The Voicing

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 24: The Voicing

Voicing is not tuning. Tuning is the adjustment of pitch — the tightening or loosening of strings to bring them to the correct frequencies, the setting of the temperament, the matching of octaves, the unifying of unisons, the work of making the piano play the right notes. Voicing is the adjustment of tone — the reshaping of the hammer felt so that the hammers produce the quality of sound the piano was designed to produce, the brightness or warmth, the hardness or softness, the particular character that distinguishes one piano's voice from another's, and voicing is done not with the tuning lever but with a voicing needle, a tool that looks like a hat pin mounted in a wooden handle, the needle inserted into the hammer felt to loosen the fibers, to soften the felt, to make the hammer strike the string with less hardness, less brightness, more warmth, and the voicing needle is the tool of tone while the tuning lever is the tool of pitch, and the two tools address different aspects of the piano's sound the way a doctor's stethoscope addresses the heart and the ophthalmoscope addresses the eye, different instruments for different organs of the same body.

Clara had been voicing pianos for twenty-eight years, had learned the technique from Leonard, who had learned it from the tuner at the Leningrad Conservatory whose name neither of them knew, and the technique was tactile as much as auditory — the needle inserted into the hammer's crown at specific angles and specific depths, the felt loosened in specific patterns depending on whether the goal was overall softening or selective thinning or the restoration of the hammer's original shape after years of compression had flattened the striking surface — and the auditory component was different from the auditory component of tuning, was not about pitch but about quality, not about frequency but about timbre, not about whether the note was sharp or flat but about whether the note was bright or warm, harsh or mellow, thin or full.

And the auditory component of voicing was — Clara had realized this gradually, over the course of the winter, over the months since the audiogram and the Korg and the compensations — the auditory component of voicing was almost entirely in her functional range.

The brightness of a piano's tone was determined by the distribution of energy across the frequency spectrum — a bright tone had more energy in the upper harmonics, the partials above the third or fourth, while a warm tone had more energy in the fundamental and the lower harmonics — and the upper harmonics that determined brightness were present at all pitch levels, not just in the top octave. The brightness of middle C was determined by partials at 523 hertz and 785 and 1,047 and 1,309 and 1,571, frequencies that were well within Clara's hearing, that were in the territory where the audiogram showed normal sensitivity, where her ear was as acute as it had ever been. The brightness of the A above middle C was determined by partials at 880 and 1,320 and 1,760 and 2,200, all within range. Even the brightness of notes in the upper registers — C6 at 1,047 hertz, with partials at 2,093 and 3,140 — was determined by frequencies that Clara could hear.

Voicing was work she could do entirely by ear.

The realization had arrived not as a revelation but as a gradual recognition, the way a shape emerges from fog — the outline first, then the details, the thing becoming clear not all at once but incrementally, the perception assembling itself from partial information into complete understanding — and the understanding was this: that the hearing loss, which had compromised her ability to tune the top octave, had not compromised her ability to voice. The voicing ear and the tuning ear overlapped but were not identical. The tuning ear needed the highest frequencies, the beats between partials above 6,000 hertz. The voicing ear needed the middle frequencies, the timbral information between 500 and 4,000 hertz. And Clara's ear in that range was undiminished, was extraordinary, was the ear that Leonard had trained.

She was thinking about this on a February afternoon — the February that fell between the January audiogram and the spring — as she drove to a house in the West Hills to voice a piano she had been asked to voice by a client she had not worked for before, a woman named Helen Marchetti who had recently purchased a Steinway A — a six-foot-two grand, the model between the smaller M and the larger B — from an estate sale in Lake Oswego, and the piano had not been voiced in years, possibly decades, and the hammers were hard, the tone bright to the point of harshness, the sound more percussion than music, and Helen Marchetti had called Clara on the recommendation of another client and had said, "The piano sounds angry. Can you make it sound less angry," and Clara had said yes, she could, and had scheduled the voicing for a Tuesday afternoon when the tuning schedule was light.

The house was on a curved street high in the West Hills, above the city, the view from the living room showing Portland laid out below — the bridges, the river, the neighborhoods east and west, the skyline of downtown, the whole city visible from the window beside which the Steinway A sat, and Clara entered the house and saw the piano and saw the view and understood immediately why Helen Marchetti had placed the piano here, in this room, beside this window — the piano and the city both visible, both present, the instrument and the landscape in dialogue, the view a kind of visual music and the music a kind of audible landscape.

