Anne Francis

I’m filing this one under Inventive Uses for Dead Pianos. (And Guitars.) It needs no further commentary. Enjoy!

It’s mind-boggling how technology now permeates our lives (especially if there are young people in your life)–and sometimes in delightful ways.

The other night I was watching TV with my family, which used to be an increasingly rare event in this internet-addled age, until we got a PVR (we’ll call this exhibit 1), which lets us “tape” and watch our favourite shows whenever we want.

Anyway, whoever was in charge of the clicker must have been dozing, because we usually fast-forward through the commercials (exhibit 2)… and we find ourselves watching a commercial (later I discovered it was for Enterprise Car Rental) when this really great song starts playing.

Our ears perk up, because we love this song and we’ve heard it before; but none of us can remember where.

So my eldest, who is 17, says, “I can Shazam it!” She pulls out her Blackberry, with this app called Shazam, which will identify a song from a snippet of a recording, such as on a commercial (exhibit 3).

She rewinds the commercial (exhibit 4) and holds her phone up to the TV for a few bars. Shazam tells her the song is Send Me On My Way, by a band called Rusted Root. (They’re from Pittsburgh, in case you didn’t know.)

“Oh, darn,” she says. “I just realized, I don’t care what the song is, I want to know where I’ve heard it before!”

So she looks up the song on YouTube (exhibit 5), and finds out it played during one of the final scenes in the animated movie Ice Age.

“Oh yeah!” says her brother. “Now I remember.” I, too, vaguely remembered grooving to it while watching the movie in the theatre.

“But wait, that’s not it,” said the eldest. “I’m sure I heard it before that.” And I had a vague sense, myself, that I had thought the song was familiar even when I heard it in Ice Age. (Or I could be making that up. But I don’t think so.)

So she hunts further. (Online, of course.) Then she gets it–the Eureka moment.

“Matilda!” she cries. “It was in Matilda!”

“Oh yeah!” we said.

Great movies. And a GREAT song. Maybe you’ll recognize it.

Enjoy.

This week I attended the announcement of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s 2012-2013 season. After music director Peter Oundjian’s spirited presentation in the lobby of Roy Thomson Hall, we were invited into the auditorium for a rehearsal of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, with Gunther Herbig conducting.

This is the first time I’ve been to this event (I’m a subscriber, but in the most minimal way possible, due to lack of funds), and I was curious to see not only what is coming, but how it’s communicated to folks like me. The TSO has a lot of exciting stuff lined up, including a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story score accompanying a “live” screening of the digitally remastered movie, among other more esoteric fare…

What struck me, while Oundjian waxed rhapsodic about the coming season, was a) how skilfully a big-city orchestra must market itself, merely to survive, b) how creatively it must appeal both to its aging stalwart patrons and to a new generation of music-lovers, and c) how incredibly well the TSO does this, and how fortunate they are to have a guy like Peter Oundjian at the helm. He’s presentable, accomplished, genuine, comfortable in his skin, and infectiously enthusiastic about the whole enterprise.

And it was really nice of them to let us watch the rehearsal. (And fun to see the orchestra in civvies.) Really, I wouldn’t blame Gunther Herbig if he were mildly pissed off about having the public in the hall during his rehearsal. He didn’t say a word to us, despite Oundjian’s warm introduction, and since he was (obviously) facing the players and he was not miked, we couldn’t hear a word of his instructions to them (though there was much helpful pointing with bows to relevant bits of score by the string players to their colleagues, which makes me wonder if perhaps they had just as much trouble hearing him as we did). And given that the Shostakovich is not a particularly well-known piece, it was a bit like watching paint dry. I realize Herbig was not there to entertain us, that it was a rehearsal and that the orchestra was working. But I think the intent behind letting us in was that it be something like attending a master class, and with all these things conspiring against that, the effect was lost.

Oh well.

I’ll certainly be at that West Side Story screening (I’d go just for the music, but seeing the movie with the live score will be a swell treat). And no doubt the TSO’s very effective telemarketer will manage to sell me some other concerts when he calls, even if I can’t afford it. He always does.

