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I will endeavor to keep up with this as much as time permits.
And…I will strive to make it chronological.
However: I have a really great story I MUST share NOW!
This is a story you may not need to hear, but it’s one I need to tell!
My profession is that of being a piano technician, however, I have been told that I am not a piano technician; that I am more like a mentor.
Dr. Vincet Craig whom I saw through his master’s degree and ultimately his Doctorate at Peabody, and as a result, with my guidance and encouragement every step of the way, became the head of the piano department at Wells College of Music at West Chester State University. Vincent called me to tell me two things: “I have a broken string, and by the way, you have never given me bad advice.” to which I responded, “Vincent, that’s because I don’t have any bad advice!”, we laughed.
Some 30 years ago, I was called to do an “emergency” service call in a house in Springfield, PA. “We have a genius living with us for the summer and he is a pianist.” I was in my piano shop at the time and there was significant begging involved. I, being who I am, just can’t refuse.
I arrived to a see a console piano with Liszt Transcendental Etudes on the music desk. OK I thought…so tune the piano I did.
In walks this tall, slender young man from the Pittsburgh area. At the time he was a student at Penn State in the engineering department, a sophomore I believe. I asked if the music on the piano was his to which he replied in the positive. I asked how long he had been playing, to which he replied, “Two years”. I said, “This is not your music.” He begged to differ. “Sit.”, I said, and play. He had every note right where it belonged, but there was no music. He was typing. However, I heard something there but wasn’t sure what that was. He was, at the time playing Chopin and Liszt etudes like the Revolutionary and Winter Wind and Gnomenreigen at full tilt within a year or so…rather amazing!
OK, for those not familiar with the process of becoming an artist at the piano, what Albert did in two years, most take ten. And, most start when they are five or six, Albert much later. But there it is and there he was, the proverbial diamond in the rough!
I asked him to be quiet while I made a phone call to Professor Harvey Wedeen of Temple University, probably the best living pedagogue on the planet. Harvey and I were good friends, and at the time I was teaching piano technology and the accompanying acoustical physics involved while taking care of all of the pianos at Presser Hall. I told Mr. Wedeen what I had experienced. He asked what the boy was playing. I told him. He said that was great then asked how long he had been playing. I went silent, then finally found the wherewithal to say” two years”. Harvey said, “Ralph, seriously?” I proceeded, “Harvey, you know me, I wouldn’t waste your time, please hear him”. Harvey agreed.
So, this young man found his way to North Philadelphia to the studio of Professor Harvey Wedeen and played. Harvey called me later that day to say that he would agree to give him lessons for the summer. I told Harvey that that boy young man no money to which Harvey responded, “I didn’t say I would charge him, did I?”
So, all that summer, Albert studied with Professor Wedeen. Every once in a while, Albert would visit me at the shop telling me how it was going.
At the end of the summer, I gave Albert money to purchase Harvey a bottle of vodka and a box of chocolates, both of which were his favorites. I didn’t think to realize that Albert was too young to buy vodka.
At the summer’s end, Albert once again visited me. He thanked me for my help and then said, with a tear in his eye, “Well, it’s all over”. I didn’t understand. As it turns out, his family was the neighbor of the folks where he stayed that summer before they moved to Pittsburgh. He was “hiding” there that summer to play the piano as he was forbidden to do so at home.
I asked if I could help by having a conversation with his father, and with terror on his face he said “No”. Then I said,” If it is all over, why won’t you let me help?” We talked further and he relented and gave me his father’s phone number, and I called.
I said to his father, “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but I am a concert level piano technician.”, and there he stopped me abruptly. “He isn’t playing the piano, is he?” I asked the father what he did for a living, he said he was in banking. I said, “Banking, and that’s what you wanted to do since you were 5 years old?” He replied, “Well no, but my fa…,” and stopped talking. I said, “So, you want to do to Albert what your father did to you?!” Needless to say, the phone call did not go well.
Albert returned to his studies at Penn State and cleverly switched his major to a degree in music. Albert quietly became so proficient that he received a full Fullbright Scholarship to Vienna, the City of Music, and was mentored by none other than Paul Badura-Skoda, a famous Austrian Pianist.
Albert went on to win competition after competition and his career was set in stone. He is now a Bosendorfer artist and widely acclaimed for his performances, and the rest I will call, “What goes around comes around”.
Just a few weeks ago, an old friend who moved to Arizona working for the largest Bosendorfer outlet in the US called to ask me to take care of a 7’ “Bosey”, the Klimpt, Tree of Life model…quite beautiful and quite pricey being shipped to Berwyn, PA. I, of course, agreed. I show up to this lavish home in Berwyn, PA. The owner said, “You come highly recommended.” I said,
‘Yes, I know Sonja Lynne very well.“ The owner said, “NO…it was Albert Franz from Vienna!” I nearly fell over. Albert was her teacher via Zoom. She asked if I would return to tune again in a week as now Maestro Albert Franz would be there and asked if he could be present to reunite with you. I was aghast.
