His are doctor`s hands. With them, Tom Porter runs his fingers along the patient`s bony spine. He unzips his black bag and extracts his instruments, little rubber wedges, a pearl-handled hammer, a tuning fork. He rises from his stool, cocks his ear toward the innards and delivers his diagnosis: ”It`s just a trifle bit sharp.”
Under examination is a 9-foot Steinway concert grand piano, last tuned by Porter for Garrison Keillor, tuned this day for a jazz concert at the University of Chicago`s Mandel Hall, a Gothic chamber dappled with the last rays of this November afternoon. Workers haul planks across the stage, drop coils of wire, swear back and forth. A radio blares.
Porter, absorbed, repeats and repeats the same action: inserting wedge between strings, hitting a key, attaching hammer to tuning pin, cranking one- quarter turn down, one-fifth turn up. There are 243 tuning pins. The process lasts 1 hour and 4 minutes.
Satisfied, Porter lifts his 30-pound bag, reaches for his white cane-”my glasses”-and threads his way off the stage, maneuvering around coils, the workmen`s lunch table, the radio.
”Maestro, how you can tune with all this noise, I`ll never know,” calls out a workman shaking his head, wiping his brow with his sleeve.
Porter does his best work with no one around but the workmen, the watchmen, the piano movers. The applause comes later, directed over the years at pianists named Horowitz, Rubinstein, Bernstein, Brendel, Watts.
Sitting alone in the wings, in the concert hall shadows, listening, puffing a cigarette, Porter hears it all. He pulls on his coat, and heads toward the night. In the playing he has heard a piece of himself. He needs no ovation; he likes his anonymity.
”I`m a technician. Like a doctor, I`m working on a patient. I give it the best it`s capable of having,” says Porter, 64, who for the last 50 years has tended to the 12,000 moving parts of Steinways, Baldwins, Yamahas, even a Bosendoerfer, without preference for one over the others. ”A good physician doesn`t really pay much attention to race. He`s treating a patient, a human being who has a past and a future-hopefully a future. I`m not going to snub any (kind of) piano.”
That his caseload is concentrated at Orchestra Hall, Ravinia, Northwestern University`s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, and the U. of C.`s Mandel Hall bespeaks the masterful touch, and ear, of Porter, who refers to himself not as a piano tuner, but ”the considerate piano servicer.”
Porter no longer sees the pianos he services. When he was 6, he underwent eye surgery for cataracts, and in the process his retina was detached. Through the years his vision worsened, and in April 1989, surgery that might have restored some sight failed. He can no longer detect light. But in his mind`s eye, he says, he sees it all: the piano`s design, its dynamics, even the distance of the hammerhead from the end of its shank.
”Being less than whole, you`re more than determined to be successful,”
says Porter, whose father, Herman, was a piano tuner in northwest Indiana and who moved to Chicago during the Depression. A third-generation Porter, youngest son Tom Jr., 38, recently took up the craft in Seattle.
”It`s a matter, from an intellectual perspective,” adds Porter, ”of being able to acquire the greatest amount of understanding of just what you`re doing. It`s part IQ and part intuitive skills.
”I can do the math that determines what the scale is going to be. I can examine a piano and determine what the designer had in mind. I can perceive the inherent inconsistencies in the instrument. I feel, in fact, that I`ve gotten instruments to work better than if I were to stick to the guidelines.” Lifelong passion
Such mastery of the piano`s workings has been a ”lifelong, all-consuming passion” for Porter, who as a young boy on the Southwest Side pulled out a ruler and a compass, and began a measured dissection of the instrument.
His quest for knowledge has not been interrupted. Now, using an optical digital scanner (a fax-like machine that ”reads” typed pages and translates them onto floppy discs) and a voice-module computer that speaks to him, Porter keeps up with journals of music theory and piano technique.
”He is the dean of tuners,” says Millie Willis, artistic coordinator for the Ravinia Festival, where Porter has been a daily fixture each summer for the last quarter century. ”He`s an institution.”
”He`s one of the handful in the world who`s been in the lion`s jaw for so long, solving these tuning problems for so long, that he has to be revered,” says Tom Jr., who admits he found tuning ”boring as sin” as a 10- year-old helping his father rebuild Baldwins in the shed attached to the family`s Southwest Side bungalow.
”Tom has succeeded with some of the most finicky artists in the world,” says Brian Mott, a Wicker Park tuner who assisted Porter on a few overhauls at Orchestra Hall. ”These are very temperamental artists. One guy will just love you, and the next guy will go out of his way to make sure you`re nowhere near the next time he`s in town.”
It would take a man with the patience to work a keyboard problem from 4 in the afternoon till 9 the next morning-”But I got it!” Porter boasts-to calm the fears of the sweaty-palmed artists who perform at Orchestra Hall.
”There`s an element of being a diplomat, an element of being a baby-sitter, an element of psychiatrist, parent figure, sibling, one of the boys and the consummate professional,” says Craig Springer, managing director at Pick-Staiger for the last 14 years.
”Not only do you have to be a diplomat,” says Mott. ”You have to be right 99 percent of the time, and that 1 percent you`re wrong better not be important.”
No point in pushing
Porter says his ”ethics” in preparing a piano for a concert performance ”is to contend over as few things as I possibly can. My attitude is it`s their show, there`s no point in my exasperating an already hyper person any further.
