photograph © Maximiliana Henze
Benjamin Treuhaft is 53 years old and has been tuning and repairing pianos for thirty-five years. After dropping out of St. Johns College in Annapolis MD and Santa Fe NM, he crisscrossed the country learning tuning at piano factories in the Midwest and East Coast. He polished his skills in the early 70s at the prestigious Steinway & Sons Concert Basement in New York where he tuned daily for internationally-known artists such as Vladimir Horowitz. He learned rebuilding at Victor Charles' famous San Francisco piano shop. For the past 25 years he has operated the Underwater Piano Shop in Berkeley, and now in New York City.
In 1993 Ben inherited $28,000 from Victor Charles, who would have loved to see him donate a piano to the Cuban revolution. In October 1993 he traveled to Cuba with Global Exchange, a San Francisco group which arranges tours to various fascinating spots around the world. The trip was a challenge, through civil disobedience, to the laws that forbid U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba without a license. No one was arrested, and most fell in love with the place. Ben later restored a 6' grand piano and sent it to Havana's Museo Nacional de la Musica, and he collected from other tuners thousands of dollars worth of piano supplies which he delivered to Cuba. In 1994, on his third trip to Cuba, he hit upon Send a Piana to Havana, which has since been occupying all his spare time.
TIPICO AFINADOR DE PIANOS
(Spring, 1994)
Last year I found myself in the doldrums. There was plenty of work in Berkeley for an established piano tuner, but working largely for well-off babyboomers left me with an empty restless feeling. Past escape attempts had landed me in Europe tuning for London Bšsendorfer and Paris Steinway dealers. I had secured the Paris job by mail, and when I showed up in jeans and sandals and my dog Jeckel on a leash, my employer Madame Hanlet invited the dog in but said the footwear would have to go: "On ne travaille pas nu-pieds ŕ Paris." For a while I traveled the Metro lines, tools in one hand, leash in the other, tuning for private customers and concert halls. Jeckel often found himself tied to the base of the Eiffel Tower while I tuned upstairs at the Restaurant Jules Verne. The winter and my inability to find digs other than drab hotels, however, soon brought me back to Berkeley.
The idea of Cuba had vaguely occurred to me over the years. Once in l979 I dashed off a letter to the Importer of Musical Machines in Havana saying Hey I heard you had a great revolution and how about hiring me to tune your pianos? No response. Then in l992 Victor Charles, San Francisco's premier piano rebuilder, died at the age of seventy-five. He was the Marxist son of a Vancouver piano maker and had been my mentor. He left a dozen friends and girlfriends little packages of $35,000. He also left a lot of his shop tools to me. In his honor I wrote to Global Exchange, a group I heard had ties to Cuba, offering to donate my services to the hundreds of frustrated musicians I envisioned playing on worn-out untuned pianos.
Piano tuning in Cuba is a felony under the U.S. laws banning travel to that country. It happened that Global Exchange was organizing the Freedom to Travel Campaign, a project whose purpose is to send waves of Americans to the island in open defiance of the decades-old ban. A l75-strong collection of activists from the ages of four to Abe, who can’t tell you how old he is because he can’t hear what the hell you are asking, agreed to risk six-figure fines and ten-year sentences in an attempt to jolt the Clinton administration into reversing Ronald Reagan's decree that visiting, patronizing and loving the Cubans is Trading With the Enemy. I decided to sign up and apply for the job in person.
OCTOBER 10 - 17, 1993 - HAVANA
MONDAY
A horde of Yankees arrives at the old Tropicoco Russian resort. In the background a piano tinkles out familiar Play-It-Sam-style tunes as an elderly Quebecois couple watches with amusement as the last few of us check in. It is controlled pandemonium with Mojito rum drinks provided by the hotel staff, everyone exhausted from overexcitement and lack of sleep. The French-Canadian gentleman has a chair off in a corner by the piano where he can survey the spectacle. I practice my French, he tells me we are witnessing an historic moment. The Quebecois, he says, have never understood the U.S. antipathy towards Cuba. He feels the arrival of these upstart tourists is long overdue.
