Deavid Andersen Press 1

Harmonic Convergence: Brotherly Opposites Kurt and
David Andersen Search for the Right Pitch
One is a famous novelist, the other a rebel piano tuner
By Gendy Alimurung Wednesday, Mar 25 2009
And so, on a recent brilliant
afternoon, you travel to a cozy,
aromatherapy candle–scented home
in Mar Vista, where you will meet
your brother David Andersen, and
tape a segment of your radio
show, Studio 360 With Kurt
Andersen.
If you are a famous, best
selling writer and influential editor
who’s just moved to Los Angeles to
be the Visionary in Residence of a
renowned design school (Art Center),
and you’re renting a historic house (a
1946 Rudolf Schindler) owned by
your famous best-selling author
friend (Susan Orlean), and you have
a Peabody Award–winning radio
show, what worlds are left to
conquer?
Your family. That deep, bottomless
well of psychodrama. Specifically,
your older brother David, who shot
you in the leg with a BB gun when
you were a kid.
David won’t just be talking about the
myriad abuses he visited upon the
adolescent Kurt but about his own
grown-up craft. David is an
extraordinary piano tuner.
“You look skinny, dude,” David says,
when his brother arrives.
“Would that it were true,” Kurt says.
“I’ve gained weight since I’ve been in
Los Angeles.”
The eight weeks he’s been here make
it the longest he’s been anywhere but
New York since he graduated from
college. He’s been having dinner out
with people every week.
“No, you look good. You look
healthy.”
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“It’s the sun,” Kurt says, as they look
each other over.
The soundman attaches each of the
brothers’ microphones on their left
ears.
“Why is it on the left?” asks David,
spreading out comfortably on the
sofa. “To pick up the secret dark
shadow shit?”
Kurt admonishes his brother to turn
off his cell phone, then a few minutes
later his own cell rings.
“Physician heal thyself, bitch,” David
says. Then, to no one in particular,
adds, “These elite Eastern snobs,
man, who put classical music on
their machines.”
Each topic David raises could spawn
its own separate radio program. Like
the fact that Mozartplayed his pieces
in a different ear from the one we in
the modern day hear, a phenomenon
known as temperament, which gets
at the alignment between music and
science. Or the fact that the rim of
the piano is the part that makes it a
piano. It is layer upon layer of
varnished hardwood, bent into
sinuous arcs.

“Then they send it off to forget for six
months,” says David, rather
poetically. “It forgets it was a tree
and remembers it’s a piano.”
Or the reason why Steinways are the
800-pound gorillas in the room of
pianos — because artists became
unofficial field reps for them over the
years. Piano manufacturers, David
explains, “befriend the artist, money
follows the artist, acclaim follows the
artist,” an effect he calls the
“psychoacoustic illusion.”

The actual hulking gorilla of an
instrument taking up significant real
estate in the living room is David’s
gleaming black $140,000
Steingraeber & Söhne. The piano is
made in a castle in Bavaria. The
brothers come up with an analogy for
it: Steingraebers are to Steinways
as Lamborghinis are to Mercedeses.
It is the only manufactured piano
David’s worked on as a rebuilder that
has ever scared him.

“Stand over here,” he instructs,
indicating the inward curve of the
piano’s belly. Bass rumbles up from
inside the beast’s gut. The strings
vibrate like a colony of bees.
David is a strict aural tuner, meaning
he doesn’t use an electronic tuning
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device. His body is the tuning device,
which prompts a question from Kurt:
Will robots ever be able to do what
he does?
“Robots can’t do my job yet. It’s
coming. Maybe. This is a
multitrillion-dollar package, this
body we have, which is capable of
picking up the custom
inharmonicities that no machine will
ever be able to pick up.”
In his radio interview, Kurt goes
after both the how and the why. In
David’s case, the details of how
reveal the why.
“The hammers are a magic thing,” he
says. “They’re the most worked-on
felt in the world, bent and held and
compressed. Each hammer has this
little insane pearl of compressed
energy at the core of the hammer.”
He clenches his fists. His face
contorts. What appeals to him about
Steingraebers is their darkness, their
big huge sound.
Kurt starts to ask about cheap
pianos. “We call them PSOs,” David
interrupts, “or, Piano Shaped
Objects.”
“Uh hmmm,” Kurt murmurs in a
faraway tone, the cup of coffee
sweetened with maple syrup
balanced on his lap, forgotten.
Past Studio 360s have included
visits with Annie Leibovitz, Fela
Kuti and Spike Lee, but the show has
not been afraid to veer toward stuff
like Sweden’s Large Hadron
Collider particle accelerator and
Chicano rock bands. The program’s
tag line is: “Get inside the creative
mind.” The show is essentially a
forum for Kurt to air his curiosities
in a weekly one-hour format.

Getting inside his own sibling’s head
is a first for Kurt on the show,
though. And the walk down memory
lane is a bit of a bumpy ride.
“I used to lie under the piano when
Mom would play,” David says. “It’s
the most expensive echo chamber in
the world. Under there, it’s
psychedelic. It’s like the Hall of the
Mountain King.”
“I would use it to stand on to get
books I couldn’t reach,” says Kurt,
and the radio-show producer
practically drools at the perfection of
it.
“And thus, character is destiny, as
Heraclitus said,” comments David,
who rates their mother as a B+
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amateur player with a repertoire of a
dozen pieces she could “really kill” —
some Chopin, Bach’s Goldberg
Variations and “Misty.” “Did you
actually listen when Mom played?”