Helen Marchetti was in her sixties, a retired architect with the precise manner of a person accustomed to specifications, to tolerances, to the gap between what was designed and what was built, and she led Clara to the piano and opened the lid and said, "Listen to this," and played a chord — F major, root position — and the chord was bright, was harsh, was the sound of hammers that had been compressed by years of playing until the felt was dense and hard and the striking surface was flat rather than rounded, the hammer hitting the string with a hardness that produced a tone that was more metallic than wooden, more percussive than resonant, the sound of a piano whose voice had been hardened by use.

"That," Helen Marchetti said. "That is the anger."

Clara smiled, not because the situation was funny but because the description was accurate — the piano did sound angry, did sound as though it resented the touch, as though the hammers were striking the strings not to produce music but to punish them — and the anger was a voicing problem, was a matter of felt density, and the solution was the needle.

"I can help with this," Clara said. "The hammers need voicing. The felt has hardened. I'll soften it."

She sat at the bench and played a chromatic scale from C3 to C6, slowly, each note sustained, each note listened to, and she assessed the tone — note by note, register by register — the way a doctor assesses a patient, systematically, noting the condition of each hammer by the quality of the sound it produced. The bass was acceptable — the wound strings were naturally darker, warmer, the hardening of the hammers less audible in the lower register where the mass of the strings dominated the tone. The middle register was harsh — the hammers hitting the plain steel strings with a brilliance that was excessive, that was beyond what the piano's design intended, that was the accumulated effect of years of playing without maintenance. The upper register was very harsh — the shorter strings more sensitive to hammer hardness, the tone brittle, metallic, the high notes sounding like a xylophone rather than a piano.

Clara took the voicing needle from her bag. The needle was three inches long, mounted in a turned maple handle that was stained dark from years of handling, and the needle's point was fine, was sharp enough to penetrate the compressed felt without tearing it, and Clara held the needle in her right hand the way she held the lever — with the thumb on the flat, the fingers wrapped around the handle — and she began.

She started with middle C. She lifted the hammer from its rest by pressing the key slowly, holding the key down so the hammer was suspended at its full height, the striking surface visible, and she examined the surface — flattened, compressed, the felt dense where the string had beaten against it ten thousand times, the crown of the hammer no longer rounded but slightly concave, dished, the shape distorted by the impact, the way a road surface is distorted by traffic — and she inserted the needle into the crown, three quick insertions in a triangular pattern, the needle entering the felt at an angle, the fibers loosened, the density reduced at the striking point, and she released the key and struck the note and listened.

The tone was — changed. Slightly softer. Slightly warmer. The harshness reduced by a degree, the metallic quality diminished, the note moving from the territory of anger toward the territory of assertion, which was where a Steinway A should live, should assert rather than attack, should declare rather than shout.

She needled the hammer again. Two more insertions. She struck the note. Warmer still. The fundamental more prominent now, the upper partials reduced in amplitude, the balance shifting from the harmonics to the fundamental, the tone becoming rounder, more singing, more like a voice and less like a bell.

She moved to C-sharp 3. She needled, she struck, she listened. The needle loosening the felt, the felt softening the hammer, the hammer softening the tone, the tone becoming what the tone should be — warm but clear, round but articulate, soft but not muffled, the voicing walking the line between too bright and too dark the way the tuning walked the line between too sharp and too flat, the work of finding the center, the correct position between the extremes.

The work was slow. Each hammer required individual attention — the degree of hardening was different on each hammer, the amount of needling required was different, the target tone was different at different pitch levels — and Clara worked through the keyboard note by note, hammer by hammer, the voicing needle entering the felt and the felt responding, the tone changing, the piano's voice being reshaped, remolded, returned to something approaching its original character, the character the Steinway factory had intended when the hammers were first installed, the character that the maker had designed by selecting felt of a specific density and shaping it to a specific profile and mounting it on a specific shank at a specific angle.

She worked for two hours. She voiced sixty-five hammers — the notes from C3 to E7, the range where the hardening was most severe — and each hammer received between two and ten insertions of the needle, each insertion placed by feel and judged by ear, the hand and the ear collaborating, the hand learning from the ear, the ear directing the hand, and the collaboration was — Clara felt it as she worked, felt the rightness of it — the collaboration was whole. Was complete. Was the work of a person whose instrument was fully functional for the task at hand. The voicing did not require the upper frequencies that the audiogram showed as compromised. The voicing required the middle frequencies, the frequencies of timbre, the frequencies of quality, and these frequencies were Clara's, were undiminished, were the territory where her ear was extraordinary.

