Unisons

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 14: Unisons

A unison on a piano is two or three strings tuned to the same frequency and struck by a single hammer, the strings vibrating together, their waves reinforcing each other, the combined amplitude greater than any single string's, and the unison is what gives the piano its voice, its fullness, its authority, the difference between a single string's thin tone and the rich, complex sound that a properly tuned unison produces — a sound that is not three times louder than one string but three times deeper, three times more dimensional, the multiple strings creating not just volume but texture, the slight differences in the strings' physical properties producing a chorus effect, a shimmer, a quality of aliveness that a single string cannot produce, because a single string vibrates in isolation while three strings vibrate in relation, and the relation is the music.

The relation is the music. Clara was thinking about this on a Saturday afternoon in July, driving to Mrs. Ashford's house with Yuki in the passenger seat, Yuki who had been invited to come play the Bösendorfer, the invitation that Mrs. Ashford had extended months ago and that Yuki had been considering, turning over, approaching and retreating from the way a person approaches something they want and fear in equal measure, and Clara had watched Yuki's consideration from a distance, had not pushed, had not insisted, had let the decision arrive at its own pace, which was the pace Clara preferred for most things — the pace of the tuning, the pace of the temperament, the pace of the sound becoming right, which could not be rushed, which arrived when it arrived.

"I'm nervous," Yuki said.

"About what."

"About playing. I haven't played — really played, on a real instrument — in two years. Since the injury. I practice at home, on my Yamaha, but that's not — the Bösendorfer is not my Yamaha."

"No. The Bösendorfer is the Bösendorfer."

"What if my wrist — what if I can't."

"Then you can't. And you'll know. And knowing is better than not knowing."

Yuki looked out the window. The July light was bright and sharp, the Portland summer light that arrived like a guest who was always late and always worth waiting for, the sky blue and cloudless, the temperature in the low eighties, the city vivid, the colors saturated, and Yuki's face in the summer light was the face of a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had once been a pianist and was now a piano tuner and who was about to sit at the best piano she had ever heard and put her hands on the keys and discover whether the hands could still do what they had once been trained to do.

Mrs. Ashford opened the door. She was wearing a dress today, not the usual cardigan and blouse, a summer dress in pale blue that made her look, Clara thought, younger than eighty-four, or not younger exactly but more vivid, more present, the dress a kind of statement, a deliberate choice for an occasion that Mrs. Ashford considered an occasion.

"Yuki," Mrs. Ashford said. "I've been waiting."

"Thank you for having me," Yuki said, and the formality of the greeting was genuine, was not politeness but respect, the respect of a musician being invited into the presence of a great instrument by the instrument's keeper, and Mrs. Ashford received the respect with a nod and led them into the living room, where the Bösendorfer waited.

Clara had tuned the piano two days ago. She had set the A and built the temperament and tuned the octaves and the unisons, and Yuki had tuned the top octave — this was the arrangement now, the collaboration, Clara and Yuki working together on the pianos that required the finest tuning, Clara providing the lower and middle registers and Yuki providing the upper — and the piano was in tune, was correct, was ready.

Yuki stood beside the piano and looked at it. She did not touch it. She looked at the case, the curves, the satin finish, the keyboard with its ivory keys, the music desk, the open lid showing the interior, and she looked the way a person looks at something they have been thinking about for a long time and are now seeing for the second time, the first time having been the observation during a tuning months ago, and the looking was both recognition and discovery, both "I know this" and "I did not know this," because the piano was both what Yuki remembered and more than what she remembered, the way a landscape is always more than the photograph of the landscape.

"Sit down," Mrs. Ashford said. "The bench is adjusted for me. You may need to raise it."

Yuki sat at the bench and found the height acceptable and placed her hands on the keys without pressing them, her fingers resting on the ivory, the touch light, exploratory, the fingers learning the surface the way a tuner's hands learn the lever, by contact, by feel, by the transfer of information through the skin. The ivory was smooth and cool and had the particular texture of real ivory — slightly porous, slightly rough at the microscopic level, the surface that had been polished by Mrs. Ashford's fingers for thirty-seven years and by the fingers of whoever had played the piano before Mrs. Ashford, the surface that was the instrument's handshake, the first contact between the player and the sound.

