Paulius Musteikis
The Wisconsin Union Theater’s Shannon Hall is silent, dim and mostly empty. But up on the stage, Bob Hohf is hard at work.
The tall, skinny man is hunched over the theater’s dismantled B piano. His tools are spread out around the stage floor, and piano parts sit on a nearby table. A lamp illuminates the inside of the instrument that Hohf literally knows inside and out. A piano technician and tuner, he has worked on the theater’s pianos since 1993. Right now he’s putting in new dampers and fitting them to the strings, “one of the hardest things to get right,” he says.
Although I work at the Union Theater, I am about to learn how much I didn’t know.
Hohf is reconditioning the piano, a job that consists mostly of restringing. He’s been at it for about six weeks, some days for longer than eight hours of meditative, repetitive, silent processes. Putting in one string takes 10 steps, and you have to keep doing it all day without letting your mind wander, he explains. “I sit in silence. I believe in focusing your full attention on the task at hand.”
Paulius Musteikis
Many musicians who have performed at the Wisconsin Union Theater’s Shannon Hall have signed its B piano.
A piano is made up of some 12,000 pieces. Many of them are glued on the inside and are unreachable, but the rest need to be reconditioned or, at times, rebuilt. There are 80 pieces for each note, which makes for over 7,000 parts for the “action” mechanism alone — the mechanical assembly which causes pressed keys to move the hammer that strikes the strings, producing sound. “These are very complicated machines,” Hohf says. “When you think about it, it’s amazing they work at all.”
Although Hohf has played piano all his life, he studied biology at Princeton. After graduating in 1971, he couldn’t find a job in his field. He worked for two years for a manufacturer of slaughterhouse machines, then decided to learn to tune pianos.
Most piano technicians now use digital machines to tune, but Hohf still does it the old-fashioned way, by ear. “It takes many years to learn to do it by ear,” he says, “I’m one of the dinosaurs who still do it. In general, tuning is better nowadays since the machines came into play because doing it by ear is very difficult.”
People can learn the craft of refurbishing pianos at a handful of schools or by doing an apprenticeship with a master technician. All of them need to take an exam by the Piano Technicians Guild to become certified. Hohf predicts that in a few decades there will be very few piano technicians left. The economic collapse of 2008 hit the piano world very hard, and there are only four American factories left that manufacture the instruments.
Having tuned for many great and famous pianists, Hohf maintains that tuning is usually not the most important thing; what they really care about is the “voicing” — what the piano sounds like. To get the right voice, one needs to adjust the hardness of the hammers by needling them to release the tension in the felt.
The B piano, which was purchased in 1970 and served as the A piano until a newer piano was purchased in 1993, is used mostly by jazz and world music performers, who prefer its “harder, more percussive tone, which is good for amplification.”
The A piano, used mostly for classical concerts, has a “rounder sound, which is better for non-amplified concerts. If you put them side-by-side,” says Hohf, “they sound very different,” even though both of them are Model D nine-foot Steinway Grand pianos.
Hohf is almost ready to hand the piano over to musicians who will stabilize the strings by playing it. Numerous retunings will be necessary before the strings are finally stabilized a year from now.
Number of Steinways, the top of the line, manufactured each year in the United States:
3,500
Number of pianos produced each year in China, the only place where the industry is expanding:
350,000
Artists who have signed the B piano:
Leontyne Price, Itzhak Perlman, Dave Brubeck, Alicia de Larrocha, Garrick Ohlsson, Emanuel Ax, George Winston, Murray Perahia, Beverly Sills and Ben Sidran.
Amount of time it takes to rebuild a piano:
Six to 12 months, and it has to be done in a shop.
