Profile: Technician acts as courtier to King of Instruments

If someone plopped you down in the lab of Joel Jones, and the first thing you saw was the cabinet full of parts he keeps on hand, you might think Dr. Frankenstein was loose in the labyrinthine bowels of the Mosse Humanities Building.

Look at the labels on the cabinet drawers, and see if your skin doesn’t crawl: tweezers and forceps, scrapers and pokers, extractors and inserters, the infamous crack/groove tools, and — God help us — Exacto blades! Then terror plunges its dagger deeper into your heart when you hear a woman’s ghastly scream coming from outside the lab.

But before you start edging toward the door, look around and you’ll see that Jones takes apart and puts together not an unspeakable creature, but the King of Instruments. And that “scream” was a soprano in a nearby practice room going up-and-down-and-up-and-down the musical scale.

This, you see, is the piano repair lab of the School of Music, and Jones is the maestro who keeps the school in tune, or at least a good chunk of it. And he’s far from Frankensteinian, with his ready smile and chuckle. In fact, he’s remarkably affable, considering how much pressure he has to keep the King in good spirits.

As senior piano technician (for some tortured reason, his technical state title is “instrument innovator”), he’s responsible for tuning 225 pianos in the school. With the help of a project assistant, work-study students and this year a visiting technician from China, he tunes the performing pianos every week and the practice pianos about four times a year.

Of course, a lot can go wrong in a piano, compared to other instruments. Take the trombone, for instance. You move the tuning slide up a little or down a little, then blow. In contrast, any piano has a stunning total of 11,000 parts. Jones knows what to do with every last knuckle, whippen, jack, butt, flange and shank, but very few performers do.

“With other instruments, the players know how they’re constructed and can disassemble them,” says Jones. “But most pianists are lost if they open the cover.”

That’s why he began a program in piano technology when he joined UW–Madison in 1974. He teaches beginning and advanced courses, designed to help pianists push beyond “I don’t know” when a technician asks them why they don’t think a piano sounds or feels right.

In his own work, Jones emphasizes preventive maintenance, but sometimes a performer gets the piano jitters before showtime. One recent Saturday evening, for example, he was called at home and asked to make an emergency call on the Memorial Union piano, which the performer for that night thought was awry in some way.

“I got there about 20 minutes before the concert started,” he says calmly. Isn’t that cutting it a little close? “Aw, there’s a lot you can do with a piano in 20 minutes.”

Piano technology blends both mechanical and musical talent, and Jones got both while down on the farm. He grew up on one near Gilman, Iowa, and on a farm, he says, “you have to fix things that break.” He also studied piano with an outstanding teacher in Grinnell, Clara Denny, who was an Oberlin graduate.

As it turned out, Jones ended up at Oberlin as a piano performance major. In his senior year he took a piano technology course, and “it just kind of clicked,” he says. His handy-on-the-farm skills were married to his talent in tickling 88 keys.

“After graduation I told my wife, Connie, that she should go get a good job, and I could fix pianos anywhere.” So she did, and he did, in the Detroit suburbs, but then he was drafted into the Army, where he landed in the 79th Army Band in Panama.

Because Army bands march a lot and pianos don’t, Jones moved over to play the trombone, an instrument he first took up in Gilman. He kept his tuning hand in by working on the piano in the officers’ club, which is how he learned that seeing a little sawdust inside a piano in a tropical climate is a very bad sign.

“That means termites,” he says with a smile. He also learned what the tropics can do to stiffness. “I would put on a triple-starched uniform in the morning,” he says, “and in five minutes the humidity would turn it into a rag.”

The piano seeps into his private life, too. Actually, it seeps into his garage, which has two of them that need to be rebuilt. In the ultimate sacrifice for an American, Jones has yielded his side of the two-car garage to the pianos and parks his car outside year-round.

“When we moved into our house, I told my wife that this two-car garage could be a four-piano garage, but she didn’t see it that way,” he says. They have two Steinways indoors, both used by Connie to teach piano lessons.

Both of them are active in the Madison Area Friends of the Piano, which coordinates an annual Piano Playathon at Hilldale and a Halloween Monster Concert at East Towne. The events raise thousands of dollars for charity.

Then there’s the Madison chapter of the Piano Technicians Guild, of which Jones is a founding member. Its meetings bring together the residents of a very small world, people who can wield a crack/groove tool with flair and love nothing better, says Jones with a smile, than “talking about knuckles, whippens, flanges and shanks.”

And to the pianists out there who know that their 11,000-part instrument gets out of tune when it gets out of sorts and who regard the inside of a piano as terra incognita, that is reassuring news indeed.