She finished the voicing at four o'clock. The light outside the West Hills windows had shifted from the winter white of midday to the winter gold of late afternoon, and the city below was beginning to light up, the streetlamps coming on, the buildings illuminated from within, and Clara sat at the bench and played the chromatic scale again, C3 to C6, and the sound was — different. Profoundly different. The anger was gone. The harshness was gone. The metallic quality was gone. The piano sounded like a Steinway A — warm but clear, round but articulate, the tone balanced between brightness and darkness, the sound of a well-voiced instrument in a well-proportioned room, and Clara heard the transformation and felt the satisfaction, the deep satisfaction of having done skilled work with the full capacity of her skill, the satisfaction that was not diminished by the hearing loss because the hearing loss was not relevant here, was not a factor, was a condition of a different part of the ear than the part the voicing used.

Helen Marchetti came into the room and stood beside the piano and Clara played the F major chord — the chord Helen had played when she said "listen to this," the chord that had sounded angry — and the chord was warm now, was full, was resolved, the three notes of the triad sounding together with the balance that a well-voiced Steinway produced, and Helen Marchetti listened and her face changed, the expression of a person hearing what she had hoped to hear, the expression of a person whose expectation has been met.

"That," Helen Marchetti said. "That is what I wanted. How did you do that."

"The hammers. The felt was hard. I softened it."

"With that needle."

"With the needle. The needle loosens the fibers of the felt. The softer felt produces a softer tone. It's mechanical — the harder the surface that strikes the string, the more upper harmonics are produced, the brighter the tone. A softer surface absorbs more of the impact, reduces the upper harmonics, produces a warmer tone."

"It sounds like a different piano."

"It is the same piano. It is the piano's intended voice. The hardening changed the voice. The voicing returned it."

Helen Marchetti sat at the bench and played — she played Debussy, the Clair de Lune, the piece that every pianist played, the piece that was the testing ground for a piano's lyrical voice, and the Steinway A sang the Debussy with the warmth that the voicing had restored, the melody floating above the accompaniment, the tone sweet without being saccharine, warm without being muffled, and Clara stood beside the piano and listened and heard the voicing she had done, heard the transformation she had produced, heard the piano's voice as she had shaped it, and the hearing was complete, was uncompromised, was the hearing of a master voicer whose ear was fully adequate to the work.

She packed her tools. She put the voicing needle back in the bag, in the compartment beside the lever, and she closed the bag and Helen Marchetti paid her and thanked her and Clara left the house and drove down the winding West Hills streets toward the flatlands of southeast Portland, and she drove with something that she had not felt in weeks, something that was not exactly joy but was adjacent to joy, was in the same family, the satisfaction of having done work that was wholly within her capacity, work that the hearing loss could not touch, work that was hers, entirely, without compensation, without the Korg, without Yuki, without the leaning and the harder striking and the careful concealment.

The voicing was hers.

She thought about this as she drove. She thought about the distinction between tuning and voicing, between pitch and timbre, between the frequency of the note and the quality of the note, and she thought that the hearing loss was specific, was targeted, was a loss of certain capabilities but not all capabilities, and the capabilities that remained were substantial, were valuable, were the capabilities that most tuners spent a career developing, and Clara had developed them and they were intact.

The tuning of the top octave was gone. The voicing was not gone. The temperament was not gone. The bass tuning was not gone. The unisons in the middle and lower registers were not gone. The ability to assess a piano's condition, to diagnose mechanical problems, to regulate the action, to advise on repairs — none of this was gone. The hearing loss had taken the peak of the mountain but had left the mountain standing, and the mountain was still a mountain, was still tall, was still substantial, was still the product of twenty-eight years of practice and thirty-six years of Leonard's teaching.

She parked in front of her house and went inside and set the bag on the table and took out the voicing needle and held it. The needle was small — smaller than the lever, smaller than the fork — and the needle was a tool she had not thought much about in recent months, had not elevated to the symbolic status of the lever and the fork, had not made into a vessel of meaning, but the needle was the tool that had given her this afternoon's satisfaction, the tool that had connected her ear to the piano's tone, and the connection had been unbroken, had been whole, had been the connection of a craftsperson whose instrument was fully functional.

She set the needle on the table beside the fork. The fork and the needle. The reference pitch and the shaping tool. The A and the voicing. The fixed point and the adjustable point. Two tools. Two aspects of the craft. Two things that Clara could still do.

She struck the fork.

A440. Clear. True. Present.

She held it and listened and the fundamental was there and the first partials were there and somewhere above the tenth the partials faded, as they always faded, as the audiogram predicted they would fade, but the fading was — tonight, after the voicing, after the Steinway A, after the satisfaction — the fading was tolerable, was bearable, was the condition of a specific part of her hearing rather than the condition of all her hearing, and the distinction between specific and all was the distinction that the afternoon had taught her, the distinction between the peak that was lost and the mountain that remained.

She set the fork on the table. She looked at the needle and the fork, side by side.

She went to bed.

Tomorrow there were pianos to tune. And possibly to voice. And the voicing was hers.