The hotel piano sounds awful, and I am drawn closer. A tall black man at the keyboard peers through gold-rimmed glasses with rectangular frames. He is ancient. I introduce myself during a lull in the music and offer to tune the hotel piano for fun. A plastic ivory is missing and I have brought along a complete set to donate to a school. The pianist, Daniel Duran, speaks good English. We agree that I will tune at 7:30 the next morning, before the guests are up. Then he asks, "my piano at home needs some of those - do you have any extra?" Without thinking I offer him the school plastics.
My tuning the next morning is less than stellar because the terrible old German grand wants to break every other string in the treble, the thin wires having rusted through after decades of exposure to the salty breezes of the hotel lobby. Luckily there are plenty of other things wrong with the instrument and the pianist will like the improvement.
That evening it occurs to me: I want to visit the elegant old musician at his home and his missing ivories will provide an excuse to invite myself. The pianist is very kind when I collar him after a song and he lets me know I have done a fine tuning. His job, he explains, is to rotate amongst the resorts east of Havana and play favorites for the tourists. He gives me his address in Alamar: Zona 6, edeficio C-2, apartamento 3. We are set for early the next morning.
Alamar, city of 100,000, is visible from the highway as a mass of concrete-block housing projects left to rot for twenty years. Tropicoco resort guests have to pass it en route to Havana and it looks depressing: does Socialist Man end up living like this? But Daniel Duran gives his address there with some pride - maybe Cubans see the block houses as bunkers from which to fight the thirty-year U.S. economic hostility.
It is raining the next morning. The taxi driver has to stop five times for directions, the Zona and edeficio numbers proving of little use, and I descend when we reach the general vicinity. Without much Spanish it is still easy to find the house by making piano-playing motions while describing a tall, dark old man. The residents must think me quite a sight, a slightly overfed sportcoat-wearing straw-hatted Yankee dripping with drizzle and sweat, carrying thirty-five pounds of tools in a doctor's bag. Eventually a kid takes me to Daniel's door where a woman lets me in. I start work on the piano. I am deep into tuning when Daniel appears from an interior room. Beautifully dressed for his shift at the Tropicoco (which starts technically at ten), gracious and soft-spoken, he puts me even more at ease than I already am. He arranges a delicious demitasse of muddy sweet espresso and we talk as I tune.
He has a Wurlitzer short upright, sold originally in Havana in l9l5 when Wurlitzer was producing great pianos. The ivories turn out to be real, so he can't use my plastic keytops after all. As soon as I lift the lid and remove the front door I can see this is an excellent old instrument. The tuning pins are dark brown with corrosion as are the strings, but something in the Cuban air has kept them from getting rusty and brittle - there is only one broken string at the very top of the treble. The pitch is at least half a tone low, but the action (the keys, hammers and all the levers in-between), is in fine original condition. All I really have to do to get the piano in good playing order is raise it up to concert pitch.
Daniel Duran is beside himself with joy at the attention his old piano is getting. He is chattering away in his English accent. It takes a lot of concentration to do this rough tuning, and it is hard to concentrate. It is only my second day on the island and I want to hear Daniel's theories of justice and economics, but I eventually have to insist, "Afinar, no politico," hoping I'm saying "No more politics, just tuning."
The hilarity has subsided enough for me to get past the middle and bass sections and into the treble, when Daniel brings out a bottle of fine Cuban rum. I have to laugh. "Daniel. You mean I can drink rum and tune your piano too?" "Yes! Yes! Are you afraid of rum?" Well, it is about ten in the morning and I am terribly afraid. But what can I do? Laughing and working I finish up the last couple of octaves along with a coffee-cup of rum. The tuning is fairly raunchy but the pitch is up where I want it and I promise to try to return on our last day to give it a fine tuning.