So just yesterday, after a one-hour tuning, in walks none other than Albert Franz and we had a four-hour visit. Tears were involved. We chatted and laughed and reminisced. We exchanged phone numbers and emails and took pictures.
Then I said to Albert, “You know, there was another young man, in whose career I had a hand at Temple,” and wondered if they had met. Then he showed me a photo on his Apple I Pad of he and Marc-Andre Hamlin at a table in a pub. They were the closest of friends, no surprise, and advised that Marc remember me fondly…more tears. These are two of the top pianists in the world, sitting and chatting at a spot in Vienna, are you kidding me?!
Albert said I had changed his life, and I said, “No, I opened the door, but you chose to walk through, and YOU did!”
So, of the many young people I have helped, most go on to careers never to be heard from again, but yesterday, the Universe decided to give me a gift.
Indulge me here please. Everyone tells me that I should write down the many anecdotes of my career in Piano Technology. “You should write a book!” they say. Quite frankly, I don’t think I’m smart enough for a book, but I will re-ignite my abandoned blog; “The Other Side of the Keyboard”. I hope you will search for it and enjoy it.
I am not very religious or political, and I’m not sure “everything happens for a reason”, or even fate, I am a Humanist. But I do believe in Karma!
I adore my musical family. On May 14, I will turn 76, and riddled with the gift the Marine Corps gave me, systemic arthritis, I will go on. I hobble to work, and I hobble home. There may still be young folks I may be able to help, and I won’t hesitate.
In closing I will say that this is only my part in Albert’s story. The rest is for him to tell. And, I did not change his life, he changed mine!
Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuqfdI9gBC8
Ralph
It’s called reverse engineering…
Since I had work and no one to help me…I had to use my deductive powers to figure out exactly what the designer of the piano wanted. Many times the design of anything doesn’t quite make it out the other side of production intact.
I read and read and read on the design and construction of pianos. I tried to assimilate what the mechanical and acoustical design wisdom was. And it was collective. There weren’t too many difference from one piano to another and from one designer to another. Now, that is a generality. Of course what makes one piano feel and sound differently from another is design difference, but the differences aren’t major. One will find how one manufacturer feels about the scale design and how another feels about the action geometry and trigonometry. But I promise, the differences are more nuances than departures.
OK…here’s a pet peeve: there are those who like to hear themselves talk about “action geometry” to impress the class. Geometry is that branch of mathematics that deals with size, shape and position of two dimensional shapes and three dimensional figures. Trigonometry on the other hand depends on angle measurement and quantities determined by the measure of an angle. Of course, all of geometry depends on treating angles as quantities, but in the rest of geometry, angles aren’t measured, they’re just compared or added or subtracted.
I read the letterhead of a fellow rebuilder which stated that they made a certain type of soundboard and used a word to describe it that I had never heard before used in soundboards of pianos or anywhere in the study of acoustics. I won’t repeat the word here because I think it is still in use and it is an embarrassment. I had to ask what that meant. He told me he made the word up…YIKES how some people focus on the wrong things. I figure you focus on making great soundboards, not make believe ones. The saying goes: “if you can’t amaze them with your talent, you baffle them with your bull…”, or something like that.
My study of pianos led me down many paths; guitars, violins, and harps, anything that had strings, and a way to excite them and produce an amplified sound. That approach revealed many truths in the piano world which I used to learn the math and procedures to give that rebuilt piano the quality of touch and tone it deserved while staying true to the manufacturer’s intent and design…not an easy task.
Of course, all of this study, research, trial, and yes error did manage to hold up production in the beginning, but it all paid off in the end.
In reality though, there is no end. One strives for perfection but one never gets there. You never, never stop learning. A prospective client once asked if I could say something about my work that would prompt him to write a check for a rebuilding deposit. Without thinking, I offered the following, “My next rebuilding is always better than my last.” He wrote the check. That is still true today.
I teach my students that the progression of improvement in piano rebuilding goes something like this: the first one is awful, the second better, the third better, and the fourth awful. What happened on the fourth, “you get cocky and over confident”. You have to learn to leave your ego and over-confidence in the back seat, slow down and pay attention to the task at hand.
In the ensuing offerings, we will take that journey over again while we go through the piano and try to understand it better. I promise to mix in some stories, both funny and not so to keep things on the move.
In the meantime, if you have a piano, play it. Don’t just let it sit there. I know you don’t have time, you can’t play anymore; you wish your mother made you take lessons. I’ve heard all the excuses. It’s music, it’s culture, it’s beautiful, and as my friend Jim says, “there are no wrong notes”. It’s not called work the piano it’s called play. Go…play. Just fifteen minutes a day and you will be surprised how the consistency will bring improvement which brings joy and fun.
