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On June 2000, I gave a presentation to a group of pianists at The Philadelphia Piano Festival at the Philadelphia Art
Museum called “The Lost Sounds of Music”. The purpose of the presentation was to articulate to a group of mainstream
pianists the advantages of utilizing the ‘historical tunings” for modern musical practice and performance.
My presentation was derived from and based on to a large extent, the exhaustive work of “Owen Jorgensen”. I began to
take notice of his work in 1980, when I read his first book on Historical Keyboard Tuning Practices. In 1991, I attended
his presentation on Keyboard Tunings at the Smithsonian where he had just completed his second updated book on the subject.
I later met with him and attended his class at the National Piano Technicians Guild Convention in Albuquerque, 1994,
New Mexico. Jorgensen’s work has had such an impact on the Piano Tuning Field that all of the electronic visual tuning devices and
software that are now manufactured are designed to accommodate and enable the piano tuner to tune pianos with these
historical intonations. That was one of the major reasons that I (who was a strictly aural tuner for 20 years) started
to use electronic visual tuning software “Cyber Tuner”. I should also mention that I aurally tuned and experimented with
some of the temperaments and tuned modern pianos from bearing plans. But the time saving potential of being able to tune
a whole range of different tunings at any given time with minimal set up is what sold me on changing my approach from
being an “aural tuner” tuning equal temperament to being a “hybrid tuner” utilizing the combination of modern technology
and aural capabilities.
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