The other day on CBC Radio 2 Shift, Tom Allen played a song I hadn’t heard before:

Sleep in Late, by his fellow CBC announcer, Molly Johnson. You can listen to it here.

It’s a nice song, eh?

Now listen to it again, and notice how the piano accompaniment sounds. Really listen to it.

This is the sound of a purposely detuned piano!

I’m listening to the song, driving up Jarvis street, thinking, my god, that piano sounds terrible! But I realized two things: one, of course they purposely made it sound like that, to give a sort of honkytonk feel to the piece. And two, only a piano technician would think it sounded bad! I was tickled when it was over and Tom, the host, commented on the sound of the piano. (Being a fine musician himself, he notices stuff like this.)

If you’ve ever looked inside a piano, you’ll know that most of the notes in the midrange and treble sections of the keyboard have three strings, and a big part of the tuner’s job is to make sure that each of those strings is tuned in perfect unison with its mates. In fact, unison tuning is considered the most important aspect of tuning–because it’s the most noticeable when it’s not right. (It may also be the easiest aspect of tuning to learn, and the hardest to master.) So when we tune a piano we are (almost) always aiming for perfect, or “clean” unisons.

Except in extremely rare cases, like this one, where a honkytonk effect may be what we’re after. (There may be other ways to accomplish this, such as the “mandolin” attachment on old player pianos, or pushing thumbtacks into the felt of each hammer!) Usually we first tune one string of a unison relative to the other notes in the octave (this is called interval tuning), and then the other two strings are tuned to match it. I figure in this case the piano was given a regular tuning in the studio, so that one string per note was tuned correctly, and then the unisons were either left as they were (i.e. out of tune), or altered just a hair, to give that jangly sound.

(I tried to find out who tuned the piano for this song, but so far I have not been successful.)

I thought this was an interesting example of knowing the rules well enough to break them, to interesting effect.

OK, the photo is extreme. But stay with me for a minute.

When trolling Kijiji for good used pianos for a customer, as I occasionally do, I often see something like this: “Beautiful antique piano in great shape, just needs tuning. Only $500.”

Sometimes I get calls from people who have just bought one of these pianos, and now they need someone to come and tune it.

So they paid $500 for that piano, and maybe $300 to have it moved… And then, for another $100 or so (they figure), they can get it tuned, and they’ll be set. Total outlay: under $1000. Seems reasonable, right?

Wrong. It often doesn’t work out that way.

The piano they bought may not look like the one above. But a piano action contains hundreds of moving parts, which, after 80 or 100 years (or even less, in the case of a lesser-quality piano) just don’t work very well.

A piano that is very old AND sounds badly out of tune is almost guaranteed to have multiple age-related problems that are expensive to repair. If the pitch has dropped a semitone or more, you’re looking at several tunings to get it back up to pitch and stable, and depending on the condition of the strings, broken strings are a distinct possibility, which means further repairs. (And that’s assuming the tuning pins are tight enough to hold the increased string tension.)

These repairs often add up to much more than the piano is worth. And sometimes the piano can’t be brought back to life.

So do yourself a favour. Hire the piano technician BEFORE you take that old beater you found online; don’t wait til after you’ve moved it in.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Peter, my friend and former teacher, suggested I start with variation no. 19… so I did. (You can listen and watch Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of variations 15-19 here. Like the aria, variation 19 is played at a much slower tempo in the later recording than in the earlier one.) I am also trying to learn variations 1 and 4.

When I go to piano technicians’ conventions, I like to take some music with me, in case I can find time to play on one of the very nice grand pianos they tend to have at these things… So I’m at the PTG national convention in Kansas City this past July, and someone sees me walking around with the Goldberg Variations under my arm. He says, “Wow, that’s pretty ambitious, isn’t it?”

I don’t even know this guy, but immediately I react with embarrassment, because:

a) I only play for my own enjoyment,

b) I am learning ONE of the variations, and

c) let’s face it–yes, it is!!

But I wish I’d had the presence of mind to come back with:

“How do you know I’m not that good?”

