Music lovers in the Chilkat valley are getting an essential service this week, as piano tuner Bob Reierson is in town.
The South East Honors Festival is happening in Haines this weekend, and select students from around the region are coming to display their musical skills at the Chilkat Center. The Steinway piano on the mainstage is essential to the event, and piano tuner Bob Reierson has come from Juneau to give it a fresh tuning. Reierson says he makes frequent trips to the Northern Lynn canal, and he expects to tune twenty of the about fifty instruments he estimates are in the Haines area.
His work is a blend of old techniques, ear training, and modern technology.
“You learn with a tuning fork. You play one note, and then you do.., and then you count the number of beats in that fifth, and then you do a fourth, and then you do another…, and then if you get up to here, then that octave should be right. Now that’s the old way. Nowadays with computers, you play about five or six notes and it figures out the stretch on the piano. ”
And he says some new apprentices are needed to keep the profession alive.
“Everyone I trained moved.”
There is a big workload, as every large cruise ship has four or five pianos on board, there is a tuner in Juneau putting in ten-hour days every day, going from ship to ship.
Reierson himself came to his career by chance.
“In the little church, I broke seventeen strings because I’m a heavy-handed player, so I got the materials just to fix that piano, and I found a correspondence course, and then I went to the old Sheldon Jackson college and I asked them if I could fix all their old broken down pianos in the dorms. Well word got out that there was a piano tuner in Sitka, and I was just learning it for myself, but I ended up doing that.”
The work has given him the opportunity to travel
“I used to cover every little hole in the wall. And once a year Arts Alaska used to fly me to every logging village, to all the one-room schools”
And provided plenty of challenges:
“Something dropped in the piano and they went to fix it. And when I got there, every part, 11000 parts, were all spread out, and they said “can you get it back together by Sunday?”
Reierson says he will soon return to Haines and Klukwan to tune the pianos he couldn’t get to on this round, and is also planning a trip to Skagway to service the estimated thirty-five pianos there.
There will be a public performance from the South East Honors Festival at the Chilkat Center this Tuesday, where you can hear the freshly tuned Steinway baby grand piano.
You can hear a recording of our conversation with Bob Reierson below.
