Piano tuning is nowadays regarded as an unusual profession and upon meeting me for the first time, many people express surprise that I am a) female and b) sighted – not necessarily in that order. One person memorably said ‘but I thought you had to be deaf …’
The entire responsibility for the association of piano tuning with the blind in Britain rests squarely with one man. Thomas Rhodes Armitage, M.D., M.R.C.P., was born in 1824 and pursued a successful career as a doctor in London:
In 1860 … [he] was told that if he wished to retain even a small measure of sight, he must retire from active practice. Already his sight had so far deteriorated that he could no longer read print.
Armitage investigated the existing facilities which were available to help the blind, and was shocked at the dearth of assistance which he encountered. Being a wealthy man, he could afford to travel, and did so widely, all the time seeking ways in which the blind could not only be helped, but learn to help themselves.
Some institutions did exist, such as the Plymouth Institution which trained the blind to play and teach the organ. In 1861 it moved to larger premises in Coburg St., Plymouth and took in its first resident pupil (or ‘inmate’ as they were called). Within four years seven ex-pupils had become church organists in the immediate neighbourhood, but to train as an organist required a talent for music, particularly if one were blind.
In 1862 an act of Parliament was passed which allowed Boards of Guardians to maintain and educate blind children in certified schools. One of the problems with this, although it was a good beginning, was that a high percentage of people became unsighted as adults, either through accidents or through illness – very few were actually born blind. Armitage, whilst financially secure himself, was deeply sympathetic to the plight of men who, like himself, had lost their sight later in life.
In 1868, Dr Armitage founded the British and Foreign Blind Association, using his own home at 33 Cambridge Square, W. London as its headquarters. In 1932 Wagg, in his Chronological Survey of Work for the Blind wrote:
The primary object of the Association was the employment and education of the blind and the provision of embossed literature. The Braille system was adopted and the Association soon became the centre for supplying printed books, maps, music, frames for the writing of Braille and other educational apparatus.
1869 was the year in which Armitage travelled to Paris. By this time five institutions in Britain had introduced the Braille system to its residents, and several more were about to do so. Armitage was very keen on the promotion of music as a profession for which the blind could be trained, and had found that Braille ‘lends itself more readily than any other to musical notation; and it would seem that the power of readily reading and writing music is almost as essential to the blind as to the seeing if they are to become thorough musicians’.
Armitage had opined that:
In all those who are of the class which finds admission into the public institutions, the object constantly to be kept in view is not to make them first-rate readers, writers, geographers, mathematicians, &c, and then to allow them to starve or be a burden to their friends or community, but to enable them to earn an honest livelihood. That branch of industry, therefore deserves to be most cultivated which pays the best …
To this end, Armitage had spent some time in Paris visiting the institution, the École Braille, where his intention was to gain a practical knowledge of Braille musical notation. From L’École Braille, a primary level school, the children went to L’Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles at the age of 13. It was here that Armitage encountered a structured piano tuning course with 250 pupils being trained. The course had begun more or less by accident; about 1830 one of the pupils of the Institution, Claude Montal, and his friend were practising on one of the pianos there which was tuned (not very thoroughly) by a sighted tuner. Dissatisfied with the sound of the piano, Montal and friend attempted to tune the piano. The tuner found out and complained to the Director who forbade them to touch the insides of the pianos ever again, and reprimanded them both. Undeterred, Montal and his friend acquired an old piano which they were allowed to keep at the Institution. They practised dismantling and reassembling it and tuned it again and again until they had completely repaired and retuned it to their satisfaction. The Director was impressed with what they had achieved and gave them permission to rebuild and repair the chapel organ belonging to the Institution. He allocated two sighted workmen to them, and they rose to the challenge, restoring it as well as a professional could. Convinced of their abilities, he permitted them to tune one of the Institution pianos, and then another – until they were eventually given responsibility for all the pianos there. The Director then made Montal head of a course teaching tuning to the blind. He studied tuning to a high degree, eventually evolving his own improved method of tuning, but when he tried to work on his own as a tuner was rebuffed by a public who did not want to entrust their precious instruments to a blind man. However, a professor at the Paris Conservatoire had heard of his abilities and, to test him, gave him two pianos of different makes to put into exact unison: he achieved this, and other professors at the Conservatoire and some professional musicians began to use him on hearing of his outstanding work.
