In 2023, Brattleboro piano technician Patrick Branstetter got a call from Rejoice Scherry, the historian and curator who runs the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch.
Scherry had a problem: The grand piano housed at the site, a 100-year-old Baldwin K that first lady Grace Coolidge played when she lived in the White House, was in bad shape. Dozens of visiting musicians had played the instrument in the decades since it had been installed at the 30th president’s homestead, but now the pedals weren’t working, and it wouldn’t stay in tune. Could Branstetter come and take a look? “I work really hard not to have expectations, but Rejoice seemed very knowledgeable, so I knew this would be an interesting project,” Branstetter said.
When he arrived in Plymouth Notch, Scherry showed him the piano and left the room for a few minutes. “I thought he’d plunk some keys and get an idea of what was needed,” she recalled. She returned to find Branstetter lying on the floor under the piano, with the keyboard taken apart and parts and pieces everywhere. Within a few minutes, Scherry was lying on the floor, too, looking up at the piano’s underbelly as Branstetter pointed out cracks in the wooden beams that held the instrument together.
Branstetter would eventually spend hundreds of hours in his Brattleboro shop replacing those beams and restoring the entire piano, which he delivered back to Scherry in June. This Saturday, September 12, he’ll talk about his work during a celebration of the piano’s revival at the Coolidge historic site, where Scherry will also share stories about Grace Coolidge and her love of music. Pianist Abigail Charbeneau will lead several musicians in a concert.
Branstetter, 38, loves seeing and hearing a piano fill a room with music after he has painstakingly brought it back to life, whether it’s the Coolidge piano or any of the other instruments he’s worked on over the past 15 years. He’s part engineer, part mechanic, part woodworker, but he’s never been much of a musician. And pianos didn’t come into the picture until he was in his early twenties.
Growing up in Bethel, he preferred juggling and acrobatics, working on cars, and acting in school and community plays. He cleaned rooms at a local inn until the inn’s manager saw him do a backflip at a holiday party and moved him into more customer-facing roles.
Branstetter graduated from Randolph Union High School and heard about a local guy, a few years older than he, who had joined the cast of Blue Man Group, the renowned performance-art troupe whose members are coated in blue paint. Intrigued, Branstetter went to New York City for an audition. A few weeks shy of his 19th birthday, he was accepted into the show’s six-week training program.
He performed with Blue Man Group for two years, in New York; Orlando, Fla.; and Chicago, but lost the gig to layoffs after the 2008 financial crisis. Suddenly Branstetter was unemployed with few job prospects.
“Blue-Man skills are not really transferable in the real world,” he pointed out. “Like, I could catch things in my mouth from far away. I knew I needed a trade or something.”
He ended up at Boston’s North Bennet Street School, which specializes in trades such as carpentry, furniture making, locksmithing and violin making. The two-year piano technology program was led by a guy from Thetford — David Betts, who was a “legend” and “a shade or two away from a tractor mechanic,” Branstetter said. “He spoke about things like a farmer would — very practical, very simple. He had a bottomless well of knowledge about pianos and woodworking and metal and tuning.”
When you see somebody maximizing the dynamics of an instrument that you’ve worked on, it’s like restoring an old car and watching a rally driver race it.
Patrick Branstetter
Piano technology has existed since the first piano was built around 1700. Technicians today restore and rebuild instruments, as well as tune the strings and adjust the multitude of other components, which can be decades old and in need of updating. “You’re working with materials that are always changing,” Branstetter said.
After managing a piano shop in White River Junction for a few years, Branstetter headed to Los Angeles to work as a piano tech at the Colburn School, which he called the Juilliard of the West Coast. He also started his own restoration business and coached at Kinetic Theory Circus Arts, where he met his wife, who owned the circus school. In 2022, they moved to Brattleboro to be closer to family in the Northeast. The next year, Branstetter relaunched his business under the name Old Timey Piano Craft.
These days, he completes about four restorations a year, and each takes four to nine months. “It’s equivalent to building a house,” he explained. “There’s no plumbing or electricity, but what’s similar is the handwork involved — the precision, the measurements.”
Branstetter’s recent projects include rebuilding a 1917 Steinway B, which he bought from experimental composer and Dartmouth College professor emeritus Christian Wolff and then sold to the Colonial Theatre in Keene, N.H. Musician Ben Folds was the first artist to play it, which was a thrill for Branstetter, who’s a fan. “When you see somebody maximizing the dynamics of an instrument that you’ve worked on,” he said, “it’s like restoring an old car and watching a rally driver race it.”
Then there’s the Coolidge piano restoration, which cost about $45,000 and was funded by a private donor. As he began, Branstetter read up on Grace Coolidge and learned that she liked to play piano alongside her sons, who played banjo and violin. She attended concerts in Washington, D.C., every chance she got and frequently hosted musicians at the White House for performances; Sergei Rachmaninoff was a regular guest.
Branstetter kept all that in mind as he worked. “I understood the historical value of the instrument, and I had a feeling for who owned it,” he said. The former first lady “seemed like a phenomenal person. How would she want her piano taken care of?”
Branstetter replaced all the piano’s strings and the parts that regulate them: felted hammers, wooden bridges, hundreds of metal pins. He built and installed all-new wooden parts — everything except the exterior “case” of the piano. The high point was installing a new soundboard that he had made — the “soul” of the instrument, Branstetter said.
“Without the soundboard, a piano sounds like an electric guitar that’s not plugged into an amplifier,” he explained. Replacing it, he added, “is like you’re putting the heart back into the patient.”
Charbeneau, a professional pianist who lives and teaches in New Hampshire, estimates that she has played Grace Coolidge’s piano 100 times over the past several decades. She said that though she loved being at the historic site, it was often “disappointing” to spend many hours practicing, only to perform on an instrument in poor condition. Now, she’s excited to play.
She said Branstetter’s restoration showed respect for the piano’s history while drastically improving its sound. “Notes that once sounded muddy can now be clearly heard,” she said, and keys that felt full of tension — “like the strings were going to pop”— now feel balanced.
Back in 2023, when Branstetter first went to Plymouth to inspect what was then a very run-down piano, he stopped by the Coolidge Historic Site’s museum and stood in front of a portrait of Grace Coolidge. “You see her looking back at you, and the connection felt like an honor,” he said. “Hopefully, she would have liked the work I did.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Piano Man | Brattleboro piano tech Patrick Branstetter brings a former first lady’s 100-year-old piano back to life”
This article appears in September 9 • 2026.
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