Stretch

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 13: Stretch

Stretch tuning is the practice of tuning the extreme registers of a piano — the lowest bass and the highest treble — slightly beyond the frequencies that equal temperament would dictate, the bass notes tuned slightly flat and the treble notes slightly sharp, the piano's range stretched outward at both ends like a rubber band pulled from its center, and the stretching is necessary because of inharmonicity, because the stiffness of real piano strings causes the partials to deviate from the harmonic series, and if the tuner does not account for this deviation the octaves will sound wrong, will beat, will have the wavering quality that tells the ear the two notes are not in agreement, and the stretching corrects this, aligns the perceived octaves by bending the actual frequencies, makes the piano sound right by making it technically wrong, another compromise in a system built on compromises.

Clara had been stretching pianos for twenty-eight years, and the stretch she applied to each instrument was different, was specific to the piano's string scaling and tension and length and stiffness, was a judgment that the ear made based on the sound of the specific piano in the specific room on the specific day, and this judgment was one of the most sophisticated acts in the tuner's craft, requiring not just the ability to hear beats but the ability to assess quality, to determine not just whether an octave was beating but whether the character of the octave was correct, whether the relationship between the two notes was healthy, whether the sound was open and clear or cramped and tight, and these assessments were made in the upper treble and the lower bass, in the regions where Clara's hearing was strongest and weakest respectively — the bass, where her hearing was undiminished and her judgments were certain; the treble, where her hearing was declining and her judgments were becoming approximate.

It was June. The Portland summer had begun, the clouds clearing, the temperature rising, the city entering the dry season that would last until October, and the pianos in Clara's rotation were adjusting to the change — the soundboards drying, the crowns dropping, the pitches drifting flat, the reverse of the October pattern — and Clara was tuning through the transition, correcting the seasonal drift, returning the pianos to pitch, and the work was the same work it always was, the ritual of the rounds, the lever and the fork and the mutes, the A set and the temperament built and the octaves tuned and the unisons matched, and Clara did the work with the compensations she had developed — the leaning, the harder striking, the Korg check — and the work was adequate, was right enough, was sufficient.

But on a Thursday afternoon in late June, Clara made a decision that she had been considering for weeks, a decision that felt like the next step on the slope she was descending, the next concession to the decline that was reshaping her professional life, and the decision was to bring Yuki to the symphony.

Not to observe. Not to watch Clara tune the Steinway and learn from the observation, the way Yuki had observed in the early months of her apprenticeship. To tune. To set her hands on the Steinway Model D, serial number 507,281, the piano that Leonard had chosen in 1978 and tuned for thirty-two years and passed to Clara in 2005, the piano that was the crown of Clara's client list, the most demanding piano in Portland, the instrument that required the best ear Clara could bring.

Yuki arrived at Clara's house at one o'clock, and they drove together to the Schnitzer, Clara driving, Yuki in the passenger seat with her bag and Clara's bag between them, the bags touching, the tools inside the bags — the lever, the mutes, the fork, the Korg — shifting with the car's movement, the metal and felt and steel and rosewood settling against each other in the dark interior of the bags.

"Why today," Yuki said, as Clara turned onto Broadway.

"Because you're ready."

"You said I wasn't ready for the Bösendorfer."

"You're not ready for the Bösendorfer. You're ready for the Steinway."

"The Steinway is a concert piano. The Bösendorfer is a home piano. Isn't the concert piano harder."

"The Bösendorfer is harder because the Bösendorfer is the Bösendorfer. The Steinway is a different kind of hard. The Steinway requires precision. The Bösendorfer requires intimacy. You have precision. You don't have intimacy yet. Intimacy comes from years."

Yuki was quiet for a moment. "Is this because of your hearing."

The question arrived like a note struck without warning, a note that was not expected in the progression, a dissonance that changed the harmony. Clara gripped the steering wheel and felt the leather under her fingers and did not look at Yuki and did not answer immediately.

"What do you know about my hearing," Clara said.

"I know you lean closer than you used to. I know you use the Korg for the top octave. I know you check your tunings after you're done, which you never used to do. I know the top octave takes you longer now than it did when I started."

