When David Kinney is tuning a piano he’s doing more than simply finding the correct notes: he is searching for its voice. Kinney has been the piano technical manager at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music since 2010. His ability to reveal an instrument’s character requires years of honing and training, in a rapidly ageing industry whose future concerns him.
“I can see the difficulty around the country and there’s just a dearth of talent,” he says during a break from servicing a Fazioli piano in Sydney. “It’s really hard to get good piano tuners.”
By “good tuners”, Kinney means piano technicians. These are people who have undergone a year of training as piano tuners before developing their skills at international piano factories or with mentors, learning action regulation, voicing, diagnosis and complex problem solving.
“People think, ‘I’ll learn to tune a piano, I’ll do it in a year and that’s it’, but no, it takes 10 years to learn how to tune a piano, and 20 years to master it,” Kinney says.
In Australia there are no large, established training grounds or facilities for young people interested in becoming piano tuners, meaning the pool of people who go on to become technicians is swiftly shrinking. Kinney believes young people don’t consider it as a career option because it isn’t marketed well and there aren’t any government-subsidised courses which sit alongside music schools as a second option for training musicians.
Unless new training facilities open up at the scale which allows young tuners to learn and come up the ranks as existing technicians retire, concert pianos and players across Australia will suffer, Kinney says.
“You can always tell the piano is not being serviced or there’s an unhealthy instrument in desperate need of care. That shows straight away,” he says.
While most pianos in homes can be given a basic service by tuners, it is technicians who can maintain and rebuild pianos, especially concert instruments, to the highest standard.
The last batch of tuners to rise through the industry went through the Australasian School of Piano Technology in east Melbourne, which was run by the technician Brent Ottley. It was the last school of its kind in Australia until it closed several years ago. The school was set up by Yamaha, one of Australia’s major piano importers, who approached Ottley to work there.
“We had about 35 graduates go through the place; I think about 50% of them, maybe more, are still in the industry,” Ottley says. “But it was a house of cards, and we didn’t have the pull power that something like a Tafe college has … Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, ‘Gee, I’d like to be a piano tuner.’”
Ottley has been working in the industry for 35 years and says it became obvious two decades ago that Australia had begun “running out” of piano tuners. He estimates there are just 250 left in the country and just 20 or so high-level technicians, with most of them close to retiring age.
“When I first started, there were about 500 piano tuners Australia-wide and we had a lot of really good factory-trained technicians out there, but everybody was still making money,” he says.
While it’s concert pianos that will be most affected by a lack of technicians, Ottley says everyday piano players in Australia will lose their listening skills if their instruments go without high-level servicing, putting the art of the pianist at risk.
“People are still buying pianos,” he says. “In Australia we are buying about 5,000 new pianos a year, and nobody throws them away at the other end, so the amount of pianos in the country keeps going north.”
It’s estimated that at least one piano tuner is needed per 50,000 people – that means Australia is running about 250 short across the board, and even further behind when it comes to high-quality technicians.
Pianos should be tuned at the very least once a year, but twice in the first year after purchase. However, concert pianos, which are specialist instruments, should be tuned and serviced more regularly by a skilled technician, otherwise the quality of sound diminishes over time.
In regional concert halls or in some homes, instruments can languish for years without being tuned properly, weakening the instrument’s strings and overall condition.
Ottley no longer works as a concert piano technician but he still receives many requests for help, from piano dealerships in New Zealand to symphony orchestras, who struggle to find technicians of his calibre when they need them.
Across the Bass Strait, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s chief executive, Caroline Sharpen, says there is a single concert piano technician who services all of the concert instruments in Hobart.
She says if the orchestra can’t access technicians who can tune a concert piano before a performance, “it can be a completely make or break situation”.
“If we can’t access somebody here who can fix something that’s broken or meet the needs of a concert artist … then we are seriously flying someone in from Sydney or Melbourne, and that’s just not tenable in the long term,” Sharpen says.
Top-level musicians playing Australia’s best concert pianos worry, too, because they can feel the lack of expertise first-hand.
When Scott Davie, an Australian concert pianist, has toured through Australia, he’s played regional shows where the pianos had been tuned but not properly maintained. When this is the case, he must work hard to alter the way he plays to finish the show.
“I’d be remembering which notes are going out of tune and which notes are really badly out of tune, and leaving them out of chords or trying to play them so softly that you couldn’t hear them,” he says. “But it gets to a point where it sounds horrible, if a piano is really starting to break down.”
Mathew Taylor, Yamaha’s marketing manager and a board member at the Australian Music Association, says the most pressing issue is the shortage of piano technicians who can work with top-level musicians.
To tackle the supply shortage, Yamaha and fellow piano company Kawai are looking to work with education institutions to set up a new training facility. Conversations between the companies and the Australian National University are under way, much to Kinney’s and Ottley’s delight.
Kinney says he wants to see public and private investment – from universities to philanthropists to instrument importers – to reinvigorate the tuning space.
“To teach piano tuning is a costly exercise and you need to plough the money in … also to broaden it out a little bit into a deeper program to reflect what happens at American universities, where it’s a graduate degree over two years,” he says. “We need to level up to equal the best in the world.”
