How A Piano Teacher Sees Pianos w/ Owen Lovell

Tune into this episode and hear Owen Lovell talk about his passion for the piano, the state of the piano industry, and his journey into becoming a writer and academic!

If you play your cards right, a role as a university music professor can provide you with all sorts of wonderful opportunities. This episode’s guest, Owen Lovell. Owen is the piano review editor for Larry Fine’s Acoustic and Digital Piano Buyer and an associate professor of music at Georgia College. Interestingly, he has trained as a piano technician under our good friend Sally Phillips.

He found his way into his work with Piano Buyer because, as a teacher at a University, he has the opportunity to come across many pianos and pianists who can develop opinions on them, and have the time and skill to write about them.

In this episode, we learn all sorts of fascinating things about Piano Buyer and how it works, as well as gain incredible insight from Owen’s multifaceted perspective as a player, teacher, technician, and editor at Piano Buyer.

Communication is something that emerged as a very important topic to us in the piano industry. Communication is about listening, not about talking, and pianists and tuners are great listeners.

So we just have to extend that to the relationship side of things. An FBI-trained hostage negotiator talks about listening and asking the right questions when negotiating tough negotiations. At the same time, some of the best concert technicians will take the time to sit back and actually listen to the client play the piano before they have a conversation about what needs to happen with that instrument.

All that to say, use your expert listening skills to enjoy this episode and you’ll get a ton out of it.

Here's a little bit about our guest Owen Lovell:

Pianist Owen Lovell has appeared as a soloist and critically acclaimed chamber musician in seventeen U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Commercial releases include tracks with rock musician Kip Winger (2008, Frontiers Records) and ASCAP award-winning composer Randall Bauer (2016, Albany Records). Owen has performed in live broadcasts on Wisconsin Public Radio and Austin, Texas NPR affiliate, KUT–FM. He has worked with many prizewinning composers, most notably Lowell Liebermann, Michael Torke, Samuel Adler, Joan Tower, Dan Welcher, Eric Ewazen, David Maslanka, Denis Smalley, and Roberto Sierra. Owen maintains professional two–piano and violin and piano collaborations, delighting audiences in settings ranging from rural community churches to the Kennedy Center.

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