“It’s a formidable responsibility – the piano can’t be badly out of tune,” he said.
Spiel will even do an occasional touch-up at intermission if the temperature has varied a lot. By the afternoon, the piano has gone flat, and he tunes it again. The most extreme conditions were an overnight temperature of 38° that had spiked to 105° by the time Spiel arrived to tune the piano for the evening concert.Īlthough temperatures in Signal Hill Barn are more constant, on concert days Spiel starts work at 6:30 a.m. Nevertheless, conditions have stabilized since Spiel first started tuning pianos for the festival in 2001 – in a meadow in Mazama. But none of this happens in a consistent way across the keyboard, said Spiel. As the humidity rises, the action on the piano swells, making the piano sharp. The festival is in a barn, where temperatures and humidity fluctuate throughout the day. Some musicians want customized tuning – Spiel recalls a bassoon soloist who wanted micro-variations in the relationships between notes.
Tuning for the music festival, with its outdoor setting and mix of performers, presents unique challenges. Modern pianos are based on a design developed in the late 19th century, and Spiel still uses the first written instructions for tuning from 1919. “You can do it by math given certain parameters, but when you put paper calculations into a real piano, the physics don’t work,” he said. The machines come very close, but they make small errors, he said.
While there are high-tech machines and smartphone apps for tuning, Spiel, like most registered piano technicians, relies primarily on his ears. And most notes have multiple strings – 236 in all – which Spiel needs to tweak so they vibrate in unison.įortunately, Spiel knows these Steinways – and how they respond to weather and humidity – intimately. Most keys allow 39 different adjustments, although the top 28 notes, which don’t have dampers, have a mere 34 options. When Curt Spiel sets out to tune the Steinway grand piano at the Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival, he can avail himself of a nearly infinite number of adjustments for those 88 keys.
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