Yesterday I went with my 9-year-old daughter (a promising pianist) to sit in the audience at Lang Lang’s 101 Pianists Workshop here in Toronto. I heard about this through the Beaches Conservatory of Music, where my son studies guitar. The school was invited to select four students to play Schubert’s Marche Militaire with 96 other kids ages 6-16 (that’s right, the youngest kids were SIX) on stage at Roy Thomson Hall in a master class format–with Lang Lang!

The kids played on Roland digital pianos (2 kids per, playing the piece as a duet). Lang played one of two Steinway D’s on stage. The other was played by two of the senior students in the workshop. The audience was comprised of many young pianists and their parents–including Lang Lang’s mom!

Lang and the kids performed the piece all the way through in unison, then he had them play it section by section, pointing out pitfalls and suggesting tips for more musical playing in his trademark goofy, friendly, and highly musical way. The afternoon was hosted by the TSO’s Peter Oundjian, and the two men, obviously great friends, traded quips about Lang’s prodigious talent and Oundjian’s silver hair. We even watched an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, one of Lang’s earliest influences. I know my daughter will always recognize the Marche Militaire now, and I really think she was quite inspired by the whole thing. What a fantastic opportunity for all these kids to learn from, and perform with, one of the greatest pianists in the world!

Like many pianists, I don’t play as much as I would like. Sure, I play a bit after every tuning, but it tends to be a medley of the same fragments of pieces each time, stuff I have managed to memorize over the years… and it gets REALLY boring!

When I do make time to sit down and play at home, here’s what I’m playing:

Grieg’s Melancholy Waltz, opus 68 no. 6

I love Grieg. As you can see, my copy of the Complete Lyric Pieces is somewhat worn. I was lucky enough to live in Oslo when I was 11-12, where I had a wonderful teacher named Hilde Ringlund. (Yes, I know, Grieg was from Bergen. I visited Troldhaugen with my parents and my sister in, I think, 1973. I wish I could remember more about it. The other day I heard Wedding Day at Troldhaugen played by Leif Ove Andsnes, recorded on Grieg’s Steinway, in his living room!

I invite any pianists to share their own works in progress.

Everybody’s talking about Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs. About Jobs’ drive, his mania for control, his brilliance, and his legacy…

To me, one of the most interesting things about the man is that he thought about stuff like the differences between Glenn Gould’s two recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, made in 1955 and in 1981.

In Chapter 32, entitled “Music Man,” Isaacson quotes Jobs as saying he always preferred Gould’s earlier recording, but that recently he had come to appreciate the more introspective, later version of the aria, which Gould played at about half the tempo of the earlier recording (or, if you prefer, twice as slowly).

Which one do you prefer? You can listen and compare here.

(Thanks are due, once again, to my source of much interesting musical information, CBC Radio 2…)

This was an interesting piece in today’s Globe (read it here).

Did you notice the dark keys in the low bass on the Bosendorfer 290 Imperial in the photo? This model has NINE extra keys in addition to the traditional 88. I am not familiar with any music this low, but according to the manufacturer’s website, it was created to accommodate certain pieces by Bartok, Debussy, Ravel and Busoni. A few years ago I attended a technical demonstration on how to tune these extremely low bass notes, by Mark Zillmann of Lowrey’s Piano Experts, which sells the 290 Imperial.

One thing: The pianists interviewed talked quite a lot about the touch of different pianos, and, while it’s true that every piano has a distinct tone and touch, some of their comments left the impression that there’s not much you can do about how a particular piano feels or sounds.

Not true! Much of what piano technicians do (especially concert technicians), besides tuning, involves voicing the hammers and regulating the action to satisfy both the manufacturer’s specifications and the player’s preferences (and sometimes to find the middle ground between the two!). Of course, as the article explains, touring artists quite often arrive at the hall to a piano they’ve never played, and there is minimal time for rehearsing, let alone for customizing the tuning, voicing and regulation. But pianos are made of organic materials like wood and wool felt, and they are actually quite malleable, when time and resources permit.