“Well … sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, I didn’t become a musician,
did I?”
Kurt never knew how and why his
brother went from being a
professional musician to piano
technician. He wants to know how it
happened. David shrugs. He tuned
everybody’s guitars and basses as a
kid. He’s been doing it now for more
than 30 years.
They weren’t close as kids in the
house but made a warm relationship
as adults. David was a bully as a kid
because he was insecure, but he is
fiercely proud of his sibling now. “I
threw him off the stairs,” David says
of his younger brother.
“It wasn’t throwing off stairs,” Kurt
corrects. “We were wrestling in the
living room.”
“The epic thing was shooting him in
the leg with the BB gun. I remember
the trajectory of the BB going out of
the gun,” David adds. The boys were
playing a game, pretending to die.
“Do you have a Matrix-scene
moment of the memory?” Kurt asks.
“My memory of course is all focused
on being shot.”

The brothers walk into David’s office.
There are toy dinosaurs and a plastic
shark and Raggedy Ann dolls on the
shelves. But what surprises Kurt
most is the copy of TheNew
Yorker sitting on the coffee table. He
is surprised to learn that his parents
subscribed to it (especially since he
was once a columnist at the
magazine) ever since David was 7
years old. Memory is tricky. They
stare at a photo pinned to the wall —
Kurt as a teenager, senior year of
high school. The brothers look
nothing alike now: Kurt with the
same curly brown mop he had as a
kid, the same serious expression;
David, frosty-haired and hawkish.
“Graduation pictures like that, they
always make me think of photos that
run in newspapers,” Kurt says. “Like
after the fiery crash that killed 10
kids.” He’d have been 17 in the
photo. He is 54 now.

“Where are his books?” asks
the Studio 360 sound guy, scanning
the shelves for Kurt’s
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novelsHeyday and Turn of the
Century, or even his parody self-help
book, Tools of Power: The Elitist
Guide to the Ruthless Exploitation of
Everybody & Everything.
“What is this?” David growls. “The
fucking Inquisition? ‘Where are his
books.’”
Kurt is the straight and narrow.
David is the ebullient rebel with a
dark streak. Kurt is the magna cum
laude Harvard grad; David, the
sometime-rocker dropout. Each has
come to epitomize the sensibility of
the place they’ve lived in for the past
30 years: One brother is the
apotheosis of East Coast reticence,
the other of West Coast
demonstrativeness. One primly
shakes your hand. The other offers a
hug.

David is a black sheep with a
generous spirit. How many times
have clients insisted they can’t hear
the tiny gradations of sound he takes
in? “‘I can’t, I can’t,’ they say. If
they think they can’t, they can’t. I
show them that they can, and this
light comes on. Wow! Bingo! So quit
telling yourself you can’t hear it.”

The black sheep/white sheep
dichotomy breaks down further on
closer scrutiny. They correct each
other as they speak, pushing for
greater rhetorical accuracy. To the
question of whether or not David was
the scapegoat, Kurt says, “No, no, no,
not scapegoat. Scapegoat implies no
blame to the goat.” Kurt remembers
David was funny, charismatic,
popular, had girlfriends. David
counters that academics was the
meat and potatoes. The portrait that
emerges is of precocious, competitive
siblings, each conscious of their
respective talents, like a family out of
Salinger.
In a bit, the group moves to the
garage-turned–piano atelier, where
pianist Tamir Hendelman is tapping
out a melody on a 1953 Steinway that
David worked on for 1,000 hours.
“Tamir is one of my top five all-time
pianists ever,” says David. “And I
thought about it before I said that.”

The guy with the microphone circles
them. Hendelman says that when he
sits at one of David’s pianos, he feels
freer than with any other. That his
fingers glide on a passage and stuff
comes out of him that wouldn’t
normally come out. His floppy brown
poet hair bobs as he plays a jaunty
number he wrote for his daughter.

Other pianists come into the atelier
and get insane soft tones,
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cascading Debussy stuff. Tones
David’s never heard before. That’s
the real reason he tunes pianos, he
says. To hear the geniuses play.

A classical pianist plays Mozart the
minute he sits at a piano. A jazz
pianist explores the ranges, tinkles
out random chords, tests the darks,
the lights, seeing how sweet and low
the instrument can get. Hendelman
is of the jazz school, so if it doesn’t
wind up on the metaphorical cutting
room floor, perhaps on Kurt’s radio
show you’ll hear him riffing on this
exquisitely tuned piano.
Pianists, Hendelman explains, can’t
take their instrument with them
when they travel, as other session
musicians do. The way a cellist might
book a seat for his cello on an
airplane. That’s why the greatest
pianists always have a deal with the
manufacturer to provide a suitable
instrument at each venue — it’s
consistency for the artist, and smart
marketing for the company.
“I get it,” Kurt says.
“He has to dance with whatever
skanky whore shows up.” David
grins.
Once, when he was feeling smug,
having just listened to Hendelman
play a concert on a piano he’d tuned,
David said, “Yeah, you must have to
play some really nasty pianos in your
career, right Tamir?”
Hendelman simply answered in his
modest way, “Well, whoever shows
up, I just make love to.”
Even some weird transvestite, David
adds now.
“Well, maybe not that,” Hendelman
concedes, and the brothers Andersen
laugh.