Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. AAA After four decades tuning an estimated 18,000 pianos, Martin Tucker reckons his job is guaranteed to give him a living for as long as he wants. Australians love playing pianos – as the hit ABC
After four decades tuning an estimated 18,000 pianos, Martin Tucker reckons his job is guaranteed to give him a living for as long as he wants.
Australians love playing pianos – as the hit ABC series The Piano shows – and the acoustic (non-electronic) ones always go out of tune.
“I haven’t got anything in the diary for the month of June but I know that by June there’ll be pianos that need tuning,” said Tucker, a colourful and talkative Tasmanian who stars in the new documentary The Piano Tuner. “I’ve been through the recession of 2009 or whatever, it was bulletproof.
“We went through COVID. Everyone stayed at home and wanted to play the piano. They weren’t spending their money on bigger things like bathroom renovations or new cars but they could afford $200 or $300 to get the piano tuned.”
Tucker’s craft is the subject of Natalia Laska’s The Piano Tuner, which is having a world premiere at Sydney Film Festival in June. Festival director Nashen Moodley announced the program for the 73rd festival at the State Library of NSW on Tuesday night.
It opens on June 6 with Selina Miles’ Silenced, a documentary about Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson’s work battling the weaponisation of defamation laws in the post #MeToo era. Among its interview subjects are Amber Heard and Brittany Higgins.
The centrepiece of the festival, the $60,000 competition for “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous” cinema, includes films by a former winner in Iran’s Asghar Farhadi (with the drama Parallel Tales) and an Australian debut feature director in Adrian Chiarella (with the horror film Leviticus).
Also in the competition are films by such highly regarded international directors as Paweł Pawlikowski (Thomas Mann biopic Fatherland), Romania’s Cristian Mungiu (family drama Fjord), Austria’s Marie Kreutzer (Gentle Monster), American Olivia Wilde (dramedy The Invite), Russian Andrey Zvyagintsev (thriller Minotaur) and Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda (sci-fi drama Sheep In The Box).
To make The Piano Tuner, which screens in the $20,000 Australian documentary competition, Laska spent eight years filming Tucker, her partner, at work.
“I’m from Poland, so piano music is part of my heritage in relation to Frederic Chopin,” she said, “but I was just there to listen.
“[Tucker] was my first encounter with a living piano tuner and he’s a natural-born performer – a chatterbox – and he’s funny.”
The documentary shows Tucker, 61, travelling around Tasmania – then later the Northern Territory on an annual migration to warmer climes – being welcomed into music-loving homes and concert halls, passing on such homespun advice as “the way to stop the mice getting in is to keep playing it every day”.
After taking lessons as a child and performing in a Hobart eisteddfod, Tucker started tinkering in his late teens with a difficult-to-fix Wurlitzer 200 electric piano that he was playing in bands.
“I used to take the front off this thing and fiddle around with it,” he said. “I’d get the part and fix it. Then it was a matter of ‘oh, I can pull the front off the real piano that I had to learn on’.
“I didn’t do any tuning but seeing all those wooden parts and seeing how they work, it just got me into it.”
Tucker won’t hazard a guess at how many piano tuners – or pianos – there are around the country.
“Back in the day, every Australian house had a piano in the same way that today you have to have a laptop or a computer,” he said. “But over the years, there’s less and less.”
Tucker and piano removalist Tony Gamble have started what they call a piano orphanage in Hobart.
“When people didn’t want their piano any more and couldn’t sell it, he’d just take it off their hands and put it in his shed,” Tucker said. “When someone wants a piano, I can go, ‘Oh, Tony’s got a nice one in his shed’.
“We sift through them. If there are pianos that aren’t any good, I say ‘Tony, you’ve got to send it to the tip’ or we have a quiet little burn.”
While a reliable business, Tucker admitted there was a downside to his profession.
“To make a living, you probably need to tune between 400 and 500 pianos a year,” he said. “But for banks, you tell them you’re a piano tuner and they think you’re an elephant trainer. They can’t see the figures they want to see.”
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