the piano tuner, "You don't
use a meter?"

He growled, "I don't need a meter. I got ears."

Right answer. Mom came into the kitchen with a big, satisfied smile on her
face, and left him alone to do his work. He was the first tuner in the new
neighborhood who passed what she called her meter test (as in, anybody who
used one never got called back) and, not coincidentally, the last tuner who
had to take the meter test, because Mom was his loyal customer until she
gave the piano to my brother, years later. That tuner sometimes showed up
stumbling drunk, wearing torn old coveralls with food stains all over, and
he looked as if he groomed his hair with motor oil and an egg whisk, but
all Mom cared about was that he left the piano sounding perfect.

But to get around to the point: Whenever this tuner arrived, he would
always start out by mumbling, "Let's see, you've got singers but no
violins, right? Okay."

He was a man of few words, and two of them were, "Shut up," to any kids who
made noise while he was tuning, but I finally worked up the nerve to ask
him why he asked about violinists and singers. He said that violinists
always think the piano treble sounds flat. "They want you to crank it up
there so they can sound like a damn dog whistle and still think they're
playing in tune." He said he couldn't ratchet it up there for singers
because, "their vocal cords don't have tuning pegs. Tune the piano where
the violin likes it and the singers sound like chickens strangling, trying
to match it. So you tune it *right* if the owner's only got singers. You
stretch the top a little bit because, you just do, that's all, but you
might as well go ahead and tune the top end sharp for fiddlers, because
they'll just keep after you until you do it their way, regardless. Even
though it's wrong."

My mother had been a contralto singer *and* a violin player -- but when I
tried to ask more questions, the tuner said, "Your mom's paying me to tune,
not talk. Go away."

Now my tuner lives inside my piano, and he's nothing but a computer
program. The electronic piano hasn't got any strings to vibrate, but
apparently the programming is good enough to replicate the mathematics of
two-string bass notes and three-string treble notes pretty convincingly. I
don't have absolute pitch. I'll accept nearly anything as concert A, and
then get my concept of "in tune" from that A. The default setting on my
Yamaha Clavinova CLP 811 was stretch-tuned to the point where, once I got
used to it, the clarion range on my clarinet started sounding flat to me.
It was driving me crazy. It seems strange that the piano treble started
sounding right to me, even though the built-in meter revealed stretch
tuning so extreme that the treble was grossly sharp.

I think I tolerate sharpness better than flatness, and I think that's
common. I might think, matter- of-factly, that something sounds sharp, and
not really care about it, but if I think it sounds flat, it makes my skin
twitch and my teeth grind. Finally I sat down with the Clavinova's manual
long enough to figure out how to reel that top end back in, to the
specifications in a piano tuner's manual, "Let's Tune Up." Then the piano
sounded flat, too, for awhile, but within a few weeks, I'd re-tuned my
brain back down to A=440 Hz.

My husband, who plays violin, now thinks the piano treble sounds a smidge
flat....

Lelia Loban
America can do better: Kerry and Edwards in 2004!

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