Clara drove. The Schnitzer was two blocks ahead, the marquee visible, the letters announcing the weekend's concert — Brahms, the First Piano Concerto, a pianist from Chicago whose name Clara did not recognize.

"I should have told you," Clara said.

"You didn't need to tell me. I could hear it."

"Hear what."

"The change. In the top octave. When you check my tunings, you're less certain. You say 'that sounds clean' instead of 'that's clean.' You hesitate. You listen longer. Your ear is searching for something it used to find immediately."

Clara parked in the lot behind the Schnitzer and turned off the engine and sat with her hands on the wheel.

"I have presbycusis," she said. "Age-related hearing loss. High frequencies. Above 6,000 hertz. It's been progressing since last October. The audiogram shows moderate to severe loss at 8,000 hertz. It affects the top octave. The beats between the intervals up there — I can't hear them reliably. I use the Korg to check. Sometimes the Korg finds errors."

She said this in the same plain, factual tone she had used with Mrs. Ashford, the Leonard tone, the tone of a measurement rather than a feeling, and Yuki listened the way Yuki listened to everything — with the full attention of a musician, the quality of listening that was active rather than passive.

"How long have you known," Yuki said.

"Since October. The audiologist confirmed it in October. I noticed it in September. The first time — it was this piano. The Steinway B at the Songbird. The top octave was muffled. I couldn't hear the beats."

"That was nine months ago."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me."

Clara looked at Yuki. The question was fair. The question deserved an answer that was honest, and the honest answer was complicated, was layered, was a chord with multiple notes that were not entirely in tune with each other.

"Because telling you would have changed what you heard," Clara said. "When you listen to my tunings, you listen with the assumption that my ear is reliable. If I had told you my ear was failing, you would have started listening for the failure. You would have heard errors that might not be errors, would have second-guessed judgments that were correct, would have lost the trust in my ear that your learning depends on. The teacher's ear is the standard. If the standard is compromised, the student has nothing to calibrate against."

"But the standard is compromised."

"In the top octave. In the top octave only. Below C7, my hearing is normal. The temperament, the mid-range, the bass — my ear is fine. My ear is excellent. The loss is above 6,000 hertz. Most of the tuning happens below 4,000."

"Most of the tuning. Not all of it."

"Not all of it."

They sat in the car in the parking lot behind the Schnitzer Concert Hall, the building's backstage wall visible through the windshield, the brick and the fire escape and the dumpsters, the unglamorous side of the concert hall, the side the audience never saw, and the silence between them was the silence of two people adjusting to a new piece of information, the silence that follows a dissonance, the silence in which the ear decides whether to resolve or to sustain.

"So today," Yuki said. "You want me to tune the Steinway because you can't tune the top octave."

"I want you to tune the Steinway because you can tune the Steinway. Because your ear is ready for the precision the Steinway requires. And because —" Clara paused. She looked at the brick wall. She looked at the fire escape. "Because the top octave needs an ear that can hear it. And your ear can hear it."

Yuki nodded. The nod was small, was not agreement so much as acknowledgment, the acknowledgment of a fact that changed the shape of their relationship, that shifted the balance between teacher and student, that moved the boundary between what Clara provided and what Yuki provided, and the shift was not large — Clara would still set the temperament, still tune the mid-range and the bass, still do the majority of the work — but the shift was significant, was the first time the student's capacity exceeded the teacher's in a specific domain, the first time the younger ear was needed not as a supplement but as a replacement.

They entered the Schnitzer through the stage door and walked to the stage and Clara opened the Steinway's lid and they stood together, looking at the piano's interior, the strings and the plate and the hammers and the soundboard, and the piano was the same piano it always was, serial number 507,281, the piano Leonard had chosen, the piano Clara had tuned for nineteen years, and it did not know that today would be different, did not care that today two tuners would work on it instead of one, did not care about audiograms or apprenticeships or the transfer of responsibility from one generation to the next — the piano cared about nothing except the tuning, the correction, the return to the grid, and the piano would accept the tuning from whatever hands provided it, from Clara's hands or Yuki's hands or the hands of whoever came after.

Clara struck the fork. The A bloomed on the stage. She set the A and began the temperament.

