Piano Tuners in the Movies

[Billbrpt]

In a message dated 98-04-20 00:44:22 EDT, you write:

<< In the movie "The Competition" with Richard Dreyfus, a piano tuner is seen
checking the tuning of a piano being used in a Van Cliburn type competition.
Every note sounds right on until he gets to one unison that is so horrible
that it is hard to imagine this note existing in the context of an otherwise
in tune piano. He whips out a pocket size lever and pulls the string up to
pitch (in a trichord unison) without any checking to see which string was
low....(snip)
  Any way, it didn't come off as a realistic tuner situation. They probably
felt that the lay persons in the audience should be able to hear the out of
tune string. I think it would have played much better if the pitch deviation
was small enough that the audience could'nt hear it, then being much more
impressive that the tuner could hear something that they couldn't.
 Such is the movies.
  Dave Bunch>>
 
As I remember this, it was actually the pianist who was checking out the
tuning.  He found the out of tune note and tuned it up himself.  But this
really doesn't change the portrayal of piano maintenance in this film.  Our
own Golden Hammer Award winning Norman Neblett, RPT was actually the
technician who tuned these pianos.  But do you think they put his name in the
credits?  NO!!!

There was also a voicing incident in the film.  The young lady wanted to play
a Mozart Concerto on a certain piano but that instrument had one note with an
extremely bright and harsh-sounding note.  It was so bad as to not really have
been a realistically occuring problem  (although accidentally dropping some CA
glue on the striking surface might have done it).  The pianist had a fit. The
judges said they would get a technician to "tune" it.  She asked, "but not
voice it too?" The reply was, "No".  

This goes along with Dave's idea about what Hollywood does.  They often
portray things to go along with what they think a general audience might
already believe or accept.  Tuning up one very bad string from very flat to
pitch is something everyone could get, so they think.  Showing someone banging
on keys and making imperceptible differences wouldn't be effective.  Same with
the voicing.  They figure that most people don't really know what a voicing
problem is so they have to make it overly obvious.   The pianist went on to
another piano and decided to play a Prokofiev concerto instead.

This reminds me of two other films in which pianos were depicted but blatently
falsified:  Amadeus and another about Beethoven, I forget the name, Immortal
Beloved or something.   The point is that in neither of these films did we
hear the piano that we saw.  Mozart's fortepiano was just some tinny sounding
modern piano in ET.  In the Beethoven movie, we heard a modern Steinway D in
ET instead of the Broadwood.  As Dave does, I think in both cases it would
have been far more effective to use the actual sound of the period
instruments, tuned the way they would have been tuned.

The Beethoven movie used a lot of speculation about a number of things.  And
true to Hollywood, steamy sexual scenes were de rigeur.  There just had to be
a scene where a woman ripped open her blouse to expose her breasts to
Beethoven.  The Napoleonic wars (which Beethoven was known to have opposed)
were also depicted.  Everyone knows that soldiers are apt to rape women during
time of war.  But do they HAVE to show it in a movie about Beethoven?  And so
graphically?  Twice?

This same movie magic was of course part of the famous film, The Piano.  We
saw a square grand or something like that.  But instead of that kind of sound,
we heard what was probably a Yamaha and the music played on it was most
definitely not period music but some phony New Age stuff.  Then of course
there is the scene that out of context, would make you think you were watching
an X rated porno flick.  There was also the blind tuner who came to tune that
piano which had been left out on the beach for a couple of weeks and hauled up
the muddy hill by movers from hell.  He had no trouble at all bringing it
right up to pitch, though.  There wasn't a single sticking key!

But as Dave says, "Such is the Movies".

Bill Bremmer RPT
Madison, Wisconsin