Piano technician Austin L.

Grimes got his start as a pianist, then soon wanted to learn how to tune his own
instrument. By Addison Y. Liu
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Behind the Curtain of Harvard’s

Piano Shop
The intense labor and precision of the technicians’ work is what enables
the musical magic we hear onstage.

BY RIYA KAPOOR AND RAIHANA RAHMAN October 20, 2022

0

We may know Sanders Theatre as a spotlight for Harvard’s musicians — but one
peek behind the curtain reveals a lesser known, though equally crucial, musical
talent. One out-of-tune piano hardly seems like an emergency. But as the
technicians of Harvard’s Piano Shop know all too well, a slightly discordant
harmony can make or break a Sanders success.

The Piano Technical Services is composed of a team of four people who work to
maintain the 200-plus pianos on campus. In addition to tuning the
instruments, they also prepare pianos for concerts, maintain the campus’s
harpsichords, and restore vintage pianos.

Piano technician and extended techniques specialist Richard A. Gruenler

explains there isn’t really a rhythm to the daily work of a piano tech. “It's really
hard to say what day to day is,” he says. “It's more like what month to month
is.” At the start of each semester, the technicians tune all of the pianos on
campus. In the summer, they focus on rebuilding worn-out pianos and
conducting extensive repairs.

Fixing a damaged instrument or tuning a faulty piano is hardly a glamorous

process — especially compared to the excitement of a piano concerto. But the
intense labor and precision of the technicians’ work is what enables the musical
magic we hear onstage.

When we speak to technician Austin L. Grimes, he’s twisting the pins in the
diaphragm of the piano in Eliot Dining Hall with a piano tuner key. He looks
through the windows and plays the note, observing the change in pitch, before
twisting the key again. Amid the buzz of students talking and eating, Grimes
tunes out the noise to make sure each of the 88 keys sounds perfect.

There are a variety of ways pianos, especially those that are over 100 years old,
can be damaged and require repairs. “The keys can get worn and they need to
be refurbished,” Grimes explains. “Sometimes the felt inside the piano can get
attacked by moths and damaged that way. Other times, they can just get worn
out from use for years and years and years.”

After packing his tools, wiping dust off the piano, and closing the lid, Grimes
recalls his introduction to tuning, when his own experience as a musician
turned into a need for technical understanding. “I saved my money for an
upright piano. And then I quickly came to realize that it was out of tune a lot of
the time.” So Grimes bought a tuning key — and quickly realized that turning a
piano takes incredible skill and dexterity.

In addition to tuning, Gruenler specializes in approving all of the requests for

“extended techniques,” or instances where pianists want to use the instrument
unconventionally. One example of this, Gruenler says, is when “people will put
screws in the strings between strings and give it a more percussive sound.”
Some technicians frown upon these techniques, citing concerns of damage to
the piano as a result of tampering with its innards. But Gruenler emphasizes
that he values the independence of the artist and their freedom to explore
different sounds — “as long as you're not going to destroy it.”

It is perhaps no surprise that all four of Harvard’s piano technicians come from
a musical background themselves; their lives are deeply steeped in music.
Grimes says, “I think it’s something that's sort of woven into not only this
professional life that I have here, but the other aspects of my life — it’s with me
playing the piano and listening to music and going to concerts and helping
people who play piano.”

Piano playing and piano tuning, it would seem, operate symbiotically, with one
skill reinforcing, even reaffirming, the other. For Gruenler, who comes from a
background in composition, being a technician makes him a better musician.
He says, “it always sticks with you, like you hear something. You hear it in a way
that most people don't hear.”

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