“I can see at a quick glance. This is a piece of shit,” Tom tells me as he takes a table lamp and a pack of Marlboro Gold Slims off the lid of the piano. We’re standing in front of a 70-year-old, four-foot-tall upright Wurlitzer. It was already here in the corner by the foyer when the house’s residents moved in; no one knows where it came from, much less the last time it was tuned. The piano’s bleached silver strings turned to gunmetal over the last few decades, and they reverberate like pieces of gravel trapped in a tin can. Tom’s not phased. “I’ve heard worse.” He’s sporting a teal button-down, teal khakis, gray orthopedic shoes with teal accents, and glasses whose translucent frames are actually cyan but catch the light at just the right angles to appear––that’s right––teal.
From a navy blue Adidas gym bag, Tom whips out a brand new Santa Cruz Shredder pick (typically used to scrape trapped bud out of a grinder), a felt wedge, a camping headlight, an 18-inch carbon fiber lever, an electronic tuning device called the Sanderson Accu-Tuner IV, and yet another Santa Cruz Shredder pick, this one superglued between two popsicle sticks for extra reach. It’s time for battle, and with roughly 18 tons of tension in its strings, the Wurlitzer is a monster.
Over the next two hours, Tom will press each of the piano’s eighty-eight keys dozens of times, pluck each of its 220 strings at least twice, and nudge each of their corresponding 220 pins clockwise, then counterclockwise, then clockwise, and so on until he’s satisfied with the pitch. “This one’s going to be fairly quick and easy.”
Everything about Tom is a declaration. I found this out the moment I first arrived at the headquarters of Piano Island Tuning (AKA Tom’s house in Hamden, Connecticut) a few weeks ago. On his doorstep, Tom had been wearing the same head-to-toe teal ensemble, but I noticed that his button-down shirt and khaki pants were made from different materials. Pairing them couldn’t have been as easy as buying a matching set from a department store––Tom had to have hunted down each piece. Each of his garments communicated an intention to let the world know that he does things his own way.
Once inside his house, Tom ushered me into a room featuring a century-old Stodart piano, hundreds of CDs and vinyls, a rocking chair, a Pilates reformer machine, a treadmill, two litter boxes, a five-foot-tall cat tree, a couple cases of Pepsi and Topo Chico, and his navy blue Adidas gym bag. At this point, it was clear: Tom had declared control over his world, curating his clothes and music-cat-living room to fit his wants and needs. And it made sense. As a piano tuner, he doesn’t have to deal with any constraints that aren’t his own––no fixed work hours, no dress code, no boss breathing down his neck. That’s probably why he didn’t hesitate when I asked if I could watch him tune the Wurlitzer. “To be able to work on my own is a wonderful thing,” Tom said. It’s just him on an island, tuning pianos.
***
Tom’s job has been centuries in the making. In ancient Greece, the only “pianos” available were rudimentary keyboard instruments that used hand-pumped air and water pressure to produce notes through pipes. From there, the Romans introduced organs with bellows instead of water reservoirs, and by the sixteenth century, the Italians had produced another relative of the piano: the harpsichord. It dominated the Baroque and Renaissance periods, but thankfully, it was not the final stop in the evolution of keyboard instruments. The problem with the harpsichord is that it’s always loudmouthed and prickly. Its pretentious, buttoned-up sound is a feature of its mechanics––the plucking action that tugs at the strings and prevents any volume control. The Middle Age alternative, the clavichord, is not much better. It offers some more room for expression by using metal blades to hit rather than pluck, but the blades were designed to strike the strings at their ends, not their middles, so the clavichord is too quiet to fill up any space besides a bedroom.
Then, around 1700, the appointed caretaker of Ferdinando de’ Medici’s harpsichords, Bartolomeo Cristofori, envisioned a new kind of instrument, one that would become the poster child of Western music for the next 300 years all because it could be played loudly and softly. The 18th-century Italian writer Scipione Maffei named Cristofori’s invention a “gravicembalo col piano, e forte” (harpsichord with soft and loud), which became just pianoforte, and eventually, with two syllables subtracted, piano. To be fair, the piano wouldn’t catch on in Europe until well after Cristofori’s death, but from the moment Cristofori made it possible to have the racketiness of a harpsichord with the delicacy of the clavichord in one instrument, Western music changed forever.
