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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/08/piano-tuning-tuners-technicians-australia>
"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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
