Key personnel

Debuting in 1866, the 625-seat Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall is flanked by looming caryatids and fronted by a capacious hardwood stage and orchestra pit. The auditorium is the largest of the Peabody Institute's sextet of performance spaces. It's also the oldest music venue in Baltimore and one of the oldest such halls in the country (famed Carnegie Hall is 25 years younger). Scores of musical luminaries have performed or visited here: Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Hilary Hahn. At this year's Peabody Commencement ceremony, the singular Stevie Wonder played a trio of his timeless songs from the Friedberg stage.

It's entirely fitting and symbolic, then, that two floors directly beneath lies what could be considered as the institute's beating heart. Accessed through a nondescript door, this windowless domain, cluttered with music stands and surplus lighting equipment, is home to the piano maintenance department. Or, as a bronze plaque on the wall reads, the "Lynn Deering Piano Workshop," honoring an arts-boosting Baltimore philanthropist.

Peabody has some 330 pianos—from humble Baldwin uprights to an armada of 9-foot Steinway concert grands —and the workers down here are charged with maintaining their impeccable playability and tuning, repair, and getting them from point A to point B.

"Welcome to the piano shop, where all the magic happens," says Renée Kelsey, manager of the Piano Technology Department and my guide to probing the world of Peabody's pianos. She introduces me to her two colleagues, starting with Yuriy Kosachevich. "Yuriy is a wizard who worked at the Steinway factory for nine and a half years," she says. Kelsey met the other technician, John Kopacko, while they were students at Boston's North Bennet Street School, the venerable vocational school offering a prestigious piano technology program. Beyond this "really great team," Kelsey says a handful of student part-timers pitch in, and during the seasonal crush of auditions and recitals—when piano use skyrockets—she hires freelance techs.

Right now it's summertime and the campus is quiet. Some youth dance programs are underway, and girls in leotards can be seen striding down hallways that are otherwise bereft of students and wafting snippets of Bach or Beethoven. For the piano minders, it's time to tackle the more demanding repairs and catch up on some deferred maintenance. I'm introduced to Mary Jane, a 9-foot Steinway down here for some tonal tweaking. Yes, most of the concert grands have names. Before I'm done, I will also meet Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, grande dame pianos that, like their oft-feuding diva namesakes, are best kept apart. "They're living their best lives in separate halls," Kelsey says. The scene here—pianos with their lids up amid piles of parts and tools—calls to mind a busy auto repair shop.

An anonymous older brown Steinway grand appears completely disemboweled. It's in for a pin block replacement (to continue the auto analogy, this would be the equivalent of an engine rebuild). The pin block is a stout piece of laminated wood running the length of the keyboard. It is penetrated by hundreds of tuning pins where the strings attach. Years of string tension can wear the pins out—they begin to slip, and so does the tuning. But, as Kelsey explains, they can also be damaged more overtly: "Somebody in a practice room spilled some kind of orangey liquid on it and didn't tell us," she says, showing how some of the laminations have begun to separate. A whole new block will be created, which means precisely and painstakingly drilling hundreds of pinholes. It's a July project if ever there was one.

Calling this workshop Peabody's beating heart might sound like hyperbole, but it's not. Pianos are the lifeblood of a music conservatory. While performance majors can study everything from piccolo to tuba, from saxophone to xylophone, the piano will figure in most every student's musical education.

"While we obviously have a degree path in piano performance, pianos are also integral to nearly everything that we do at Peabody," says Andrew Kipe, assistant dean for performance activities and preparatory education. "It's an instrument that almost every student has some facility in. It's a great tool for composers to use. Even our dance programs use them. There are pianos in every dance studio."

Piano Professor HieYon Choi puts it this way: "The piano is just the basic instrument for musical learning—you cannot not need it." And while students studying violin, or trumpet, or even the double bass turn up on campus with their personal instruments in tow, piano majors arrive empty-handed, dependent on instruments looked after by Kelsey and crew.