The temperament was hers. This was her territory, the middle octave, the heart of the piano, the twelve notes from which all other notes were derived, and Clara set the temperament with the confidence that her hearing in this range justified, the intervals clean, the beat rates consistent, the fifths uniformly narrow, the thirds uniformly wide, the grid precise and smooth, and she worked with the fluency of a person who had set this temperament on this piano hundreds of times, the hands knowing the pins, the ear knowing the strings, the lever moving with the precision that twenty-eight years of practice had calibrated.

She tuned the octaves downward, into the bass, and the bass was hers too — the stretch applied with the knowledge of this specific piano's inharmonicity, the lower notes tuned to the positions that she knew from experience produced the cleanest octaves on this instrument, the flatting applied with a hand that remembered how much to flat, how far to stretch, the muscle memory and the auditory memory collaborating the way they always had, the body and the ear working as one.

She tuned upward from the temperament, through the mid-range, through the upper mid-range, and the octaves were clean, each one set and confirmed, the ear hearing the beats and eliminating them, the sound becoming still at each octave, the stillness radiating outward from the temperament like ripples in reverse, converging rather than diverging, the piano coming into tune.

At C7 she stopped.

She set the lever on the rim and stepped back from the piano and looked at Yuki, who was standing at the edge of the stage, watching, her bag at her feet, her hands at her sides.

"From here," Clara said.

Yuki walked to the piano. She picked up the lever — Clara's lever, Leonard's lever — and she seated it on the pin for C-sharp 7, and she struck C-sharp 7 and C-sharp 6 together, and she listened.

Clara listened too. She heard the two notes sounding together, heard the fundamentals, heard the approximate relationship between them. She could hear that the octave was approximately correct. She could not hear the fine structure, could not count the beats, could not determine whether the octave was clean or one cent wide or two cents narrow. The information was there, in the air, in the sound waves traveling from the piano to Clara's ears, but the transducers at the base of Clara's cochlea — the hair cells that would have converted the high-frequency beats into neural signals — were damaged or dead, and the information arrived at the ear and was not converted, was not transmitted, was lost at the threshold, the way a letter arrives at a house and is not opened, the information present in the envelope but not accessed by the recipient.

Yuki heard it. Clara could see that Yuki heard it — could see the concentration, the slight tilt of the head, the pause, the assessment — and Yuki adjusted the pin, a fraction of a turn, and struck the notes again, and listened, and adjusted again, and the iteration continued — strike, listen, adjust — until Yuki was satisfied, until the octave was clean, and she moved to D7.

Clara stood behind Yuki and watched her tune the top octave of the Portland Symphony's Steinway Model D, and the watching was different from any watching Clara had done before, was not the watching of a teacher observing a student but the watching of a person observing the continuation of something she had started, the watching of a person witnessing the thing she had made — the apprentice, the trained ear, the next link in the chain — doing the thing she had trained it to do, and the thing was being done well, was being done with precision and care and the particular attention that the Steinway's top octave demanded, and Clara watched and was — the emotion was complex, was multiple notes sounding at once, the chord not simple but rich.

Pride. Yuki was good. Yuki's ear was hearing what it needed to hear, was making judgments that were correct, was tuning the top octave of a concert grand with the competence of a tuner who was becoming, through practice and talent and the training Clara had provided, genuinely skilled.

Grief. Clara's ear could not do what Yuki's ear was doing. Clara was standing on the stage of the Schnitzer Concert Hall, watching someone else tune the piano her father had chosen and she had maintained for nineteen years, watching because she could not do it herself — not the whole of it, not the upper edge, not the territory where the finest work lived — and the watching was a diminishment, a stepping back, a concession.

Relief. The piano would be correctly tuned. The top octave would be clean. The pianist performing Brahms this weekend would sit at a Steinway whose every note was correct, whose every interval was properly tempered, whose stretch was right, and the correctness would be the product of two ears rather than one, Clara's ear and Yuki's ear working in sequence, each providing what the other could not, the collaboration producing a result that neither could produce alone — Clara because she could not hear the top octave, Yuki because she did not yet know the piano well enough to tune the temperament and the mid-range and the bass with the precision that Clara's decades of experience provided.

