Customer Reviews

Notes of a Piano Tuner

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is wonderful, gentle and moving. The author truly loves what she does, and she loves the people whose pianos she tunes.

Very few of us have an inkling of what a piano tuner's duties might entail. Thankfully, Denele Pitts Campbell shares some of her experiences with us in this lovely memoir. "I sometimes see my professional duty as an almost sacred task, a ministration to eternal muses which give music to speak what words cannot say in questions or answers that are never clearly formed." (page 8) Wow! We accompany her on this noble mission as she travels the back roads of Arkansas to get to her customers -- the payers as well as the players. Hers is the kind of job that gets her out and traveling through the landscape, which she seems to enjoy almost as much as the pianos and people she meets along the way. She visits and performs her work at a variety of venues: private homes of all kinds, churches, schools, concert halls. Each has it own unique demands; and to say she has seen a wide variety of keyboards is the ultimate understatement. Still, one woman can only do so much, and Campbell can't create a concert-hall Steinway from a rinkey-tink mouse-house spinet. Issuing death sentences on mistreated instruments -- ones left too long exposed to the elements (dirt floors, barns, mice, snakes (!), extreme humidity, or extreme temperatures) -- is seemingly the toughest part of her job, especially if it means removing the possibility of music from a deserving but impoverished home. And the reader has to wonder: is Campbell of a dying breed, a fading past? As electronics and computers take over our lives, will our need for piano tuners diminish in return? After reading this book, one hopes not.

I happened upon this book while doing a search. I also am a tuner and can understand what the author is doing and saying. The book seems less about the tuning than about the people and places where the pianos are and how the pianos got there. It is a well-written collection of episodes in the career of a tuner, almost in the same class as James Herriot, but it is a bit sad, to me.

This book is more a biased character observation than a study of the profession of a piano tuner. The author writes about the pianos' people rather than the pianos themselves. That would be interesting if she didn't assume and judge all the way through the book.

This author is so middling middle class it's embarrassing. She doesn't approve of poverty, nor of having money. She concocts stories in her head about the people's lives having no clues other than the marble entryway or the condition of the double wide on the 80 acres. She assumes so much about people that it became tedious. One line from the book will describe the continual judgments that permeated all her observations. She had just tuned a piano for the "artist," as she called the performer on stage.

p. 100 "I sat in the dark theater, my friend next to me, concentrating on the performance. The music was good, for jazz, and I found myself swept along with the mood of the music..."

The book is filled with these kinds of jabs. They land most often on the people who appear, to the author, as having more or less money than they should. She has definite ideas on the proper way people should live.

Her prose flows with the beauty of the landscape she writes about; unfortunately, what could have been a relaxing gem of a read turned out for me to be getting to know a critical and resentful woman's journal entries about what she saw that day while working.

When I found this book in the music section of the used book store, I thought I'd made a great find. I couldn't understand why I'd never seen this book before. Now I know why. Most of the time when books go out of print, there's a good reason. The public, for the most part, knows when it feels good or bad after reading something. This book left me feeling dirtied, sad, sullied. But it had so much potential!