And not all the pianos are on Peabody's Mount Vernon campus. The maintenance team services instruments for Peabody's preparatory program, which has six locations around the state—from Annapolis to Frederick. Last year, Washington, D.C., was added to the mix as the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center has four pianos. The school also leases pianos to students to take home. And we're not just talking smaller upright models: One student has a 7-foot grand in her apartment. "She has to crawl under the piano to reach her bed," Kelsey says. Your average Steinway weighs more than half a ton and has 12,000 parts—more than half of them moving. In this age of plastic, pianos remain largely organic, fashioned of wood, iron, felt, leather, and ivory (OK, that's giving way to plastic). There are many things to wear out or become misaligned. Just for starters, wood swells and shrinks in response to changes in temperature and humidity, so seasonal tunings are a must. "Here in the Northeast, we piano techs look at the weather as job security," Kelsey says. "The work can be stressful at times, but there are a lot of joys, too, as we support a student's journey," she adds. "It's my dream job."

Prepare yourself for Peabody's cardio program—it's called stairs," Kelsey says of the labyrinthine domain as we set off on a quick campus tour to visit some of the school's hundreds of pianos. I begin to wonder how they move pianos around these confines. Later, I'd see the motorized Pianolift. It flips them on their side and, with the instrument's legs removed, propels them about on rubber tank treads.

First stop is upstairs on the Friedberg stage, home to a pair of Steinway concert grands. They are the same model, though one (named Sherman) was built in the company's New York City factory and the other in Steinway's plant in Hamburg, Germany (named Hammy for the moment until greater inspiration strikes). "I actually got to go to Germany and help select this piano with some of our faculty—a really special experience," Kelsey says. She explains how it's now traditional for larger concert halls to have both Steinways on hand. "They sound very different," she says. "While made by the same company, they are not the same piano."

Sherman the New Yorker, she says, sounds "big" and "grizzly at times" and works well accompanying an orchestra or chamber group. His European twin Hammy is "sweeter" and a popular choice for solo works. These shiny black beasts are examples of Peabody pianos someone from piano maintenance would tune and tweak almost daily during the school year.

Is hearing believing? Kelsey sits down at each and plays a lovely snippet of Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor. I learn two things: My ear isn't good enough to discern "grizzly" from "sweet," as the haunting melody sounds beautiful on both pianos. And that Kelsey can play the piano as well as tune and fix them. "I actually went to a performing arts high school, and when I was 16, I was playing the piano eight hours a day," she says of her childhood in New Jersey. "But I also sensed pretty early on that I wasn't going to be good enough to actually make a living as a pianist. I transitioned it into a hobby."

As the daughter of two engineers, she says both the arts and sciences were emphasized at her house. When it came time for college she went with the latter, earning a degree from Monmouth University in marine and environmental biology and policy. But she quickly soured on the field. "It was really cut and dried and filled with problems and solutions for sustainability that no one wants to talk about," she says. Attending North Bennet seemed a way to unite both her art and science interests. Billed as the nation's oldest trade school, it opened in 1881 and never really left the 19th century, offering training in throwback skills such as bookbinding, cabinetry, and violinmaking. Kelsey completed its demanding, 18-month piano tech program. Hired as a Peabody piano tech in 2018, she was promoted to department manager in 2021.

You don't need to be able to play the piano to tune and repair one, but it helps. "It's a really wonderful intersection," she says. "I'll evaluate and work on a piano as a technician and then play a few things on it after I'm done. Often, I'll end up thinking, OK, as a tech, I liked these things, but now as a pianist, I want to make a couple of changes."

From the grand stage we head to a long hallway lined with practice rooms (eerily silent when they're usually teeming with musical life). If the hall pianos are pampered thoroughbreds, practice room pianos are ebony and ivory workhorses. Most rooms house older, smaller Steinway grands that see heavy use. "We close the practice rooms for about four or five hours in the wee hours of the morning, and security is usually kicking students out," Kelsey says.

Slipping into a random room and lifting a piano lid, she quickly shakes her head. "These hammers were replaced a year ago, and they are already getting flat," Kelsey says. The felt-covered hammers are what strike the strings, and steady use dulls their teardrop shape, changing the piano's tone and keyboard feel. "There's also more surface area impacting the string, and so strings break more easily," she says. Also visible under the lid is a sticker with a QR code. This is how students and faculty report issues with a piano, as scanning the code on a smartphone pulls up an online work order.

Busily prepping pianos for students is one sort of challenge, but adjusting instruments for big-name visiting pianists must be another level of stress. "The pianists who are really at the top of their game are usually lovely to work with," Kelsey says. "They're just like, yeah, put out a black piano. If I play poorly tonight, it's not going to be because of you. And then there are other people who are quite ... persnickety."