It is pushing eleven when Daniel walks with me to the main road. We are in a slight pickle because we both have to get to the Tropicoco and there is no normal way to travel such a distance in Cuba these days. With the petroleum shortage since the demise of trade with the U.S.S.R., the bus can take five hours to come. No taxis come to Alamar any more. There is a system whereby any open-bed or government vehicle must stop for hitchhikers, but you have to get in a long line. To my embarrassment Daniel approaches an orange-coated hitching-control officer to get priority for his American dignitary. Just then a couple of Cubans come up and offer to sell us a ride for the price of gas plus a couple of dollars. We arrive at the Tropicoco fifteen minutes later.
FRIDAY
Maria Teresa Linares greets me at the door of her elegantly colonnaded neoclassical Museo Nacional de la Musica at the appointed hour of ten o'clock. Freedom to Travel has been in Cuba five days, Cuban TV has covered the visit intensively, delegations from all levels of government and all sizes of children have been mobilized by an obviously deeply moved population, and here am I, soaked in sweat, recovering from a delicious cigar, looking for a job.
Maria Teresa takes me on a tour of some of the Museo's pianos - three Steinway grands, a l920 Pleyel-Wolff French grand dripping with brass ornament, and a couple of ornate European uprights. I play a few triads here and there and am relieved to hear that the instruments are in quite good shape. I am surprised to see that these Caribbean pianos soaking in Cuba for many decades have been more preserved by the film of moisture than ruined by it. The only drawback seems to be that piano tools tend to melt in your hands.
In the Museo's small concert hall/meeting room, I meet Raquel Montejo Soto, a student of piano tuning in Havana. She stands with Maria Teresa and the P.A. sound specialist I have dubbed Protocol because he knows some English and can translate the odd phrase for Raquel. They watch intently as I begin tuning the rare Art Steinway L, white Louis XIV with subtly decorated side panels. The pitch is close to concert A-440: high humidity won't let the soundboard (the curved belly of the piano over which the strings are stretched) contract over the years and loosen the strings. Also I learn there was a good tecnico ruso (Soviet technician) in years past - he must have administered several solid Russian tunings.
Unfortunately the bass strings are a little dead, or tubby-sounding. The strings of the bottom two octaves of a piano are steel with a tightly wound wrapping of copper wire for added mass. Moisture and age eventually corrode these unlike metals causing the strings to stiffen up and lose their sonority. This leaves me with a few options. Best would be to restring the seventy-year old piano from top to bottom, a week-long job. I have one day and no strings. Second best is to remove the bass strings from the back end of the piano a handful at a time, tie them in a large loop, run the loop up and down the strings to loosen the corrosion, and reinstall each string with a full twist to tighten the winding. This process takes about an hour and results in a nearly new-sounding bass, but removing strings wreaks havoc with the tuning. Maria Teresa has planned a flute and piano concert for the following day and I won't be able to return to touch up the bass. So I use option three, a trick I learned from my first master, the blind Ceylonese E. Michael Silva of Hayward, California. You briskly loosen and retune each bass string in the hope that some of the old corrosion will break up.
Now you have to see it from Raquel’s point of view. Here is an American stranger violently messing with the bass strings of their extremely valuable Steinway. She murmurs something about breakage. I am paddling about obliviously, talking to myself and experimenting with removing a few of the wires. Finally Raquel puts her foot down: the piano, she avers, is in perfectly good shape for tomorrow’s concert. Luckily I have my C.V. and a letter of recommendation from Steinway’s prestigious New York Concert Department tucked in with my passport. I hand the documents to Protocol and ask him to present them to Maria Teresa. A hush descends on the hall as they all pore over the two crucial leaves. In time, a verdict. I pass. By now it is almost 11:00 a.m. and I set to work with a vengeance.
Raquel is in a chair by my side unable to calm down about having the wierd Yankee expert for the day. I answer her questions and give occasional pointers, all the while trying to speed through the concert tuning to get to the sorely-needed action work. Occasionally Raquel sings the note I am tuning - a practice guaranteed to enrage a tuner, who has to listen carefully to the faint interference beats. "Nińos no canta!" is my broken-Spanish refrain (trying to say "Children! No singing!") I myself cannot be prevented from intermittent bursts into song, so happy am I to find myself of use to these benevolent beings on a foreign planet.
