Have you ever wondered how piano tuners learn their trade? Most tuners learn the business from a family member. In fact, piano tuning often spans several generations in a family, handed down from father to son.
There are good tuners and great tuners, but in any case they have to learn a craft that is several hundred years old and has changed little.
There are three distinct types of tuners: tuners, repairmen and rebuilders. Usually a tuner works their way up from simple tuning to the more difficult task of repair and then rebuilding.
A tuner can expect $100 per tuning, but if they work for someone else they may take home only half of that. Still, it is a job much in demand.
The average tuning takes at least an hour, and requires quiet and solitude, although the very best tuners, usually working for a large firm like Steinway, can expect to be on call for the most famous concert pianists.
These superstars of the piano business hover backstage at major concerts, waiting for the occasional string to break so they can vault out onto the stage and fix it in front of thousands of people.
One such tuner superstar is Franz Mohr, who was tuner and repairman for two legendary pianists, Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein. As an employee of the Steinway Company, he was delegated to accompany either of these two great artists on their world travels, tuning hammer and pliers at the ready, in case something should go wrong, \he most dramatic being a string breaking during a concert.
Mohr became a personal friend of both Rubinstein and Horowitz, was part of their international entourage.
Mohr selected pianos for Horowitz, for Horowitz never took a "company" piano. By this you must understand that great concert pianists are sometimes forced to play on a variety of instruments in their travels. The only solution to this problem of inconsistency is to take a piano with you, and this is very, very expensive, requiring genuine superstar status.
Horowitz had his favorite Steinway 9 foot concert grand, and he kept it at home. When a concert tour came, the neighbors of his New York City Upper East Side townhouse were used to the sight of the immense piano being lowered slowly out the window and onto a waiting truck.
Mohr and other great tuners I have known like Steinway's Heinz Zimmerman were artists in their own right. To tune and repair a piano for a professional pianist is an extremely demanding job, for the results must in fact be perfect. Every key must feel exactly the same. Every key must feel, to the artist, as if they have the same weight, the same feel, the same speed. The process that achieves this at the piano is called "regulation," and may take several days to adjust the thousands of tiny moving parts
There is no better feeling to a great pianist than a great piano, perfectly tuned and regulated, waiting for beautiful music to be played.
By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2000 Walden Pond Press. Visit http://www.pianoiseasy.com to see the fun PIANO BY NUMBER method for kids.
John Aschenbrenner is a leading children's music educator and book publisher, and the author of numerous piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER.
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