Who I am: The Piano Teacher
I did not play piano as a kid. I wanted to play violin. (not allowed!) I loved the sound of the oboe (but never practiced). I sang for a while. I liked best to sing gregorian chant, but am a soprano, so I am mostly a legend in my own mind.
I took up piano, finally, in order to avoid practicing singing while studying Music Theater in New York. Someone told me that you can’t play the Moonlight Sonata without piano lessons, and I set out to prove them wrong. I was arrogant and deluded, but I really did love to play. I discovered that I could spend a whole day noodling around at the keyboard without ever minding or wishing I was doing anything else.
When I finally arrived at college a few years later, though, I was ready to actually learn. I had learned so many things the hard way- why do we count? Why do I have to use the same fingering? How do I use my body to make music in a way that feels good, and doesn’t hurt. How do I get this specific tone I want out of the piano? Why does Schumann feel like purple crabs crawling around in my head, and Bach feels like a sunny morning?
All music is deeply tied to stories for me. Stories of the composers, of the pieces they wrote, or the way the light must have been shining that day when this music was dreamt up for the first time. Playing music is like bringing a distant moment or place back to the world again.
I try to pass this on to my students. This curiosity, and passion, and meticulous attention to detail.
As a young singer, I don’t think I understood why someone would teach. I thought it was just for money until they got their big break, but I have found that I much prefer teaching to any performance. It’s because I am enchanted by the entire process of making a page full of dots and lines become a living breathing time-machine. I love to share that with others. I love to see the journey of my student’s imaginations in music.
Who I Am: The Piano Tuner
In my college there were four music majors, no budget, and one very tired professor…
Being rather involved with my ears while studying piano, I was continually whining about the state of the pianos at my school. My professor finally handed me a tuning hammer and said in his raspy voice, “Oh, well, why don’t you do something about it?”
That began two years of extreme frustration. Pitch, the physics of sound, the behaviour of metal pins and strings under tension, the art of fitting 8 notes into the scale in a fixed way that doesn’t make anyone wish to gouge out their eardrums, and the history of tuning all became an obsession. That obsession eventually turned into the career that I have followed for the last 20 years.
I cut my teeth on a 1960’s Harpsichord Kit, armed with a zither tuner, a roll of music wire, some easing pliers, and a book entitled Tuning the Historical Temperaments by Ear by Owen Jorgenson. I read everything I could abot tuning, pitch, harmonics and the history of pianos. I even devised ways to tune experimental temperaments by ear, joyfully inflicting those on my fellow students.
My summers and weekends were taken up with an apprenticeship at Pianoworks in Logan, Ohio. I spent my mornings tuning (or attempting to tune) old, mangled uprights in the back room. My afternoons were spent rebuilding old, and slightly less mangled grand pianos in the middle room in exchange for tools and training. My evenings were passed playing Beethoven on all the pianos in the place.
After college and armed with my tuning hammer and a lot more tools, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I have been honing my skills and tuning pianos ever since.
I am happy to report that I love my job. I am proud of the work I do. In a time where so much of the world seems to be tending towards increasing discord, I am intensely grateful to be doing something that brings more harmony.
I love tuning those really out of tune pianos because the difference is so extreme and satisfying. And the owners get so excited! I love tuning the new pianos because they sound and feel really good when I am done.
I love when someone has called me in deep concern about a key that just won’t play and I am able to fix it — and return 3 pencils, a hair clippy, and their favorite video game cartridge from 1998. I love the way a well-made piano smells. I like the really old dusty ones, too, because I think about how there are tiny pieces of everyone who played that piano there in that dust.
I love the stories, the ghosts and the critters, and I love satisfaction of leaving another piano singing beautiful music again at the end of the day.
I love my job because it is a little bit like a superpower.