Remember, as adults we have diseases. The symptoms are the adult ear, we think we can run home and play something we’ve heard on the radio just because we have the music, and, we have responsibilities…mortgages, kids, work. Fifteen minutes a day…use it as your “me time”
So…who will teach me????
Where do you go…to whom do you go to learn a craft and trade that almost doesn’t exist?
You try the mentor route. The trouble with that is the first sentence…there is no one out there that actually gets this trade.
In the old days, a piano needed a pin block…maybe it gets replaced…but a soundboard and bridges…you just take the piano out back, one bullet to the brain and it’s the dumpster for you.
The mentor route wasn’t viable because those trying to rebuild just put back whatever the factory put there in the first place. You may think this interesting, but the factory is not always right. Just look at the older pianos from the late 1800’s. They weren’t really pianos as we know them today. The mechanical and acoustical features were crude at best. We can’t put it back together that way.
And even in the case of the better modern pianos, was it before or after???? Before or after what…?…the beer break. “Back in the day” as the kids put it, there wasn’t a coffee break at 11AM. Someone would come to the middle of the floor in the factory and put down a bucket of suds…that’s right…BEER. The workers would approach the bucket with their personal stein in hand, take their dip and go back, trade stories, and down the brew.
Now then…was your piano done…before…or after the dip.
My dilemma remained. Where do I go to learn how to do it if all around me were just “doing it the way the factory did it”? Worse yet, I would hear after asking a pertinent question about a process, “Well, we always did it that way”. It was cutting off the ends of the roast all over again. Don’t know that story? This is as good a place as any.
One day a young girl asked her mom, when making a roast, why it was she dutifully cut off the ends. The mom replied that her mom always did it that way, that’s the way she learned, and that’s the way she continued to make a roast. But being a good teaching mom, she suggested that the next time they visited with grandmom, the granddaughter should ask, and ask she did…”Grandmom, why did mom learn to cut off the ends of a roast? Grandmom replied, “When I was a young married woman, we didn’t have much money and a large roasting pan was not something on which I would spend that hard earned cash. The normal sized roast would not fit in my pan (…wait for it…) so I got into the habit of cutting off the ends.”
That was nice for the meal, but not good enough for me to learn a complicated process.
My background was in science. We learned a lot about deductive reasoning. The process then was something they call today: reverse engineering. I let the piano teach me.
I was able to get my hands on two pianos; a Steinway A, and a Mason & Hamlin AA. These were two top tier piano designs. I took to the task of ripping them down, but as I did that I would record what was done, and try to figure out, both acoustically and mechanically where the manufacturer wanted to be, and how I could get them there during the “put it back” process.
It took a long time and a lot of sleepless nights, and as it turned out, many more pianos than those two I had at the time.
After fully realizing that my “mentors” were not going to give me and my rebuildings what I needed, I moved off on my own to my first little shop. This goes back some 45 years.
I took on jobs but had no tools. How do you do that…you stall. “Ralph, will you rebuild my piano?” “Why certainly,” I would reply, “but my schedule is so backed up, there will be a bit of a wait.” With that, I would contract the job, get a healthy deposit, and you guessed it, went out and bought tools for that specific job. Before you knew it, my shop was small, but it could do everything but refinish. Refinishing was better left to those who did that for a living…so I left it with them.
And down that slippery slope I call piano rebuilding I slid………………………………………
OK…so there I was!
The year was 1962…WAIT…I have a question…NO…two questions:
1. Why is when people have me as a technician, they insist on surprising me with a new piano purchase done without my FREE help. Today I went to a client’s house and they surprised me with a grand piano that isn’t as good as the console they had…oh…they were so proud. What do you say…”Congratulations!”
2. How in heaven’s name does someone write on Facebook, from my account, in what looks like my name…???? How do they do that…hacked again!!!! I had to send out 250+ apologies for what…for having a Facebook account that was apparently unsecured.
Ok…where was I…? Oh yes, 1962…
My Uncle was bent on my being a piano technician…I was bent in the other direction. So for some time I followed him around from client to client. When an action was broken…we would both stare at it like a helpless driver stuck on the side of the road looking into the hood of the car for something…anything!
He would go to the car to fetch a part, and inevitably, by the time he got back…I had it figured out. You see…I was one of those kids that took all of their toys apart…but put them back so they worked better…I was doomed!
Soon, he became frustrated with me and passed me off to one John “Larry” Scheer. Larry was “Mr. Technical” in the guild. He wrote most of the technical articles…he was the guru of piano technology and happened to live close by…what luck????