”Besides,” he adds, ”the more one defends, the more difficulty you get into. Particularly if you`re dealing with an egotistical person.” He pauses. ”Yeah, once or twice I`ve had one of those.”
He won`t be more specific than that, but he will offer these observations:
– Vladimir Horowitz: ”Not as great as you`d think. A great showman, lots of flamboyance” and non-musical trash ”that you could do without.”
– Artur Rubinstein: ”Toward the end of his life, he got careless with tonal control.”
– Keith Jarrett: ”A high-class noodler.”
– Leonard Bernstein: ”Last time I saw him was two years ago. The piano they put in his dressing room was in really bad shape. He was more interested in drinking his Scotch and offering it to everybody around.”
Only twice has Porter taken a pass on tuning. Rosemont Horizon: ”Never been there, never will.” The Rolling Stones: ”Always passed them off to someone else.”
Tagging along with Dad
Porter never set out to tune the great keyboards of our time. As a boy, he tagged along as his father tuned creaky old parlor pianos. He listened, learned and soon studied with his father`s teacher. The leap onto concert stages came, he says, out of nowhere.
”I didn`t actually get drawn to it,” he says, ”I got shoved to it.”
In the summer of 1945, while working for Baldwin-after being fired from Wurlitzer for letting a customer know he was being sold a rebuilt piano-Porter got a call from his boss. The concert grand in the Grant Park band shell needed tuning for that night; the tuner hadn`t shown up for work.
Porter trudged down to 11th Street (where the shell was then located), and with the sun blazing over his shoulder, he toiled to get the instrument in tune. He didn`t finish till the sun had set. The ever-shifting shadows and temperatures kept altering the tuning. It was a lesson he never forgot.
”I worked like a demon out there in the sun. All I was interested in was getting it done, wondering if I`d get it done, and getting out of there.
”Apparently, it was a success,” says Porter, who was rewarded with this forecast: ”Some day, you`ll be one of the best tuners around.”
Says Porter: ”I never really believed it. I don`t have problems in that area-getting all blown up about something that may not be true.”
Shortly after his debut at Grant Park, Porter and his black bag were sent out to service the Baldwins at Orchestra Hall and a string of Loop theaters:
the Auditorium, Blackstone, Chicago, State-Lake and Oriental.
Along the way, he bumped into the likes of Judy Garland and Victor Borge. Once, dispatched to the set of the WLS National Barn Dance, a radio show broadcast from the old Eighth Street Theatre, he diagnosed a ”very strong click” in the Baldwin there. After Porter`s tinkering, the pianist noticed the ”little funny noises disappeared.” Porter was summoned back, by name, every week for two years.
Concert hall regular
He has fixed it all. A broken piano leg. A horrendous buzz (”buzzes, one of your greatest enemies when you`re tuning”). A recalcitrant key that would play once, then get stuck (”When you`re in the middle of a sonata, that`s like going down a flight of stairs without one step being there”).
He`ll never forget tuning for Bernstein at Ravinia in 1956. He worked up the piano in the morning; caught a train home to bring his wife, Marie, home from the hospital with their fifth and last child, a baby girl; then got a call from Ravinia to return to ”nurse the piano” during Bernstein`s performance of Bach`s Clavier Concerto in D Minor. After the concert, Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president that year, wandered backstage to meet the maestros-performer and tuner.
In 1965, Porter left Baldwin to work as a free-lance technician. He and Marie bought a brown-brick bungalow in Chicago Lawn, a tidy matrix near Midway Airport. First in a shed, then in the garage, Porter began his piano-rebuilding business, a trade usually reserved for Sundays, when his appointment book just might be blank.
He has been a regular in the underbelly of Orchestra Hall, the Civic Opera House, Ravinia and Pick-Staiger since the mid-60s. He was as comfortable sipping Scotch and talking harmonics with Bernstein as he is joking around with Rocco Principe and the rest of the stagehands at Orchestra Hall, according to those who have witnessed both.
All the time, his sight was slipping. He never asked for special favors.
”A few years ago, we found out he`d been mugged several times on the `L,`
” says Ravinia`s Willis. ”Of course, he never said a word, and (he) wouldn`t have asked, but right then and there we started picking him up from Northwestern and taking him wherever he needed to go.”
”If you`re going to be a total person, you have to be independent,”
says Porter`s wife of 41 years, who is the executive director of Chicago`s not-for-profit Guild for the Blind. ”If you`re not, you`re just putting yourself in a shell.
”It`s not easy,” she says, ”but you see too many people lock themselves into something less than they can be.” Despite his ”phobia” of elevated train platforms, Porter makes his way around the city and suburbs via public transportation.
His schedule continues to be a complex criss-crossing of the concert halls. Even Sarah Myers, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra`s operations assistant who logs his weekly schedule onto a floppy disc, says he keeps a straight schedule that boggles her mind.
This day he tunes the Steinway at Mandel Hall. Tomorrow morning he tunes the American Steinway at Orchestra Hall for the Leningrad Philharmonic`s pianist, Dmitri Alexev. Then it`s up to Pick-Staiger to attend to one of the Steinway concert grands there.
Of all his father`s artistic achievements, this is the one that most impresses Tom Porter Jr.:
”We were up at Ravinia, very close to curtain time, and we had a note that was squeaking. Of course we didn`t have time to take apart the piano to get rid of the squeak.
He didn`t even have time to reach in his bag for a tool that would lubricate it. So he kind of took the sweat from the pores on his forehead and lubricated the part. He got rid of the squeak.”