A solid tuning is just the first step in preparing a piano for concert. Hammers grooved from years of play have to be reshaped and fitted precisely to the strings. The hammer take-off point as well as the let-off point (the hammer has to "let off" a few millimeters from the string or the note won't play) must be set. Eighty-eight springs must be adjusted for maximum reliability on repeated notes.
Maria Teresa sets me up in an office with a desk by a window. I lug the action to the desk, arrange my tools on an adjacent table and begin the three-hour job of reshaping the excellent old hammers to the "Steinway shape" in which each hammer is given the profile of the pointy end of an egg. Raquel watches for a while and asks to take over. I decline, somewhat alienating her. She disappears for a couple of hours.
There is a room off my workshop containing the office of Ligia Guzmán Piantini. She seems to be the Museo's archivist and musicologist. She shows me her name on the cover of a tract and I ask if the Piantini refers to her mother's name and the Guzmán her father's. She says I have the order of Spanish names right and that both her mother and father were well-known Cuban musicians, and that's as far as my Spanish takes me. For some reason I ask her about a song we hear everywhere on the island, "Cuba, Que Linda Es Cuba." She too disappears.
I am alone in my wonderful workshop, feverishly shaping the hammers by the open window in the wet heat with the sounds and smells of Old Havana intruding from the window and the sound of an advanced guitar lesson coming from the hallway and the rustling of papers from the office of Ligia Guzmán Piantini.
Ligia enters from the side door to speak with me. She presents me with some pamphlets from the archives. The first is a history of the Museo with photographs (the fancy l905 residence contained the offices of Batista's Secretary of State until the Rebel Army took it over). The second pamphlet is her own biography of Eduardo Saborit, composer of Cuba, Que Linda Es Cuba (Ligia's father, Maestro Adolpho Guzmán, turns out to have collaborated on many of Saborit's recordings). She has written a note in commemoration of my visit. On the back cover she has written out longhand every word of "Cuba, Que Linda Es Cuba". It certainly is.
SUNDAY
It is the last morning, and by 6:l5 we will have to be on the buses. I hold back tears in the hotel lobby as our Cuban hosts present farewell speeches. Only hours earlier I got past my sheer admiration of the heart and strength of the Cuban people to finally know some of them in a personal way. Last night I got bored stiff with the farewell festivities planned for us, and ended up in the room of some of the hotel staff talking about rum, politics and work. There were three young men (one so drunk you had to tell him everything twice), two fabulous young women and one typical American. We talked until three a.m. and in the end I traded shoes with my host, the ever-smiling restaurant worker Joe. He had told me how much he loved his job, that he was learning every aspect of the waiter's trade, but that life in Cuba these days entails miles and miles of walking every day. When he pointed out the two holes in the sides of his leather moccasins I looked down at my perfect new adjustable Birkenstocks and immediately proposed a trade. Joe's shoes didn't fit me at all and ended up getting me in a heap of trouble later with Continental Airlines when I tried to board in Cancun barefoot.
The week has been a success. The Museo’s piano got regulated in time for the concert, and now it looks like I may be invited to spend a few months later this year working for the Arts and Music School in Havana. Daniel Duran's piano got its fine tuning on Saturday. He arranged for a fine box of cigars for my father. There is only one thing I must do, and luckily I remember when there are a few minutes left before bus-boarding time.
Brian Viani is a soil scientist with the Lawrence Livermore Weapons Lab. He has top security clearance for his job, which is to design nuclear waste dumps for the Federal Government. We were talking a few days before my trip to Cuba, and when I got up to leave he asked me a favor: Could I send a postcard to him at work?
I find one with a gaudy image of our big Russian hotel, plaster a big Cuban stamp on it address it to him at the weapons lab, and write GREETINGS.
photograph © Maximiliana Henze