Yuki pressed a key. Middle C. One note. The hammer rose and struck the strings and the strings vibrated and the soundboard amplified the vibration and the note filled the room, and the note was — Clara heard it from her position by the window, heard it the way she always heard the Bösendorfer's sound, with recognition, with pleasure, with the particular satisfaction of hearing a piano she had tuned producing the sound she had tuned it to produce — and the note was correct, was in tune, was 261.63 hertz, the frequency of middle C in equal temperament, and the note was also more than correct, was beautiful in a way that correctness alone did not explain, because the Bösendorfer's soundboard gave the note a resonance that other pianos could not match, a warmth, a depth, a quality of surrounding the listener rather than facing the listener, the sound coming from everywhere rather than from a single point.

Yuki played a chord. C-E-G. The same chord she and Clara had listened to on the Knabe, the chord that sounded like home, and on the Bösendorfer the chord sounded like home in a house that was larger, more beautiful, more generously proportioned, the acoustics of the room and the quality of the soundboard combining to produce a C major chord that was — Clara searched for the word — that was spacious, that had room in it, that contained not just the three notes but the overtones of the three notes and the sympathetic vibrations of the undamped strings and the resonance of the soundboard and the reflections from the walls and the ceiling and the floor, the chord expanding into the room the way a drop of ink expands in water, the color spreading, filling, occupying.

"Play something," Mrs. Ashford said, from her chair.

Yuki sat for a moment with her hands on the keys, and Clara could see her deciding, could see the internal negotiation between ambition and caution, between the desire to play something worthy of the instrument and the fear of the wrist, the fear that the tendons would protest, that the pain would return, that the three years of healing and adaptation and acceptance would be undone by a single passage of Liszt or Rachmaninoff, the loud passage, the difficult passage, the passage that had broken her.

Yuki played Chopin. Not the nocturnes that Mrs. Ashford played, not the familiar pieces, but the Barcarolle in F-sharp major, opus 60, one of Chopin's last compositions, a piece that was not technically demanding in the way the études were demanding — no massive octave passages, no extreme extensions of the hand — but that was musically demanding in a different way, demanding of the ear, of the touch, of the ability to shape a long melodic line over a rocking accompaniment, the left hand maintaining the barcarolle rhythm, the right hand singing the melody, the two hands doing different things but doing them together, in relation, in unison.

The Bösendorfer responded to Yuki's touch the way a great instrument responds to a musician who understands it — with generosity, with cooperation, with a willingness to produce sounds that the player's technique makes possible. The action was responsive — the keys moved under Yuki's fingers with a speed and sensitivity that the Knabe could not approach, each keystroke translated into hammer motion with a fidelity that made the connection between finger and string feel almost direct, as though Yuki were touching the strings themselves rather than pressing keys that activated a mechanism that threw hammers — and the sound was the Bösendorfer sound, the sound that Clara had been tending for twenty-two years, and the sound was coming now not from Clara's tuning alone but from Yuki's playing, from the combination of Clara's preparation and Yuki's performance, the tuner's work meeting the pianist's work in the instrument, the two contributions merging in the strings, in the soundboard, in the air.

Yuki played for ten minutes. The Barcarolle unfolded in the living room like a landscape unfolding from a train window — slowly, continuously, each measure revealing the next, the melody rising and falling over the accompaniment's steady rocking, the harmony shifting from F-sharp major to its relative minor and back, the piece building toward its climax not with drama but with accumulation, each phrase adding a layer, each repetition of the melody adding a variation, the music growing the way Clara's long sentences grew, by accretion, by the addition of clause after clause, the meaning building through the accumulation of detail.

Clara watched Yuki's hands. The right hand moved with fluency, with ease, the fingers finding the notes with the automatic accuracy of a pianist who had trained since childhood, the muscle memory intact, the pathways between brain and fingers still open, still functional, still carrying the signals that produced the music. The left hand moved differently — with care, with deliberation, the wrist held at a specific angle that minimized the strain on the tendons, the thumb tucked slightly, the range of motion limited, the hand working within the constraints that the injury had imposed, and within those constraints the hand was — Clara looked for the word — the hand was sufficient. The left hand was doing what the Barcarolle required, was maintaining the accompaniment, was providing the harmonic foundation, was doing the work of the less visible hand, the hand that supported rather than sang.