In 1832 he gave a series of lectures on tuning and in 1834 wrote a short treatise on tuning which he sold at an Industrial Exhibition where he had been employed to tune the pianos. He expanded this treatise into a full book in 1836. Meanwhile, a steady stream of Montal’s pupils had been leaving the Institution as fully-fledged tuners and finding employment as the public became used to blind tuners. Factories even began to send blind tuners to their more exacting clients, and the Institution gave certificates to those of its graduates who were regarded as ‘masters of their art. The Paris Institution became intent on training tuners more than any other trade. Armitage was enormously impressed and very admiring of Montal, ‘to whom’, he later wrote, ‘the blind are indebted for their introduction to one of the most useful and remunerative vocations of which they are capable. Indeed, Armitage was impressed to learn that between 80 and 150 pounds a year were common incomes, and one tuner was reputed to make £250 per year. Inspired, Armitage returned to England and in 1872 founded the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind with Sir Francis J Campbell at Norwood in Surrey. (‘Normal’ in this instance was used in the French sense as in École Normale, meaning a school or college for the training of teachers.) Armitage wrote that:
… by the establishment of the Royal Normal College, [piano tuning] has been prominently brought before the public, and the blind in England have proved themselves no way inferior to their French brethren, though even long before there were not wanting in England isolated instances of thoroughly competent blind tuners.
Here, he was undoubtedly thinking of:
Mr John Taylor, of Birmingham … known as the best tuner in that town. He was trained at the Edgbaston Institution, and had the advantage of careful private music teaching as well. He is a first-rate mechanician, and when I visited him in Birmingham in 1870 I found him engaged in putting up large clock dials in every room of his house, all being electrically connected with his kitchen clock.
The Music Trades Review was full of admiration for Armitage’s efforts on behalf of the blind:
The keen ears of the blind render them specially fitted for fine tuning and it is very satisfactory to find that so many leading provincial firms give them employment.
By 1880 55 trained tuners had left the Royal Normal College and 44 were ‘well-employed’ – one had become an organist and another a sugar refiner, so tuning was not necessarily their career having left. The college taught many other trades, but Armitage seems to have regarded tuning as the jewel in its crown: any visitors to the college were shown the extensive tuning department:
The last place visited is the tuning department where young men are engaged in tuning pianos, putting on strings and making other repairs. Others give demonstrations from models of pianoforte actions and many a lady [visitor] will leave this technical school with a better knowledge of the construction of the piano than she had before.
The college also taught construction:
Some are even employed in making pianos. A few of these are sold, but they are mostly used in the college. The main object is by this means to make the man handy and able to repair any instrument which may hereafter be entrusted to their care.
By 1882, the Music Trades Review was writing that:
The employment of the blind as piano tuners is happily becoming so popular throughout the country that we should be sorry if anything were done to counteract the benefits of such a system.
The writer then goes on to quote the New York Trade Review, who said:
We recently found a blind tuner tuning a piano and watching his method, one saw that he had no conception of the principles of proper tuning. His musical ear was true, but he did not understand the mechanical construction of the piano and there is no doubt he succeeded in ruining the instrument. Some persons may be activated by a spirit of charity, therefore engaging a blind man for the purposes of tuning their pianos but they could better afford to pay the unfortunate man a few dollars to keep him from touching the piano and at the same time make money by the operation, as the damage usually done is equal to twenty times the cost of tuning.
This rather negative outlook on the part of the American magazine was probably a result of an unregulated training of tuners: the Royal Normal College’s system of certification prevented such occurrences from being commonplace in Britain although they were not unheard of. As the Music Trades Review remarked:
… before the blind are employed in any such work their capabilities and training should be fully and carefully regulated.
To this end, the Blind Tuner’s Federation was founded in London in 1902, although by 1930 records show it to be no longer extant.
Life could still prove difficult for the blind tuner on occasion, even with the new awareness on the part of the public: in 1891 a blind tuner applied to the magistrates, complaining that although he had travelled to places like Reading, Wellington, Bognor and Chichester alone by train, Great Eastern Railway officials had refused to permit him unaccompanied on to the platform at Stadwell Station. The magistrates were, however, unsympathetic:
A small boy, sufficiently sensible to prevent a blind man from getting into danger is not a costly luxury.
Dr Armitage conducted extensive research, travelling the world visiting places as diverse as the United States and Saxony, comparing various tuning courses, and collecting any useful information which he felt he could apply to his work in England. He died in 1890, and Wagg said:
There are few, if any, men who have left behind them a greater record of service to the blind, especially in the cause of education.
Armitage himself once wrote:
I cannot conceive any occupation so congenial to a blind man of education and leisure as the attempt to advance the education and improve the condition of his fellow sufferers … [for which work] … the very calamity which has unfitted me for most other occupations has made me peculiarly well-suited.
In an 1884 census, things had improved to such an extent that 94% of men who were unsighted had a definite occupation, and 37% of blind women. Of the 436 who had definite occupations, 110 were musicians – including piano tuners. The education of the blind in piano tuning is unique in another way, in that it provides documentary evidence of an otherwise almost invisible breed; tuners were doers, not writers, and not institutionalised until much later – i.e. not degree and certificate oriented. The blind, however, were of necessity institutionalised and provide us with records.
From: Gill Green MA
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