Fine Tuning
Thursday, January 19 at 6pm
A Free Lecture and Demonstration at Groton Hill Music Center
In person and live streamed from the Concert Hall
Hosted by Pete Robbins, Director of Education and Performance Programming, with Carl Giegold, FAIA, Threshold Acoustics, Fred Mudge, Registered Piano Technician, Fred’s Piano Service, LLC, and Jenny Tang, Concert Pianist and Groton Hill Faculty.
What makes a concert hall exceptional? When you attend a live event you don’t necessarily hear all the considerations that went into shaping the room’s sound – from physics and materials to height and curves, to the preparation of the instruments and the artists’ performance technique.
We invite you to experience the Concert Hall before its official opening and learn about the process of designing and acoustically commissioning our world-class performance space and tuning our new Steinway D grand piano to the space with a live lecture and demonstration by the individuals who tuned the architecture of the room, tuned an instrument to the room, and fine-tune their own musical performances on our stage.
Carl Giegold, FAIA
Founding Partner, Threshold Acoustics, Chicago, IL
Carl could be found haunting construction sites at the age of seven and earned a Bachelor of Architecture with honors from Virginia Tech in 1982. His broad background in design and technical architecture adds great depth to his consulting in acoustics. He has carried design responsibility for many music and theatre performance and educational spaces in the United States and internationally. He has presented his work at conferences held by the Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Acoustics in the United Kingdom, and Ryerson University in Toronto. He has lectured architectural and acoustics classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Virginia Tech, Illinois Institute of Technology, The University of Illinois, and Cambridge University.
Fred Mudge
Proprietor and Registered Piano Technician, Fred’s Piano Service LLC, Hyde Park, MA
Fred is a Bruins fan, motorcycle rider, vegetarian, and registered piano technician, in that order. A Berklee College of Music alum, Fred began his piano technician training with Yamaha Corporation of America in 1992, working with some of the world’s best piano technicians: Terri Nimi, Yoshi Suzuki, and Nori Soga. Running his own piano service since 1995, he has prepared instruments for concerts by some of the biggest names in music: Billy Joel, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Emmanuel Ax, Dave Brubeck, and Chick Corea among them. An authorized Steinway pianos technician, Fred is the official piano technician for Groton Hill Music’s 35 pianos, including two Steinway D concert grand pianos.
Jenny Tang
Concert Pianist and Groton Hill Piano Faculty
Jenny Tang was born in Hong Kong and began her musical studies at age three with her mother. Awarded the Licentiate Diploma from the Royal Schools of Music (UK) in piano performance, she was also honored as a Fellow of the Trinity College of Music in London and has a B.M., and M.M. from New England Conservatory. Jenny regularly performs in solo and chamber music recitals in the U.S. and abroad, including Jordan Hall, Sanders Theatre, Symphony Hall, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. She is on the piano faculty at Groton Hill and is also a senior performance faculty member at Wellesley College and Co-Director of the Wellesley College Chamber Music Society.