Yuki reached the climax of the Barcarolle — the passage in the last third where the melody rises to the top of the keyboard and the accompaniment swells and the music arrives at a fortissimo that is not loud so much as full, the entire range of the piano sounding, the bass and the treble and the middle all engaged — and she played the climax with a restraint that was not timidity but wisdom, not caution but judgment, the restraint of a player who knew the limits of her left hand and played within them, who shaped the fortissimo not with force but with voicing, using the dynamics of the right hand to create the illusion of the fullness that both hands at full force would have produced, and the illusion was convincing, was musical, was beautiful in a way that full force might not have been, because the restraint gave the climax a quality of containment, of held-back power, of something larger than what was being expressed, and this quality was — Clara recognized it, felt it in her chest — this quality was the quality of a person who has lost something and has learned to make the loss part of the music.

The Barcarolle ended. The last notes decayed in the room, the Bösendorfer holding the sound, the soundboard sustaining the final chord, and the chord faded and the room was quiet and Yuki sat at the bench with her hands in her lap and her eyes closed.

Mrs. Ashford was silent for a long time. Then she said, "Yes."

The word was simple. One syllable. One vowel, one consonant. But the word contained, in Mrs. Ashford's delivery, the weight of seventy-six years of playing the piano and thirty-seven years of playing this piano, and the word was a judgment, a verdict, an assessment delivered by a woman who had heard the Bösendorfer played by many hands — her own, her husband's, Clara's when Clara occasionally played a few bars after a tuning — and who knew what the piano could do when the player was worthy of the piano, and Mrs. Ashford's "yes" was the declaration that Yuki was worthy.

Yuki opened her eyes. She looked at Mrs. Ashford, and Clara saw in Yuki's face the expression she had seen on the faces of musicians who had received a judgment from someone whose judgment mattered — the expression was not joy but relief, the deep relief of having done the thing you were afraid to do and having it received by someone who could receive it fully.

"Your wrist," Mrs. Ashford said.

"It held. It's sore. But it held."

"You compensated beautifully. The left hand — you found a way to make the limitation invisible. No, not invisible. You made it part of the sound. The restraint in the left hand made the right hand more expressive. Like a tuning — the compromise in one interval makes the other intervals work."

Clara looked at Mrs. Ashford. The analogy — the comparison of Yuki's compensated playing to the compromise of equal temperament — was precise, was exact, was the analogy of a woman who had spent decades listening to a tuner explain the physics of the piano and who had absorbed the vocabulary and the concepts and now used them to describe something that was not physics but art, not tuning but playing, not the adjustment of frequencies but the adjustment of a life to a limitation.

"Come back," Mrs. Ashford said. "Come play again. Whenever you want. The piano is here. I am here."

Yuki nodded. She could not speak, Clara saw. The emotion had reached the threshold where speech became impossible, where the body's response to the emotion — the tightening of the throat, the pricking of the eyes — prevented the production of words, and Yuki sat at the bench in silence and Clara stood by the window in silence and Mrs. Ashford sat in her chair in silence, and the three silences were three different silences — Yuki's the silence of being overwhelmed, Mrs. Ashford's the silence of satisfaction, Clara's the silence of recognition.

Because Clara had heard something in Yuki's playing that she had not expected to hear, something that had nothing to do with technique or musicality or the condition of Yuki's wrist, something that was about the piano itself, about the sound, about the quality of the sound, and what Clara had heard was this: the Bösendorfer sounded different when Yuki played it than when Mrs. Ashford played it, sounded different not because the tuning was different — the tuning was the same tuning Clara had set two days ago — but because the player was different, because Yuki's hands produced a different sound from Mrs. Ashford's hands, a different distribution of energy across the frequency spectrum, a different balance of fundamental and overtones, a different quality of attack, and the difference was — Clara listened to the memory of the Barcarolle, replayed it in her mind, listened to it the way she would listen to the memory of a pitch — the difference was brightness. The Bösendorfer, under Yuki's hands, was brighter than under Mrs. Ashford's hands, had more energy in the upper partials, more shimmer, more of the high-frequency content that Clara's ear was losing.

