getting tuned

When I was laid up recovering at my parents' house I kept thinking about all the things that were "out of tune" back home. The big symbol for me--and of course, being a literature professor, I read almost everything as a symbol of something much bigger--was my piano back home, which had a sour note that twanged horribly whenever you hit it. It had gone out rather suddenly right before I'd found out about the tumor--sad story, and naturally due to my own fault--so of course its untunedness seemed even more symbolic of my non-functioning body than it might have. So in those first few weeks of recovery I kept thinking about that note and how it had ruined my piano, and how it needed to get fixed as soon as I could arrange it. Never mind that I seldom play anymore--people get busy, and I've fallen out of practice. I vowed that the first thing I'd do when I could go home again was fix that discordant note.

The note had gone sour when I had decided to buy my own piano tuning kit and....well, the rest is probably pretty obvious. I f'ed it all up. And then I couldn't get it back again even to its untuned state. It was dreadful.

I've always wanted to know how to tune pianos, though, ever since I was a kid. And I didn't know how to learn. I asked our tuners about it, when they came periodically to do our annual tunings, but every single one of them had learned the art from a family business in tuning--the father was a tuner and taught the daughter, who eventually started her own business (I've only ever met one female piano tuner, incidentally), and so on.

When I went off to college and majored in music, I thought certainly there would be piano tuning classes in the curriculum. At the very least I expected to find SOMEONE there who could teach tuning. But no. Universities inevitably specialize in lots of impractical knowledge and theories. Anything useful you pretty much have to pick up on your own. So UCLA, which has a fabulous and renowned music department, did not offer any classes on piano tuning, nor did UCI when I transferred myself there. There was nothing. Now that internet access lets us see all the offerings absolutely everywhere, I can say with assurance that NO university has any regular offerings on the theory of piano tuning. Instead, piano tuners are like the medieval crafts guilds. Almost all of them have learned the craft either through a family business, handed down over the generations, or by apprenticeship. And of course apprenticeships are not open to just anyone. Apprenticeships are basically about having a connection who gets you into the business.

In a way it's kind of neat that such family-taught professions still exist. On the other hand, there's so much less freedom of choice involved. If that's the craft that really draws you and you're an ordinary schmo like me with no family connections, you're out of luck. And if you happen to be born into a family that safeguards a craft that doesn't appeal to you, well, you've got all that burden of guilt if you should choose to reject it and do something else.

But now, of course, we have the internet! It's probably been only in the last few years that the internet has started carrying information on piano tuning--I know, believe me, because I've checked. But there's information there now, and, more importantly, there are internet sites from which you can get the necessary tools peculiar to the craft.

And thus it was, filled with false confidence (I can do this! I have a good ear!), that I procured for myself a piano tuning lever, mutes for blocking out the strings not immediately being worked, and began twisting and turning away, just as I'd watched my own tuners do.

Yikes. What a disaster. I didn't know how to use the mutes correctly, so I found myself completely unable to isolate strings. And each note in a piano has 2-3 strings that you have to get perfectly matched or you get a messy, blurry sound. There's apparently also a trick to overtuning very slightly so that when you hit the key a few time the string relaxes into the proper note. If you don't do this your piano promptly un-tunes itself.

I ended up with the most hideous-sounding, blunted "TWANG!" on one of the most important and frequently played notes--Middle C. Oops. It sounded like someone was sitting on the strings. I'm not sure how I did that, either--all I know was that I couldn't undo it afterward.

And then, of course, before I could get the problem properly corrected by a professional, I grew myself a brain tumor and became completely unable to do anything at all.

So you see? It is all rather symbolic, isn't it? Disharmony in the environment; disharmony in your relationships; disharmony in your work place--it's all of a piece. Anyway, the upshot is that as soon as I could go home again I found a tuner who could fix the problem for me. And now I have a clean-sounding piano that I really should start playing again one day.

It's on my to-do list for today.