Well, at least mechanically. Here’s what it takes to produce a single note on a piano: the “key,” which is really a see-saw that extends into the instrument’s guts, tilts down when it’s pressed, causing the capstan on the other end of the key lever to hit the wippen––a mass of bolts, hinges, and felt pads whose technical names (such as “hammer shank rest post”) sound like forgotten indie bands from the early 2000s. In any case, the capstan jerks the wippen awake, which in turn propels the repetition lever upwards, which in turn hits what might be the most important piece of this whole process (and what my name would be if I were a WWE wrestler): the hammer knuckle. Also called “the escapement mechanism,” the knuckle is a twelve-by-ten millimeter attachment on the hammer’s base. It sticks out just enough to catch the rising repetition lever and shoot the hammer’s felt head towards the string before letting the lever fall off almost immediately. The hammer then follows suit. It thrusts upwards, makes contact with the string for less than a second, and comes down. This twelve-by-ten bump encapsulates Ctistofori’s genius. It’s what allows a player to control the force with which a hammer hits a string and what prevents a hammer from killing a string’s vibrations with too much close contact––the whole reason why pianos can produce loud and soft sounds at all.
I know. Your mind is blown, your third eye is open, and you’re riding high on new levels of intellectual enlightenment because of this information. Join the club. This is embarrassing to admit, mostly because my family used to have a grand piano in the living room and my sister played for about a decade, but before I met Tom, I never really thought about the instrument. At some point, after seeing and hearing my family’s piano for the umpteenth time as a kid, it must have faded from my conscious awareness and joined the class of objects that are common enough in everyday life to exist outside of time: couches, chairs, carpets––the kind of stuff in my old childhood living room that’s just always been around. As far as I can tell, the fact that we can trace one of these kinds of objects to a person means Cristofori should be a household name, on par with the likes of Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. But he’s not. How many other legends have we forgotten?
***
After his initial inspection of the Wurlitzer, Tom has to check its pitches. He works like an octopus, putting the felt in between each key with his left hand while his right plucks the strings and an inexplicable third writes down their degrees of flatness or sharpness in a list. “We’ll start with F3”––DINGGG, DINGGG, DINGGG––“Wow, it’s––DINGGG, DINGGG––at pitch, so I’ll write zero.” He plucks each string at least five times in two-second intervals, keeping an eye on the values cycling through his Sanderson Accu-Tuner IV’s screen like slot machine reels. “A3… DINGGG… about––DINGGG––five cents flat… DINGGG… G––DINGGG––4… about five cents––DINGGG––flat” and so on until he gets to “A6––DINGGG, DINGGG, DINGGG, DINGGG… about twenty-five cents sharp.” Less than a minute in, and I’m already feeling disoriented. Tom explains that the piano is too: “The whole thing is not falling flat, and the whole thing is not going sharp. It’s going in both directions.” At some point, the dings start sounding like a serial killer slowly pounding on the door, or worse, the way I imagine a dead-end job manifested in musical form. Tom doesn’t seem to mind. He’s already moved onto the next step: measuring inharmonicity. This involves resetting the Sanderson Accu-Tuner IV, letting “its capacitors discharge,” turning it to tune mode, plucking a few F, A, and C strings in each octave again, jotting down the average deviation of their overtones (13.0, 7.2, 7.4 cents), pointing out that these values should be 11.0, 8.2, and 8.0 cents, selecting a reference point from a long list of different pianos’ inharmonicity numbers, hitting “stretch” and “mem” at the same time, and waiting about two seconds for the Accu-Tuner to calculate the ideal pitches for the entire keyboard.
This sounds (and is) very complicated, but the basic idea here is that no two pianos sound the same, and therefore cannot be tuned the same way. The fact of the matter is that Cristofori could only take the instrument so far. In an ideal world, the piano would have perfect strings that would be perfectly flexible (no stiffness) with perfect vibrations (no uneven waves) to produce perfect notes (no inharmonicity). Unfortunately, piano strings––all strings, actually––are inherently flawed. When we hear a note from a piano, the entire string vibrates, but each string is really composed of sections (AKA partials, AKA overtones) which operate at different rates; the faster the vibration, the higher the note. No note we hear is ever just one frequency––it is a combination of higher pitches vibrating alongside it. When we “hear” F, for example, we actually hear F plus F2, F3, F4, F5, and so on––all the overtones that sound higher than F but harmonize to give us the illusion of a singular note. The average person can’t hear the separate overtones, but they’re there. In fact, it’s their magnitude––the overtones’ degrees of loudness and softness––that makes instruments sound different from each other in the first place.