And Clara had heard it. Not all of it — not the highest partials, not the frequencies above 6,000 hertz — but more of it than she had expected, because Yuki's playing was producing more high-frequency energy than Mrs. Ashford's playing, the younger pianist's stronger fingers driving the hammers faster, the faster hammers producing a brighter tone, the brighter tone containing more of the upper partials that Clara's ear was straining to hear, and the result was that Clara heard the Bösendorfer's treble more clearly when Yuki played than when Mrs. Ashford played, not because Clara's hearing had improved but because the signal had increased, the source had produced more of what the ear needed, and the ear had responded.

This was not a solution. This was not a reversal. This was a moment, a single afternoon in a living room on Klickitat Street, and the moment did not change the audiogram or the trajectory or the prognosis. But the moment contained a truth that Clara needed, the truth that the ear's relationship to the sound was not fixed, was not determined solely by the ear's condition but by the interaction between the ear and the source, and the source could change, could vary, could produce more or less of what the ear needed, and this variability meant that the experience of hearing was not a decline-only graph but a landscape with peaks and valleys, and there were still moments — this moment, this afternoon, this Barcarolle on this Bösendorfer — when the ear received enough, when the signal was sufficient, when the hearing was not diminished but full.

Clara drove Yuki home. They did not speak much on the drive — the experience at Mrs. Ashford's was still too recent, too vivid, too close to the surface to be discussed, the way you do not discuss a piece of music immediately after hearing it but let it settle, let it find its place in the memory, let the ear's impression become the mind's understanding.

At Yuki's apartment — a small one-bedroom on Southeast Division, above a bakery, the smell of bread rising through the floorboards — Yuki got out of the car and took her bag from the back seat and stood on the sidewalk and said, "Clara."

"Yes."

"I understand now. Why you said the Bösendorfer requires intimacy."

"Why."

"Because the Bösendorfer responds to who you are, not just how you play. The sound it makes depends on the person. It hears the player."

Clara looked at Yuki standing on the sidewalk in the July light, her bag over her shoulder, her face still carrying the expression of the afternoon, and Clara thought about what Yuki had said — "it hears the player" — and the phrase was not technically accurate, because a piano did not hear, did not have ears, did not perceive, but the phrase was emotionally accurate, was the kind of truth that musicians spoke in the language of metaphor because the language of physics was insufficient, because the physics could describe the frequencies and the amplitudes and the inharmonicity but could not describe the quality, the presence, the aliveness, the thing that made a piano sound like a piano and not like a collection of vibrating strings.

"Yes," Clara said. "It hears the player."

Yuki went inside. Clara drove home. She sat at the kitchen table and struck the fork.

A440.

She held it to her ear and listened, and the partials climbed, and somewhere in the climbing she heard, for a moment, a partial she had not been certain she could still hear — the eleventh, perhaps, or the twelfth, at 4,840 or 5,280 hertz — a partial that was at the edge of her diminishing range, and it was there, faintly, briefly, the way a star is visible at the edge of the eye's peripheral vision, not by looking directly but by looking slightly away, the signal detected not at the center of attention but at the margin, and Clara heard it and held her breath and the partial faded and was gone.

But it had been there.

She set the fork on the table. She did not try to hear it again. She let the moment be what it was — a peak in the landscape, a point where the signal had been sufficient, where the ear had received enough — and she did not try to replicate it, because replication would turn the moment into a test, and the test might fail, and the failure would erase the memory of the success, and Clara wanted the success, wanted to keep it, wanted to hold it the way she held the fork, carefully, without striking it, the potential undisturbed, the vibration still possible even if it was not occurring.

She went to bed.

In her sleep the Barcarolle continued, Yuki's hands on the ivory keys, the Bösendorfer singing in the living room on Klickitat Street, Mrs. Ashford in her chair, the summer light through the windows, and in the dream Clara could hear everything — every partial, every harmonic, every frequency from 20 hertz to 20,000 — and the hearing was full and complete and perfect, and the perfection lasted until morning, when she woke and the perfection was gone and the reality was the reality, which was diminished but not absent, which was less but not nothing, which was the ear she had, the hearing she had, the life she had, and she struck the fork and heard the A and began the day.