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‘We’re running out’: decline of Australia’s piano tuners hits a sore note
(www.theguardian.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unless new training facilities open up at the scale which allows young tuners to learn and come up the ranks as existing technicians retire, concert pianos and players across Australia will suffer, Kinney says.
The last batch of tuners to rise through the industry went through the Australasian School of Piano Technology in east Melbourne, which was run by the technician Brent Ottley.
“If we can’t access somebody here who can fix something that’s broken or meet the needs of a concert artist … then we are seriously flying someone in from Sydney or Melbourne, and that’s just not tenable in the long term,” Sharpen says.
When Scott Davie, an Australian concert pianist, has toured through Australia, he’s played regional shows where the pianos had been tuned but not properly maintained.
Mathew Taylor, Yamaha’s marketing manager and a board member at the Australian Music Association, says the most pressing issue is the shortage of piano technicians who can work with top level musicians.
“To teach piano tuning is a costly exercise and you need to plough the money in … also to broaden it out a little bit into a deeper program to reflect what happens at American universities, where it’s a graduate degree over two years,” he says.
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