“To teach piano tuning is a costly exercise and you need to plough the money in … also to broaden it out a little bit into a deeper program to reflect what happens at American universities, where it’s a graduate degree over two years,” he says. Kinney says he wants to see public and private investment – from universities to philanthropists to instrument importers – to reinvigorate the tuning space. Conversations between the companies and the Australian National University are under way, much to Kinney’s and Ottley’s delight. To tackle the supply shortage, Yamaha and fellow piano company Kawai are looking to work with education institutions to set up a new training facility. Mathew Taylor, Yamaha’s marketing manager and a board member at the Australian Music Association, says the most pressing issue is the shortage of piano technicians who can work with top-level musicians. “But it gets to a point where it sounds horrible, if a piano is really starting to break down.” “I’d be remembering which notes are going out of tune and which notes are really badly out of tune, and leaving them out of chords or trying to play them so softly that you couldn’t hear them,” he says. When this is the case, he must work hard to alter the way he plays to finish the show. When Scott Davie, an Australian concert pianist, has toured through Australia, he’s played regional shows where the pianos had been tuned but not properly maintained. Top-level musicians playing Australia’s best concert pianos worry, too, because they can feel the lack of expertise first-hand. ‘We are seriously flying someone in from Sydney or Melbourne’ … the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra play in Hobart’s Federation concert hall in 2021. In regional concert halls or in some homes, instruments can languish for years without being tuned properly, weakening the instrument’s strings and overall condition. However, concert pianos, which are specialist instruments, should be tuned and serviced more regularly by a skilled technician, otherwise the quality of sound diminishes over time. Pianos should be tuned at the very least once a year, but twice in the first year after purchase. It’s estimated that at least one piano tuner is needed per 50,000 people – that means Australia is running about 250 short across the board, and even further behind when it comes to high-quality technicians. “In Australia we are buying about 5,000 new pianos a year, and nobody throws them away at the other end, so the amount of pianos in the country keeps going north.” “People are still buying pianos,” he says. While it’s concert pianos that will be most affected by a lack of technicians, Ottley says everyday piano players in Australia will lose their listening skills if their instruments go without high-level servicing, putting the art of the pianist at risk. ‘In Australia we are buying about 5,000 new pianos a year, and nobody throws them away at the other end,’ says technician Brent Ottley. “When I first started, there were about 500 piano tuners Australia-wide and we had a lot of really good factory-trained technicians out there, but everybody was still making money,” he says. He estimates there are just 250 left in the country and just 20 or so high-level technicians, with most of them close to retiring age. Ottley has been working in the industry for 35 years and says it became obvious two decades ago that Australia had begun “running out” of piano tuners. “But it was a house of cards, and we didn’t have the pull power that something like a Tafe college has … Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, ‘Gee, I’d like to be a piano tuner.’” “We had about 35 graduates go through the place I think about 50% of them, maybe more, are still in the industry,” Ottley says. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The school was set up by Yamaha, one of Australia’s major piano importers, who approached Ottley to work there. It was the last school of its kind in Australia until it closed several years ago. The last batch of tuners to rise through the industry went through the Australasian School of Piano Technology in east Melbourne, which was run by the technician Brent Ottley. While most pianos in homes can be given a basic service by tuners, it is technicians who can maintain and rebuild pianos, especially concert instruments, to the highest standard. “You can always tell the piano is not being serviced or there’s an unhealthy instrument in desperate need of care.
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