last word
LAST WORD
BY JARRAD SAFFREN
W hen Charles Birnbaum
was 13, he tuned his first
piano, a beat-down baby
grand that Birnbaum said looked like
“it came from the inside of a fraternity
house.” Fiddling and fixing things came nat-
urally to him.

“A lot of natural instincts and curi-
osity of how stuff works ... was kind
of built into me that I think they can’t
really necessarily teach,” Birnbaum
said. “You have to have that curiosity.”
What was once a skill that emerged
from necessity for Birnbaum later
became his livelihood.

Birnbaum, 75, has tuned thousands
of pianos during his 40 years as a piano
tuner, including the likes of those
played by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett
and Stevie Wonder, and he doesn’t plan
on retiring anytime soon.

Birnbaum knew he was going to pur-
sue a career in music from a young age.

His parents were both Holocaust sur-
vivors; they both lost their respective
spouses in the Shoah and met while
surviving in the Polish forests.

Birnbaum was born in Neu-Ulm,
Germany in 1947 and moved to San
Francisco in 1952 before arriving in
Philadelphia five years later, where he
would grow up and go to school.

Both he and his brother had a knack
for music. His brother received a schol-
arship to attend the Curtis Institute of
Music, while Birnbaum got more seri-
ous about his studies at the Settlement
Music School.

“From the time I was 10-years-old,
[music] was not something we did
for fun. We took it very seriously,”
Birnbaum said.

Per their parents’ upbringing, once
they had found something they were
good at and interested in pursuing,
“​​the die were cast,” Birnbaum said.

But Birnbaum’s arrival at the
Settlement Music School was kismet.

It was there that he met mentor Marian
Filar, a Polish pianist, virtuoso and
40 Holocaust survivor who accounted his
time in seven concentration camps in
his 2002 book “From Buchenwald to
Carnegie Hall.”
Filar took Birnbaum under his wing
and pushed him musically. At 11,
Birnbaum won a children’s competi-
tion to play piano with the Philadelphia
Orchestra and three more competi-
tions after that.

Filar mentored Birnbaum through
his arrival at Temple University in
1964, where he received his bachelor’s
and master’s degrees studying music.

He met his wife at Temple while he was
studying for his master’s; she was get-
ting her master’s in music education.

The couple married in 1971 and moved
MARCH 10, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
to Hammonton, New Jersey, where they
could be close to Birnbaum’s parents.

Splitting his time as an adjunct pro-
fessor at Temple University and a New
Jersey community college, Birnbaum
was beginning to think about a family.

His first daughter was born in 1975,
and the young family needed a supple-
ment to their income.

Birnbaum began to sit in on classes
from a piano rebuilder and technician,
who every semester, tried to stump his
class with an obscure question about
music theory. Birnbaum was the only
one to answer the question correctly.

“His jaw dropped,” Birnbaum said.

From there, Birnbaum’s career snow-
balled. He has always found joy in
tuning pianos for his musician friends,
especially because many of the profes-
sional tuners would do a poor job.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people
they’re doing it for don’t know the dif-
ference; it’s kind of sad,” Birnbaum said.

After stunning friends with his tun-
ing work, Birnbaum made a career
for himself tuning pianos at the
up-and-coming resorts and casinos in
Atlantic City, close to where he lived
and where he was raising his family.

As his prominence in the local music
industry grew, however, so did troubles
in his personal life.

In 2012, his family’s property in
Atlantic City, where his parents had lived
since 1965 until they died, was under
threat to be seized by the state through
eminent domain. The property was on
the fringes of the now-Ocean Resort
casino. Birnbaum ultimately won the
case, which was taken to a New Jersey
appellate court in 2019, but the “emo-
tional impact” of the case took its toll.

The Birnbaum family moved into the
Atlantic City home after their Center
City apartment was deemed “unfit for
human habitation” by the city. The
move severely impacted Birnbaum’s
mother, as the relocation to the suburbs
limited her freedoms.

“It was like putting Mom in Siberia,”
Birnbaum said.

The story was different for Birnbaum.

Shortly before graduating, Birnbaum
suffered a psychotic break and, after
receiving psychiatric care, the move
to Atlantic City was a fresh start. The
home there was where he introduced
his wife to his parents and where they
became engaged.

Despite the hiccups in Birnbaum’s
life, Birnbaum hasn’t slowed down.

He just finished tuning the piano at
the Tropicana Showroom for a Fifth
Dimension performance on March 4.

Next month, he’ll be doing the tun-
ing for a show with Steve Martin and
Martin Short.

After tuning pianos for over half
his life, Birnbaum still has a deep pas-
sion for it: “It’s like giving a piano its
soul.” JE
Courtesy of Charles Birnbaum
Charles Birnbaum