![]() He patiently talks me through how the job works, explaining, crucially, how a piano tuner is not necessarily listening to the pitch of the note itself but to the "beats", the interference or distortion that occurs when two strings of different intervals are struck together. It only takes five minutes with him at a piano for me to realise how wrong I am. "I never imagined that one day I would be tuning pianos for London's lords and ladies and all these famous people," he says, with a chuckle.īefore meeting Martin, I had assumed that piano tuners learned on the job, without college training. ![]() ![]() I told my mum at a very early age it was what I wanted to do."Īt the age of 19 Martin enrolled on a three-year course as a piano technician with the London College of Furniture. "I would be there, listening to everything, fascinated. "He was a blind, African jazz player and he would come and work on our piano for maybe two hours," he recalls. His mother kept a piano and Martin remembers being thrilled by the tuner's visits. "There's something very magical about a piano tuner and I realised that early on," Martin says, recalling a humble upbringing in a small suburban rented house with a tin bath and outside loo. His regular work also takes him from the Roundhouse Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company ("They have a thing about using flying pianos which they have to hoist down from 20ft in the air for me to tune") to the Union Chapel in north London, a live music venue, where Martin tunes the piano for a series of concerts run by BBC Radio 1 DJ Jo Whiley.īut rewind to the early 1960s and this hobnobbing with celebs was all just a glint in a young boy's eye. There was the time he had a tuning "in a shed with James Blunt's band", followed the next day by a job at Wembley with U2. But there are clients with even greater star billing in Martin's diary. I had been hoping to meet Martin, 50, later in the week for a regular tuning at the house of Michael Portillo ("an eminently charming man who makes a very nice cup of tea") but, funnily enough, the former Conservative minister turned television presenter wasn't keen to have a journalist in his house. There's a battered old leather sofa surrounded by speakers, a drum kit, keyboards and, of course, a piano that needs tuning. We are sitting in the well-hidden, underground Dean Street Recording Studios, a typically anonymous looking Soho dive you can easily walk past at street level. His experiences have provided his friends and family with such a rich vein of amusing and fascinating anecdotes that he is now compiling them into a book, with the working title Diary of a Gay Piano Tuner. a complex and subtly imagined adventure.Martin's fascination with the trade started with his mother's piano tuner when he was a boy of six or seven and has led him to the upmarket houses of celebrity clients and the recording studios and theatres of the West End. “An intense, shimmering dream of a story.” – Grand Rapids Press “A smart, entertaining adventure.” – Christian Science Monitor should be intrigued by the mix of historical detail, lush settings, and equally lush language.” – San Jose Mercury News “Daniel Mason’s ambitious, lyrical The Piano Tuner. Its author is rich in talent and promise.” – Philadelphia Inquirer ![]() artfully weaves psychology, politics, medicine and music theory into a polyphonic composition. a gifted writer.” – San Francisco Chronicle “ The Piano Tuner is a haunting, passionate story of empire and individualism. astonishing.” – The New York Times Book Review powerful prose style and his ability to embrace history, politics, nature and medicine. “Mason’s writing achieves that kind of reverie in which every vision, tone, flavor and sensation is magnified.” – LA Times “Reminded me of books I read by flashlight, under the covers, when I was young.” – USA Today The Piano Tuner is a brilliant debut.” – Miami Herald A profound adventure story.” – The New Yorker “Intoxicating, full of sights to see, histories to learn, stories to entertain.” - USA Today Mason’s writing achieves that kind of reverie in which every vision, tone, flavor and sensation is magnified.” - Los Angeles Times a gifted, original and courageous writer.” - The Washington Post Book World “An ambitious, adventuresome, highly unusual first novel that offers pleasures too rarely encountered in contemporary American literary fiction. Riveting.” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times It immerses the reader in a distant world with startling immediacy and ardor.
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