Meet the piano tuner

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/07/2018 (2654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On a warm day when I was out for a walk in my Fort Garry neighborhood, I heard the plinking sounds of a piano being tuned.

It turned out the piano was in my neighbour’s garage; it was an old 1891 Berlin piano. That is how I met Charles Lage, the piano tuner.

“I am the piano tuner,” is what Charles Lage has said every day since April, 1977. His father was the proprietor of Lage Brothers Pianos in Winnipeg and his uncle Rudy was the piano technician. His childhood aspirations were to be a musician, to play guitar, piano, and bass, but when the opportunity for piano tuning came up, his father found him a private tutor in St. James, to teach him the craft.

It took the private tutor, Harold Ganby, two-and-a-half months to teach 17-year-old Lage everything that he could teach him, which otherwise took students four years to learn.

With this newly acquired skill, Lage went to work at Lesage Pianos in St. Therese, Que., where he built pianos from the bottom up. A few months later, he went to see his father’s friend in Toronto, owner of Remenyi House of Music, and he offered to tune pianos for him.

“I told him if he didn’t like what I did, he didn’t have to pay me. Now that part is important, because that has always been my policy. So he said OK, but I’m not going to be the one to test you, so he got a friend of his who happened to be the director of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. The director checked the tuning work afterwards and without knowing whose work it was, thought it was the work of a blind guy. So I got my very first paycheck on my first professional tuning.”

With a letter of recommendation from his father’s friend, Lage returned to Winnipeg to tune pianos for his father’s business.

“Before I did my first tuning job in Winnipeg, my dad said I had to tune all the pianos they had in storage before he would give me any work outside the store, so there were about 500 of them. I spent three months tuning all the pianos. Then my father started letting me go out to tune for other people.”

Since then, Lage has been tuning pianos his whole adult life.

“I never ever after 30,000 tunings and after more than 700 restorations, ever thought of myself as being great or the best. I have always just been the guy who answers the phone. See, because I am autistic, it wouldn’t make sense to me.”

Lage can hear frequencies that are exceptionally high and low.

“When I tune a piano, the fact is, a piano can never, in colloquial terms, be tuned. You can only blend it to make it sound the least offensive because each string makes up about 200 ugly sounds, so you just have to be good at guessing which is the sound you are going to use in order to tune it. The less offensive a piano sounds, the more in tune the customer thinks the piano is.”

Besides tuning pianos, Lage also restores them. Restoration of a piano used to take Lage a matter of two to three days; now it takes a little longer. About old dusty pianos sitting in storage, Lage, with pride for his profession says, “In general, pianos don’t die. The old uprights were made of grade A quality wood and even if there is a crack in the sound board, the only time you know it’s there, is when it causes a buzz and that’s easy to fix. The industry is dying because people have been told their piano is a piece of junk, but with today’s methods and technology, we are able to do pretty near anything with the parts. If a part is indeed irreparable, it can always be reproduced on the laser printer.”

Lage’s 20-year old son Matt, assists his father in the piano tuning business. He has been helping tune pianos since age three. Lage travels all over Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, and northern Ontario to tune pianos. Recently, the owner of the top music store in Toronto, Remenyi House of Music, requested Lage to come back to where it all began — and tune all their pianos.  

“I have been flown in to many places to merely tune pianos.”

Not only does Lage travel to tune pianos, pianos have been shipped to him for restoration. Pianos have been shipped from southern France, all over Ontario, and Saskatchewan. The piano comes in a big shipping container, movers pick it up at the airport, and bring it to him.

Charles Lage can be reached at lagepianos@gmail.com.

Helen Lepp Friesen is a community correspondent for Fort Garry. You can contact her at helenfriesen@hotmail.com