Ok…I was almost hooked…almost. I called Mr. Scheer and he told me he was no longer taking on students. I understood. We talked more. He asked questions and I answered them. He was impressed by the fact that I had read the last nine years of the piano technicians journal given to me by my uncle, and memorized all of his technical articles. “OK…maybe one more student”.
Now, instead of following Uncle Pete around, I followed “Uncle” Larry. He loved the fact that I showed up on our first appointment together with a note book…yes…the same kind I kept track of my book request; that black and white marble, hard cover, sewn copy book.
We worked together for one year until he said, “Kid…I have nothing more. You take faster than I can give”, and turned me loose just after I promised to take my test and become registered…more on that later.
In the time I spent with my Uncle and Larry, I bought books…read them all, bought tools…wore them out learning and by 1964 started…wait for it…Onesti Piano Service…NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO not a piano technician…doomed!
I thought I would just do it to get me through college…I did that, but forgot to stop!
Through all of this…there was the mystery of rebuilding…you know…taking the piano apart and putting it back together…only better. I did it with toys. This was a musician’s toy…sorry…tool…why not.
Why not, I’ll tell you why not! That business really wasn’t up and running yet. It was in its infancy…yet to be invented, and I was in on the invention…now it gets interesting.
The Judge said, “Get a job or go to Jail!”…
That’s what I say when people ask how I got into the piano service business…a joke of course.
Truth is, I started with my Uncle Pete, on my mother’s side of the family, who was a technician back in the early ‘60’s. He would take me around with him on his runs in the summer. It really isn’t what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a music educator. Piano was my instrument.
The main problem was my choice was limited to my physical ailment of arthritis that I got from the Marine Corps in 1969. I went in rather heavy, and instead of putting me in the “fat boy” platoon to get me into shape for regular boot camp, they kept me with the regular platoon and put me on a diet of raw carrots and raw celery and coffee for 12 weeks. So malnourished and physically punished, I developed osteoarthritis at a surprising young age. And to that, pushups on my knuckles completely destroyed my hands.
The other influence in my life was Uncle Frank on my father’s side of the family. He was an educator and a big deal in the Philadelphia Public School System.
So what do I do now…I service and rebuild pianos and teach!…go figure. Never give the finger to the witch doctor.
I have been doing this as a result of the deterioration of my joints, especially my hands, knees and shoulders. In music education you have to have the main instrument, and piano was it. So, I went to the State of Pennsylvania Department of Vocational Rehabilitation. After a full examination, both physical and intellectual, they saw the I deserved a full pass to the Philadelphia Musical Academy.
I tried. I was Dean’s list, but my hands refused to let me play anything! So, music education was not in the cards for me. Back to piano service for me… hated it.
I service pianos in homes, in studios, on the concert stage. I’ve taught for the Piano Technicians Guild, The Master Piano Technicians of America, retailers, and at Temple University. I’ve done, and still do, consultations for technicians, rebuilders, and manufacturers. And, I still hate it…but I love the people.
The truth is that in spite of my ailment, I could do piano technology through the pain. My doctors told me the best I could do was to keep moving and improve my muscle strength. I did was I was told and was able to work. There was no medication for my problem, just perseverance!
The musicians in my life think that their schedule is my schedule…and…they are correct. They know I’ll do anything for them if humanly, and sometimes inhumanly possible.
It seems I’ve worked for just about everyone in the biz.
So why am I blogging…something else I said I wouldn’t do?!
Many times I would go to an appointment, service the piano, be my personable self, tell stories, and people would say, “You need to write a book”. Well, “I don’t think there is a book in there.” I would reply. But they kept saying it and I kept refusing. However, I decided that if one thousand people asked me to write that book, I would consider it.
I went years ago, to purchase one of those hard over, marbleized copy books. In it a put a stroke for every person who said, “You need to write a book”. I never really took it seriously.
A few months ago I went to an appointment, tuned the piano, told my stories, and the client said…you guessed it…”You need to write a book”. When I said I didn’t think there was a book in there…he said, “Think Blog!”
That evening, I dutifully went to my little copy book to give him his deserved “stroke”, and what do you know…he was number one thousand.
Welcome to, “The Other Side of the Keyboard”. This blog is named after a lecture I do for audiences filled with piano owners, pianists, teachers, etc who want to know more about their rather complicated instrument.
This is my first entry, and I will do my level best to be diligent in keeping it up. I’m not very technical with blogs yet, but I do plan to cover humorous stories, technical issues, and anything that comes to mind, mine or yours.
Welcome to this new venture and adventure…let’s see where it goes, shall we?
To learn more about me, you can go to:
theothersideofthekeyboard http://theothersideofthekeyboard.onestipiano.com
On here…you can read, and comment, ask questions, anything you like. This is here for the individual piano owner, the serious musician, the hobbyist, and technician…if you like pianos…come on in…the water’s just fine.
Ciao and wish me (us) luck,
RJ