Because piano strings, like any other, resist stretching as they’re pulled, they increase the frequency of higher sections and sharpen a note’s upper partials. Even worse, the piano’s ginormous range from bass to treble demands an equally wide variety of string thickness to produce all those sounds, which ensures a large discrepancy in stiffness and more noticeably out of tune partials on the keyboard’s two ends. This is the inharmonicity Tom measures with his Accu-Tuner IV, and it means that pianos are always going to be slightly out of tune with themselves. It’s a mathematical guarantee. The solution for tuners like Tom? Perfection is unattainable, so fuck it.
Tom isn’t trying to tune the Wurlitzer. He’s trying to make it appear like it’s in tune. Thankfully, his Accu-Tuner IV makes this easier by extrapolating the “in tune,” relative pitches of the entire keyboard from just three sample values. Before these electronic tuning devices were first introduced in the 1930s, piano tuners had to rely mostly on tuning forks. This meant their reference pitch was just that––one pitch. So, tuning involved hitting the fork, then plucking a string, then hitting the fork again, then plucking the string again, and so on until the tuner couldn’t hear any more dissonance. There was a lot more reliance on the tuner’s ear, a lot more trial and error, and even more dings.
It’s no wonder piano tuners used to dominate English insane asylums.
When Tom told me this in his music-cat-exercise-living room, I didn’t initially believe him. As a classical violinist, I tuned my own instrument all the time––before orchestra rehearsals, private lessons, chamber sessions, you name it. And guess what? I’m massively chilling. So, surely, it didn’t matter which instrument someone had to tune. At the end of the day, pianos and violins––guitars, violas, harps, cellos, basses, and banjos too––they’re all just pegs and strings. EHHHH. Wrong. After I left Tom’s house that day, I googled “piano tuners English insane asylums,” which brought me to a 2019 Facebook post, then to a 2023 LinkedIn post, and finally, to the source I was looking for: Katie Hafner’s A Romance on Three Legs. On page 43, she writes, “In the early 1900s, when men were flocking to the profession, some found the constant exposure to loud, often dissonant tones unbearable.” Two sentences later, she confirms what Tom told me: “In the early twentieth century, piano tuners outnumbered members of any other trade in English insane asylums.”
I had two thoughts after reading this: (1) Boy am I glad Tom has his Sanderson Accu-Tuner IV, and (2) I had Tom all wrong. It isn’t that he is a beacon of pure and utter control, manipulating his surroundings––his clothes, his tools, his living room, his job––to perfectly match his desires. If this were the case, Tom would’ve already lost his mind after realizing pianos could never truly be in tune.
Instead, what makes Tom Tom is that he’s comfortable saying fuck it, letting go, and eschewing the idea of a “right” way of doing things.
***
Back at Piano Island Headquarters, Tom explains to me the two times he dabbled in conformity. The first time, he was a kid on Long Island. His mother had decided to stay at home with Tom and his brothers while his father, a contractor, managed various building projects, including the house Tom grew up in. As a kid, Tom started taking flute lessons, and by this point, his mother had enforced a strict practice regimen: half an hour before school, half an hour after, everyday. These were the minimums. If his mother heard a wrong note, he had to restart until he got it right. Tom nicknamed her the “Jewish Nazi.” At some point, his parents tried to get him started on piano lessons, but he found it difficult to read the piano’s two clefs after already getting accustomed to flute sheet music. This brief, early stint with the piano ended with his teacher saying, “This kid will never play. Just forget the lessons.”
By the time Tom got to high school, he had fallen in love with Jimi Hendrix, grown out his hair, protested the Vietnam War, and started smelling a little too much like a hippie for his parents’ liking. So, they kicked him out. His then-girlfriend was the sister of his soon-to-be best friend, Derek, and it was this family who took him in. He spent the next few years living with them and going to just about every concert he could find: Donovan at Madison Square Garden (“I’ve never seen so many hippies in my entire life”), Cream at Nassau Coliseum (“Everyone waited until they were in the parking lot to start booing”), and Spirit at the Fillmore East Festival (“You just wanted to die from cringing”). It’s difficult to imagine the Tom I know––the same guy who said he’d “rather go for a picnic in the field than fight a crowd of people to get a drink at a bar”––as such an avid concert-goer, but then again, Tom’s always been pulled towards adventure.
After Tom and Derek road-tripped across the country a couple times and briefly took up residence in a Californian commune, the two had the idea to form The Furors, a self-described “two-man band doing the work of at least one and a half men.” With Tom on drums and Derek on guitar, the duo performed sporadically but well enough as twenty-somethings to put on shows at venues like Club 57 and Max’s Kansas City when they returned to Long Island. Still, Tom and Derek never thought of The Furors as the end-all be-all. To this day, they rehearse weekly and, as they put it, continue “peddling their peculiar brand of melodic mayhem for longer than most house plants survive.” But, like Tom said, “We just liked doing it. Music for the sake of music.”
