One string at a time

Ken Hatfield has just spent two hours painstakingly stabbing the felt hammers of a client’s grand piano with a special three-pronged tool. He can do three hammers at a time, stabbing them on each side or on the top, depending on the register. There are 88 hammers in all.  

It’s all in a day’s work for Ken, who is a piano technician with Theme & Variations, the Sydney-based business which looks after pianos in homes, schools, conservatoria and concert halls across Australia. 

In this case, he explains to me over a cup of tea at his workshop, his aim is not so much to tune the piano but to make the sound of the piano less overwhelming in his client’s living room. Putting holes in the felt hammers mean they absorb more of the vibration, giving a softer sound.  

From there, Ken goes to the Sydney Opera House to work on one of the Model D Steinway concert grands which, by contrast, need the tone and volume to fill the Concert Hall.  

Then it’s on to the Opera House Studio, a cosy space where a late 19-century upright piano needs to be brought to the right pitch without losing the honky tonk sound of a saloon bar piano for the musical Calamity Jane.  

Three different pianos. Three very different challenges, but each of them needing an intense level of focus from a technician to maintain their precision engineering. 

‘You’ve got to embrace the obsessiveness. It’s 100% obsessive,’ says Ken.  

‘Piano turning needs a certain degree of patience. I’m not a fast piano tuner. If it’s easy it might take me 45 minutes but most pianos still take me over an hour, and it’s a solid hour.’ 

Later that day I watch him in action on the stage of City Recital Hall, where he is tuning another Steinway concert grand before a performance by Trio Isimsiz. From his small box of tools he produces a felt strip, which he weaves in an out of the strings to isolate one of the sets of two or three strings making each note. He sounds each string softly, then hard, then with other notes, making tiny adjustments with a socket-headed tuning spanner, increasing or decreasing the tension on each of 230 or so strings as he works his way through the intervals of the harmonic series. It’s strangely hypnotic. 

You work through the order of intervals, he explains: the fourths, fifths, thirds, octaves, tenths. Then, once you’ve done the intervals, you do the unisons, which involves getting sets of strings to equal pitch.  

‘That takes a lot of concentration because it’s very fine,’ he says. ‘I find that the hardest thing, harder than getting the intervals aligned.’ 

He'll be following the same exacting routine in November, when he tunes the pianos at City Recital Hall, Adelaide Town Hall and Newcastle City Hall for Polish piano virtuoso, Piotr Anderszewski.

Ken does this all by ear, without any kind of electronic metering. How does he know when it is just right? 

‘When I started training I was given course notes listing correct beat speeds for all these intervals. But after a long time of doing it over and over again you’re not counting the beats; you just know what that should sound like. You internalise it.’  

Ken loves the sound of the City Recital Hall pianos. The late Ara Vartoukian, founder of Theme & Variations, visited the Steinway factory to choose instruments specifically for the hall. Each piano is over 2 metres long and cost upwards of $200,000.  

‘The tone, the sound that Steinways make has become the standard for the concert world’, says Ken. ‘It’s a beautiful sound. The history and the sound they make has become what others are judged against.’ 

It also means that international artists and virtuoso pianists like Piotr Anderszewski, who don’t get to travel with their own instrument, have something familiar to play on.   

‘If they get a nice Steinway they don’t have to adjust too much. They’re used to how it feels, the different colours they can get from it. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of variation within Steinway. There is. But there’s a certain feel and sound that comes out of a Steinway. 

‘There’s no such thing as a perfectly-tuned piano. The piano is a physical thing, not a digital thing. There are inconsistencies with the strings, the hammers, the string lengths. The weather! Even inside, people come into a hall and the humidity changes. Timber expands and contracts, the strings expand and contract… 

‘If it’s a solo piano recital it’s important to discuss the piano with the pianist, to make sure they’re comfortable with the tone and how it feels. You’re limited, time-wise, but you can do small things, lubricate parts or adjust the repetition springs… We’re trying to be fussy here. We’re striving for perfection.’  

When Piotr Anderszewski arrives in Australia to perform Beethoven, Brahms and Bach, he will be greeted by a piano that, if not exactly like his own, is not a complete stranger.  

And it will have been tuned by Ken. 

Theme & Variations are supporters of Musica Viva Australia. You can see a demonstration of piano tuning by the late Ara Vartoukian, founder of Theme & Variations, here.  

You can hear the City Recital Hall piano on 10 November, when Piotr Anderszewski begins his Australia recital tour.