Piano Tuners in the Movies

PDtek PDtek@aol.com
Mon, 20 Apr 1998 00:32:06 EDT


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.
I suppose it could have been a newly replaced string, but he would have had 2
strings to raise, except for the unlikely event that it was an individual wire
tied to the hitch pin. 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
Dave Bunch Piano Service
Des Moines, IA
http://members.aol.com/pdtek/piano.htm


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