Gratitude. Yuki was there. Yuki existed. Yuki had come to Clara's door eighteen months ago and asked to observe and had sat in a chair and watched and heard the fourth partial of the A3 beating against the fundamental of E5 at 7.4 beats per second, and Clara had known, in that moment, that Yuki had the ear, and the knowing had led to the apprenticeship and the apprenticeship had led to this moment, this Thursday afternoon on the stage of the Schnitzer, Yuki tuning the top octave of the Steinway while Clara watched, and if Yuki had not come, if Yuki had not existed, Clara would be alone with the piano and the declining ear and the Korg, and the Korg could measure frequencies but could not hear the piano, and the top octave would be correct but not alive, and the difference between correct and alive was the difference between Yuki and the Korg, the difference between an ear and a device, the difference that Clara had spent her entire career defending and that she was now, by necessity, relying on someone else to provide.

Yuki finished the top octave. She set the lever on the rim and turned to Clara.

"Check it," she said.

Clara walked to the piano and played through the top octave, each note against the note an octave below, and she heard the octaves — heard them approximately, heard them as clean or approximately clean, could not distinguish between the two — and she took out the Korg and checked each note.

C-sharp 7. Correct. D7. Correct. E7. Correct. F7. Minus one cent. Yuki adjusted. Correct. G7. Correct. A7. Correct. B7. Correct. C8. Plus one cent. Yuki adjusted. Correct.

The top octave was clean. Two notes required adjustment of one cent each, which was within the tolerance of any tuning, which was the kind of micro-correction that even the best tuner made on the second pass, and Yuki's tuning of the top octave was, by any measure, competent. Not yet as refined as what Clara would have produced at the height of her capacity — there was a subtlety of stretch, a nuance of voicing-through-tuning, that came only with years of experience on a specific instrument — but competent. Good. Sufficient.

Clara tuned the unisons throughout the piano — this was still her work, the unisons in the mid-range and the bass, the territory where her ear was undiminished — and Yuki tuned the unisons in the top octave, and they worked in sequence, Clara finishing a section and Yuki beginning the next, and the collaboration was smooth, was natural, was two people doing complementary work on the same instrument, and the collaboration produced a tuning that was — Clara listened to the finished piano, played a chord, played a scale, played the opening of the Brahms concerto's orchestral introduction on the piano, the low octaves and the bass chords, and the piano sounded good, sounded right, sounded like the Steinway Model D that Leonard had chosen in 1978 for the darkness of its bass, for the sound of a room with no windows.

They closed the lid and covered the keyboard and packed their tools and walked off the stage into the backstage corridor, and Yuki said, "Clara."

"Yes."

"Thank you. For trusting me with the piano."

"You earned it."

"I know. But thank you anyway."

They walked to the car in silence, the silence of two people who had done something together that had changed their relationship, that had moved the boundary between teacher and student, between provider and recipient, between the one who gives and the one who takes, and the boundary had moved in the direction it was always going to move — toward Yuki, toward the younger ear, toward the next generation — and the movement was natural, was inevitable, was the same movement that had occurred when Leonard passed the lever to Clara, and Clara had known, when Leonard passed it, that the passing was not a gift but a necessity, not a gesture but a fact, and the fact was that the ear ages and the work continues and the work requires an ear, and when the ear that was doing the work can no longer do the work, a new ear must be found.

Clara had found the ear. The ear was Yuki.

She drove home. She sat at the kitchen table. She struck the fork.

A440. Clear. True. Present.

She held it and listened and the partials rose through the harmonic series, the fundamental and the second and the third and the fourth, climbing, each partial present and clear and then less clear and then dim and then gone, the series fading into the territory that was no longer Clara's, the territory that was Yuki's now, the high country where the youngest ears lived and the oldest ears departed, and Clara listened to the fading and accepted it — not happily, not peacefully, but with the recognition that acceptance was the only alternative to a refusal that would change nothing, that would not restore the hair cells or reverse the audiogram or return the cents she had lost.

She set the fork on the table. She looked at it. Steel. A440. The one fixed point.

She left it on the table and went to bed.