Kelsey won't name names in the latter category (no tune-and-tell for her). She does say that the late, great Leon Fleisher, the world-renowned pianist who taught at Peabody for more than 60 years, was in the "lovely" camp. "He was wonderful and hilarious," she says. As for Stevie Wonder? "I didn't speak with him, but he played a piano that I tuned, and I absolutely sent that video to my mother—it's a career highlight," she says.

Aafter touring campus pianos, it's time to take a tour under a piano lid. You can essentially divide a piano into two sections: the "action" comprises the moving parts, translating a finger pressing on a key to a hammer striking a string. Adjustments made here are referred to as piano regulation. "We spend a lot of time making sure things go straight up and come straight down," Kelsey says. "And after you achieve that, you can start working on adjusting the tone, making sure that it has the sound quality you want." Nearby, her colleagues have paused the pin block project and started to work on key leveling, which, true to the name, is the process of using special shims to make sure all 88 keys are the same level across the keyboard. The other chunk of the piano—the static half, if you will—includes the pin block, strings, soundboard, and the iron frame reinforcing it all to allow for some 20,000 pounds of collective string tension. The soundboard's role is somewhat magical—this great piece of wood amplifies string vibrations, allowing their tones to fill a hall. Kelsey uses a small wind-up music box to demonstrate. In her hand, its tinkling tune is hard to even hear. When she places it on Mary Jane's soundboard, the tiny tune becomes loud and clear. Older pianos benefit from having had access to tight-grained old growth wood. Modern Steinways source their soundboard wood from Alaska, home to mammoth Sitka spruces.

If regulating a piano is mechanical engineering, then tuning one is physics mashed up with musical theory. "Tuning is the hardest part of the job," Kelsey says. As a dilettante guitarist, to tune my knock-off Strat I simply grab a $20 digital tuner and work through the open strings, turning the appropriate tuning peg until the tuner's dial centers and a light comes on. Tune achieved! However, you can't just do that with a piano.

First off, most notes on the piano are created by a hammer striking three strings simultaneously. Some lower notes use pairs of strings and the lowest bass notes are single strings. "You want all three strings to be vibrating at the same pitch," Kelsey says. "It's the most important interval on the piano—the unison." Tuning is undertaken with a tuning wrench that fits over the tuning pins, allowing them to be subtly tightened or loosened. And while it seems counterintuitive, before Kelsey does anything, she puts in earplugs. The process can get loud and, over time, ear damaging. A trio (or duo) of strings in perfect unison collectively sounds clear without any sonic wavering or oscillations, known as "beats."

Next, well, things get complicated. When a hammer hits a string, its "fundamental" tone is the one created from the vibration of the string's entire length. An A key creates an A sound as the fundamental. But fractions of the string (its two halves, three thirds, four fourths, and so forth) also subtly vibrate, creating what are called overtones, which aurally lurk in the background coloring the sound. However, a physical byproduct of a piano's taut metal strings is that an inherent inharmonicity is introduced, wherein some of these overtones are slightly sharp relative to their fundamental. How a tuner addresses this issue is a complex process called "tempering" and involves making subtle tuning tweaks across all 88 keys—allowing for a certain number of beats within certain combinations of notes. You essentially "hide" the inharmonicity where it will be less noticeable.

There are electronic tuners that can perform tempering, but they don't cost $20. "I have CyberTuner, which is the most expensive app you can buy," Kelsey says. "It's $999 because you can't have an app be a thousand dollars on the app store." But in the end, she trusts her ear more than her app—turning to the machine for rush jobs or for certain tuning tasks.

"Personally, I love tuning by ear," she says. "There's an art to it. Temperament is like musical sudoku. You're just trying to place everything where it's supposed to go and just kind of get it together in this neat little package so that the rest of the piano is going to sound good."

After a hectic day in the piano trenches, regulating, tuning, or just schlepping the instruments all over campus, does she still have time to pursue piano playing as a hobby? Yes, but here's the thing: Her home piano, she says, is a hybrid instrument with a mechanical action but digital sound. No tuning required.

"I'm definitely the shoe cobbler's daughter," Kelsey says. "I tune pianos all day and when I come home, I don't even want to think about it."