Staying in Tune

In a sense, Emily Townsend began her career at age 12, when her mother called a piano tuner for the family’s Kimball upright. “He was an old man with gray hair, a tuning fork and a wooden box of tools,” Townsend says. Fascinated, she watched him work on the instrument she used to practice for her piano lessons.

“Doesn’t it sound like the coolest job in the world?” she asked her friends when she told them about the piano tuner — and was surprised when they weren’t that impressed. Starting then, people told her that tuning pianos couldn’t be a real job, that she’d have to do something else to make a living and maybe work on pianos on the side. Besides, wasn’t she a musician? And where could you learn how to tune pianos, anyway?

The piano had been at the center of Townsend’s life since she started taking lessons at age 7. Her parents, she says, had bought one “so that my father could get back into playing it, but after I overtook him, it sort of became my piano.” Growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, she entered the young musician’s world of recitals and competitions, branching out to gain proficiency in mallet percussion instruments during high school.  For college, she chose Trinity University in San Antonio, where she earned a bachelor of music degree, performing frequently as a solo artist, ensemble member and accompanist.

After graduation in 2006, Townsend wanted something different from the traditional career paths taken by most piano-performance students. “Teaching didn’t appeal to me, and I didn’t think I’d be particularly good at it,” she says. At the same time, she was aware that only a few pianists are able to forge successful careers as performing and recording artists. “That’s a difficult and demanding lifestyle,” she says, noting that except for those at the top, “Money is always a problem.”

Instead, she chose another way to use her piano skills and to continue working with other musicians. When she first started researching education for piano tuners, she found that there was a short list of options. “There were only about five schools (in the United States) for piano technicians, and two were for non-sighted people,” she says. That left only a few institutions, from which Townsend chose the North Bennet Street school in Boston’s North End, a block south of the historic Old North Church. At North Bennet Street, a prestigious trade and craft school, she entered the piano-technology program, where she learned the basics of piano tuning in the first year and continued with studies in in-home repair and restoration to earn her diploma in advanced piano technology in 2008.

With her husband, John, whom she had met at Trinity, Townsend decided to move back to San Antonio. “My husband’s family lives here, and we both knew San Antonio and liked it,” she says. Also, while still at North Bennet Street, she had learned that the city had more room for new piano tuners than some others. Statistics showed that San Antonio had one piano tuner for every 100,000 people, while Boston, for instance, already had one for every 300 people, so moving back home also made good business sense. Back in San Antonio with certification as a registered piano technician, Townsend found clients through her Trinity University connections and through the local Steinway Piano Gallery.

House calls — like the one that so impressed her as a child — are a large part of her business, now known as Townsend Piano Service. A typical day might include three to five visits to homes or churches, where for an hour or two at a time, she’ll do small repairs to fix rattles and buzzes or pedals that stick. Though she also cleans pianos, polishing surfaces and keys, Townsend says, “That’s mainly cosmetic work. There’s a lot going on that you can’t see.”

That’s when she goes under the lid, replacing hammers, cleaning key pins, adjusting strings and occasionally using power tools to repair or replace larger parts. 

While she works, she listens to KPAC, Texas Public Radio’s classical music station, “because they play good stuff,” or puts her iPod on shuffle, “so I’ll hear piano music, the Muppets, rock ’n roll, whatever.” When Townsend is finished with the job, she tests her work by playing a few bars from a Beethoven sonata or a Mendelssohn prelude — both arpeggiated pieces whose broken chords let her hear how the instrument’s newly tuned tones line up. People often ask her to play something, she says, “and it’s also a signal (to the piano’s owner) that I’m done.”

Townsend recommends twice-yearly tunings to keep pianos in optimal condition and to spot any problems before they become serious. “I tell owners of high-end pianos, especially, that maintenance protects your investment. You wouldn’t buy a new car and then never change the oil until it breaks down,” she says.

For pianos that haven’t been so well tended, she also does piano restoration, either on-site or in her workshop, where she reconditions essentially high-quality instruments for resale. 

Some of the pianos Townsend restores have undergone damage in traumatic events, such as a flood, but others are merely victims of long-standing neglect. They range from Steinway grand pianos to instruments whose value is largely sentimental — the piano the customer took childhood lessons on or one that belonged to a beloved relative. Humidity, temperature changes and fabric-eating moths do the most damage, but simple old age also is a factor. “Wood has a workable life span,” says Townsend. “When a piano is 100 years old, things don’t line up in quite the same way they did (when the instrument was new).”

At home, the Townsends have four pianos of their own. One is her Steinway Model C, another is the Yamaha C3 from her husband’s childhood home, and the other two are instruments she bought to restore on spec. That’s a total of four grand pianos in their music room — formerly the dining room, she says, “but we’ve kind of had to push the table into a corner.”

Another part of her business that Townsend especially enjoys is the work she has done at concert venues. She has had two summer fellowships in piano technology at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she prepared instruments for use by performers at the center’s annual festival. There and at Trinity, where she has cared for the pianos in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall, she has worked on pianos used in rehearsal or in concert by notable musicians including Emanuel Ax, Sheryl Crow, Ramsey Lewis, Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor, composer/conductor John Williams and Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion, who was “just as nice as he sounds on the radio.” (San Antonio’s Vikki Carr — “a lovely woman” — also is a client, for the piano she keeps for at-home rehearsals.)

After one concert, Townsend overheard audience members comment that a pianist playing on an instrument she had prepared “had never sounded so good.” Although she liked being onstage during her student days, she is comfortable with her choice to work behind the scenes. Concert work can be high-stress for a piano technician, because “performers expect the highest-caliber instrument,” but the pressure doesn’t compare with what a musician getting ready for an appearance must go through with “months of preparation” for a performance.

As a technician, Townsend gets to stay for concerts — at least through the intermission, in case the artist runs into any problems that could be corrected — and hear the music, appreciating different approaches to familiar pieces. “It’s said that if five people play the same Bach prelude, they’ll come up with five different interpretations,” she says. At home, Townsend still plays the piano, taking lessons from Trinity music professor Dr. Carolyn True, in exchange for piano-tuning services. Pianists have to practice, she says, “or it’s like speaking a foreign language: If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.”

For Townsend, being a piano technician did turn out to be “the coolest job in the world.” She makes her own hours, meets a variety of people and stays connected with music. Best of all, she says, “Whether it’s a world-class musician or someone just starting to play, I help all kinds of people get the most out of their instruments.”