After four decades of making an estimated 18,000 pianos, Martin Tucker thinks his job is guaranteed to pay him as long as he wants.
Australians love to play the piano – like the popular ABC series Piano exhibition – and acoustic (non-electronic) ones tend to be out of tune.
“I don’t have anything in the diary for June but I know that by June there will be pianos that need to be fixed,” said Tucker, the handsome and talkative Tasmanian who stars in the new film. Piano Enhancer. “I’ve been through the recession of 2009 or whatever, it didn’t stop the bullet.
“We went through COVID. Everyone stayed 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 a piano fixed.”
Tucker’s craft is a subject of Natalia Laska Piano Tuner, which has a world premiere 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 and Selina Miles’ It is mutedarticle about an Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinsonwork to combat the weaponization of defamation laws in the post-#MeToo era. Among his interview subjects are Amber Heard and Brittany Higgins.
The centerpiece of the festival, a $60,000 competition for “bold, modern and daring” cinema, includes films by former winner Asghar Farhadi of Iran (as well as a drama. Parallel Stories) and Australia’s first documentary director in Adrian Chiarella (and horror film The affairs of the Levites)
Also in the competition are films by famous international directors such as Paweł Pawlikowski (Thomas Mann biopic. Fatherland), Romania’s Cristian Mungiu (family drama Fjord), Marie Kreutzer of Austria (Gentle Monster), American Olivia Wilde (actress An invitation), Russian Andrey Zvyagintsev (thriller Minotaur) and Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda (scientific drama Sheep In A Box)
To do Piano Tuner, which is featured in the Australian $20,000 documentary competition, Laska spent eight years filming Tucker, his partner, at work.
“I’m from Poland, so piano music is part of my heritage in relation to Frederic Chopin,” he said, “but I was just there to listen.
“(Tucker) was the first time I’d met a live vocalist and he’s a natural born singer — a chatterbox — and he’s funny.”
The film shows Tucker, 61, traveling 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 household advice like “the way to keep the rats out is to keep playing it every day”.
After taking lessons as a child and performing at the Hobart eisteddfod, Tucker began playing in his youth with a difficult-to-fix Wurlitzer 200 electric piano that he played in a band.
“I was taking the front of this thing and playing with it,” he said. “I’d find a part and fix it. Then it was a matter of ‘oh, I can pull the front part off the real piano I had to learn’.
“I didn’t do any remodeling but seeing all those wooden parts and seeing how they worked, it got me in.”
Tucker won’t hazard a guess as to how many piano tuners – or pianos – there are around the country.
“Back then, every Australian home had a piano in the same way that today you have to have a laptop or computer,” he said. “But over the years, there is less and less.”
Tucker and pianist Tony Gamble have set up what they call a piano orphanage in Hobart.
“When people didn’t want their piano anymore and couldn’t sell it, he would just take it off their hands and put it in his shed,” Tucker said. “When somebody wants a piano, I can go, ‘Oh, Tony’s got a good one in his shed’.
“We sift through them. If there’s pianos that aren’t good, I say ‘Tony, you’ve got to take them to the tip’ or we get a little bit stuck.”
Being a reliable business, Tucker admitted there were flaws in his profession.
“To make a living, you probably need to play between 400 and 500 pianos a year,” he said. “But with banks, you tell them you’re a pianist and they think you’re an elephant trainer. They can’t see the figures they want to see.”
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