Monday 3 February 2014

The Purpose of Tuning

As Piano Tuners, when our job is done, we leave the house, hall or studio until next time. The pianos, when we are gone, become tools of the piano-playing art for learner, student, amateur or professional. Although we hear nothing of the music played between our visits, we have an enormous influence on the pleasure felt by those who play and hear the piano. 

An extra dose of satisfaction for the tuner comes when we are able to listen to somebody - especially a professional - playing a piano we have tuned. At a public recital, the room becomes a place of intense emotion as the soloist fills the hall with wonderful, stunningly played music. The tuner hears every note, and listens carefully to be sure the tuning is holding up well. I love the sound of big, rich chords, held for a few seconds. The sustained harmonies hang in the air, like a choir trained to sing out their parts, loud and clear!  

The tuner gives shape to the harmonic relationships between every note. This finger-print-type interconnection of sounds is the palette of tones made available for the pianist to use during the practice session or the recital. 

However, the tuner is never the main event. It is the same when we tune a piano in a small terraced house for a nine-year-old who is learning to play! Truly, the main event is what happens when we leave to get to our next job. Does the player, young or old, rush to the piano to relish the fresh, in-tune sound, and thereby be inspired to climb another rung of the great piano-playing ladder? Or, does the player notice a few octaves and unisons that are not quite right, and lose some of the enjoyment of playing? - And perhaps, lose a little of the desire to succeed!

Tuners are often fussy and inflexible, but we should try hard not to be purists for the sake of it. Spending time fussing about minute details in one area of the keyboard is not always the best way to get 88 notes in tune. Our job is to restore structure and harmonic beauty to the full seven and a quarter octaves of the piano we have in front of us - or at least, as far as that piano will allow. 

We should strive to excel but know there will always be room to improve our abilities further!  


Tuner's Journal          
©
Pianology


Wednesday 29 January 2014

Desert Island Luxury Item

The BBC Radio program ‘Desert Island Discs,’ created by Roy Plomley in 1941, has a very simple formula that works every time. A castaway is invited to share eight favourite records during what is usually, a relaxed discussion about the castaway’s life. At the end of the program, it is imagined that the castaway must choose one of the eight records to take to the island, and is also given the works of Shakespeare, a copy of the Bible, and (since 1951) one luxury item to make life on the island more bearable. Each of these choices reveal further layers of the cast-away’s personality.

The program has been going long enough to throw up some interesting statistics.

According to the  BBC’s website. From over 22,000 choices, the Castaways’ Top Tracks is
1. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor.
2. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor. 

Notice that piano music ranked very highly! 

 The Castaways’ Top Composers
1. Mozart
2. Beethoven
3. Bach
4. Schubert
These guys are mostly associated with keyboard music!

According to the Telegraph, the top luxury item choice is a piano! What else would one choose?

This is music to the ears of all piano tuners. It shows that despite the convenience and ready availability of music these days, the piano holds a very special place in the lives of these castaways. The piano is the most interactive of musical instruments. The very principles that drove the piano’s development in the early 1700s, still attract the desire for self-expression.

It would be a good thing if it were made official: 
The Piano really is the top choice of luxury items!

The Piano World

© Steve Burden
Pianology




  

Wednesday 22 January 2014

Piano-making in UK.

Once again the less-than-perfect state of new pianos has been highlighted this week. This week, I have seen or worked on 4 pianos not yet 2 years old that have needed extra technical attention before they can be considered satisfactory. Nobody likes hearing the same old moan time and time again, but the customer has to live with the reality of their choice of piano. Most of these keen pianists are paying good money and are at a loss to understand why their pianos are not as good as was expected.

I have been reading Alastair Laurence's book Five London Piano Makers, and I am sure I have detected in the book, hints of a similar mood of disappointment. He says in his introduction, "The near total collapse of British piano making means that there seems to be little likelihood of those fascinating centres of musical workmanship - the small piano factories - ever being seen again on these shores."

Anyone who has worked in a piano workshop will know something of the atmosphere of constant and affectionate labour over the many apparently lifeless components of a piano. Workers feel a strange and invisible force urging them towards the later stages of repair work - that stage when the piano is touched with the magic of creativity and is now finished! Maybe in other professions, something of the same drive is at work, but wherever there are pianos and music, the mixture is intoxicating.

The fact that there are fewer 'centres of musical workmanship' in the UK is partly due to the poor standard of piano produced during the late 1970s. Piano makers were now competing with imported pianos from the far east which, frankly, were better. Cost cutting meant, the fine finishing of the pianos was cut to a minimum, thus bringing forward the eventual demise of the industry.

Alas, many of the cheaper imported pianos are as less-than-perfect as was the case in the UK in the late 1970s. The best we can do is to make good what we can and hope that one day finesse, better reliability and the positive feedback that should follow a piano purchase will be rather more common than it is today. Let us hope that the tide of piano-making doldrums might be on the turn! 

Whether what remains of the piano industry in the UK can get its act together strongly enough to meet the challenge remains to be seen. I share Alastair Laurence's finishing word of hope: "With luck, a new, younger generation of piano makers here will help to ensure the survival of piano-making skills in Britain throughout the twenty-first century." 

We have work to do!


The Piano World

© Steve Burden
Pianology