The second time Tom tried out a cookie-cutter life was when Derek and his family relocated to New Haven to cut down on the long commute to Yale, where Derek’s parents worked as an art historian and an electronics engineer. When Tom came along to Connecticut, they paid for him to take a course in data processing while he started broadcasting news on Yale’s radio station, WYBC. Eventually, Tom landed a job analyzing advertisements at A.C. Nielsen. He was tasked with feeding a computer program the names and contents of commercials from five to eight cities. All of the ads were stored on VHS tapes that had to be rewound after every watch, and Nielsen mandated overtime, which Tom realized was unnecessary if there were employees exclusively assigned to watching commercials and others exclusively assigned to rewinding tapes. When he explained this to his managers, they started hiring tape-rewinders to save time, eliminated mandatory overtime, but they still brought in efficiency consultants to tell them what Tom had already figured out: Nielsen needed more tape-rewinders. “Yeah, no shit, guys,” he remembers thinking at the time. Tom was never seriously recognized for his contribution.
So, after 12 years, Tom left Nielsen for Garland Science, a company that specialized in manufacturing college biology textbooks. Around the same time, The Furors were trying to incorporate a player piano into one of their sets, so for the first time since he was a kid, Tom began to play. He loved it so much that he bought a “$5,000 junker” from a friend, hired a tuner, and kept playing when he could. It was an old piano, though, so it fell out of tune within a few weeks, at which point Tom could’ve easily just called the tuner back. (I definitely would have. I didn’t even tune my own violin until middle school.) But instead of wasting another couple hundred dollars, the first thought in Tom’s head was, “I’ll just go online, order whatever tools I need, and fix it myself.” I assume it would be difficult for anyone to teach themselves how to tune a piano, especially for someone with relatively minimal formal playing experience. But Tom said it wasn’t that difficult. And besides, he was motivated to keep tuning after hearing performances like Valentina Lisitsa’s rendition of Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. According to Tom, Lisitsa’s version “is the version,” the way it was meant to be played. Tom knew that he probably could never play on Lisitsa’s level, but he also knew he could still do good by the piano by unlocking its full potential for players better than him. As Tom explained, “That is what is intellectually and emotionally satisfying to me.”
By the time Garland Science went under and Tom lost his job, he had already been running his piano tuning operation in the evenings after his shift at the office for years. It’s been almost two decades since Piano Island Tuning first opened its doors, and Tom has perfected his technique.
***
I’m reminded of this when he starts actually tuning the Wurlitzer. Tom doesn’t try to get the piano completely in tune when he first starts moving its pegs. If he turns his lever too far in one direction, the string won’t be able to handle the pressure. It’ll break. And Tom is proud of having never broken a string, so he turns the pegs slowly against the 160 pounds of tension packed into each one. Still, regardless of how carefully Tom moves on his route from the bass to the treble keys, adjusting a single peg triggers a butterfly effect that changes the pitches of the other strings, which is why Tom uses his Santa Cruz Shredder pick in the first place and why this won’t be the only pass he takes over the keys. Like any other piano, the Wurlitzer’s strings are all anchored to a cast-iron frame, so tightening and loosening pegs or overusing the keys’ hammers triggers a redistribution of tension wherever the piano sees fit. It’s one of those classic two-steps-forward, one-step-back situations.
Actually, scratch that. Tuning isn’t as simple and linear. I prefer an analogy someone once told Tom, which he repeats for me when he starts his second pass over the keyboard: “Tuning a piano is like trying to catch a baseball bouncing off the ground. It goes in every direction, and you cannot control it.” When he’s done accounting for the tension redistribution after the second pass, Tom tests how well the strings hold their tune, careful not to overload the keys with too many sudden movements. He starts by pressing every single key once, then he moves into chord progressions, and finally, he plays his rendition of Beethoven’s Für Elise. Some notes keep wanting to go flat, plus Tom hasn’t had a formal piano lesson since he was a kid, so his Für Elise isn’t perfect. But if perfection were really what Tom was striving for, we’d still be listening to the dings of F3.
Four days from the moment Tom and I lay our eyes on the Wurlitzer, the strings will be out of tune again and revert back to what they’re used to. But in the meantime, just before Tom and I are about to leave, one of the house’s residents starts riffing a honky-tonk tune that reminds Tom of one of his favorite pianists, Johnnie Maddox. After we exit through the front door and stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the sidewalk for a few seconds, Tom turns to me and says, “That’s why I do it. To tune for people who can really, really play.”
