Ken Coleman has been tuning pianos since 1980 – he knows because he’s kept meticulous records on index cards from the very beginning – and he has no plans to retire.
That will come as welcome news to numerous piano-owning households throughout Chestnut Hill, where Coleman continues to tune everything from small upright Baldwin spinets to prized Steinway concert grands. The people in the pews at Chestnut Hill’s Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where Coleman started tuning pianos 1984, have also heard the results of his handiwork.
“I’m only 71, and I’ve been doing this for about 45 years now. I’m planning on doing this another 45,” he quips.
Hearing Coleman talk about his life’s work, you quickly come to the realization that what he does is equal parts craft and art.
Piano tuning, Coleman explains, is not a question of what people think of as a “good ear.” It’s not about perfect pitch. Such a thing, he adds, would only interfere.
Rather, he explains, “It’s a trained ear. It’s something you have to learn. It’s like neurosurgery, but if you kill a piano it’s not as critical. Some people are better at tuning than others, but it’s nothing innate. There are things you actually listen for – objective things that you learn to listen for and deal with. It has very little to do with pitch. You’re listening for vibrations between two notes, or even within the note itself. They’re called ‘beats,’ which is different from drumbeats. You’re not listening for sharps and flats. You can’t tune a piano like that.”
Coleman, a pianist himself, became interested in tuning in the late 1970s after he went shopping for an acoustic piano. The salesman opened up one of the pianos for his inspection, and he was intrigued more by what was on the inside than on the outside. Curious, Coleman asked a bandmate about a piano tuning class that the friend had just concluded at Temple’s School of Music. He soon signed up for the same class, and came under the tutelage of instructor Victor Benvenuto. The two hit it off.
“He and I got along well, and I started doing an informal apprenticeship in his shop,” Coleman recalls. “He was a rebuilder and a tuner, and so I learned from him. He was my mentor.”
The state of the art has advanced a good deal since then and so has Coleman. He describes himself as a hybrid tuner. He uses an electronic device to get the tuning close. The fine tuning that follows, he says, is all by ear.
“I’d say most piano tuners now do use electronic tuners,” Coleman explains. “Some use it exclusively. There are a dwindling number of tuners who tune completely by ear. It just takes a lot longer. If you had a piece of rough wood, you could sand it down with real fine sandpaper and it would take a long time, or you could use coarse sandpaper at first and get it close. That’s what the electronics do. They get you close, and then you’re using your ear.”
Coleman has worked on incredibly valuable instruments – he recalls in particular an Art Case Steinway with finishing touches by a French designer – but far more humble pianos constitute his bread and butter. “Most of the members of my tuning family are just private residences. I do tune for a lot of concerts and professional musicians and teachers, but the vast majority of my work is just normal households that have kids taking lessons.”
Even a student just starting out deserves a piano that sounds good and plays as well as possible, he says.
It turns out that there’s no one “right” way to tune a piano because every piano is different, Coleman adds, and every player has certain preferences as to how the piano should sound.
Tyrone Whiting, St. Martin’s Director of Music and Arts, is one client who appreciates Coleman’s expertise, and he concurs with his intuitive approach to tuning. St. Martin’s has pianos in the church and in the parish hall, and each has its special needs.
The church piano, for one needs to be pitched to the church organ, Whiting says. They’re often played together and for one to be out of tune with the other would be, he says, “jarring and horrendous”
But there is much more to Coleman’s tuning job, and it plays into the tuner’s insistence that every player has distinct requirements. And often Coleman’s expertise extends beyond the piano to the overall acoustic environment in which it is played.
“He (Coleman) did some voicing work on the church piano,” Whiting says. “And I have tastes, as everyone does when they play the piano. I don’t particularly like a very bright register in the upper register of the piano. I don’t like it to be very brilliant. But I learned from him that in our small space and the piano being too small for the space, that it actually needs to be bright, otherwise the sound won’t carry to the back of the hall. His knowledge is just immense.”
There’s also a piano in the parish hall, and it can be cranky in other ways.
“We’re lucky, our pianos are pretty modern, but they will have their quirks,” says Whiting. “The piano in the parish hall has a tendency for notes to stick because the temperature in that room changes. The wood will swell and contract and occasionally that causes issues. There was one note that was sticking last week, and he said, oh, I can fix that one, but what about this little bit of swelling that’s happening in these octaves up here? I hadn’t even noticed. He diagnoses it straight away as he tinkers around with it, and it’s all very unassuming. He just walks in, he usually has quite a long coat on, has a sort of flight case of tools that I’m guessing is about as old as he is, and he just opens it up like a painter’s toolbox. And suddenly he uses all these tools to create a really good sounding instrument.”
Whiting appreciates Coleman’s consummate skill. Coleman loves coming away from a piano knowing that it sounds better than it did when he arrived, Whiting says. “That’s the gift of an artist as you give something that’s your skill, but it allows someone else to create art or experience art and he does it very well.”
By his own admission, Coleman’s tuning visits are gratifying not just because he and his customers are pleased with the results, but because he craves the social interaction.
“Beside the actual work or tuning and working with other aspects of the piano, I just love talking to the people. I could never work in a piano factory and just tune pianos eight hours a day. I could never do that.”
(Photo courtesy of Tyrone Whiting.)
