The Apprentice

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 29: The Apprentice

Yuki Tanaka had not intended to become a piano tuner. She had intended to become a pianist, had trained for it since the age of six, had studied at the Oberlin Conservatory with a teacher named James Garfield whose pedagogy was built on the principle that the body was the instrument and the piano was the medium, the body producing the sound through the piano the way a voice produces sound through the air, and Yuki had believed this, had organized her practice around it, had spent four years at Oberlin training the body to produce the sound she heard in her mind, the sound that was hers, that was Yuki's sound, the particular quality of tone and phrasing and rhythm that constituted her musical identity, and the identity had been forming, had been taking shape the way a sculptor's clay takes shape under the hands, and then the wrist.

The wrist was the left wrist, the extensor carpi ulnaris tendon, the tendon that ran along the outer edge of the forearm and anchored at the base of the fifth metacarpal, the tendon that enabled the rotation and extension of the hand that was essential for the left hand's work on the keyboard — the arpeggios, the octaves, the reach, the particular rotation that Chopin's music demanded, the turning of the wrist that Liszt's music demanded, the extension that Rachmaninoff's music demanded — and the tendon had been strained, had been overworked, had been subjected to the repetitive stress of six hours of daily practice over four years, and the strain had become inflammation and the inflammation had become chronic and the chronic had become permanent, the tendon scarred, thickened, the range of motion reduced by fifteen degrees, the pain present at the threshold of exertion, the threshold that was precisely the threshold of concert-level piano playing.

She could play. She could not perform. The distinction was the distinction between walking and running, between speaking and singing, between doing a thing and doing a thing at the level that the thing demanded, and the level that concert piano demanded was the level where the wrist failed, where the pain arrived, where the body said no, and the body's no was final, was not negotiable, was the no of a physical structure that had been damaged beyond its capacity to recover.

Yuki had grieved the loss the way musicians grieve — privately, incompletely, the grief present in the background of every day the way a pedal tone is present in the background of a musical passage, sustaining, coloring, never fully resolved. She had moved to Portland because Portland was not New York, was not a city where everyone she met was a musician or knew a musician or wanted to discuss music, was a city where she could be anonymous, could be a person without a biography, could walk through the Pearl District or ride her bicycle across the Hawthorne Bridge without encountering the question she dreaded, the question that well-meaning people asked when they learned she had studied piano at Oberlin — "Do you still play?" — the question that required an answer that was too complicated for conversation, the answer being yes and no and sometimes and not the way I used to and not the way I wanted to and not the way I trained to, the answer being a paragraph when the question expected a sentence.

In Portland she had worked at a coffee shop on Division Street and had not told anyone she was a pianist, had not mentioned Oberlin or Garfield or the wrist, had simply been Yuki, the woman who made pour-overs and cleaned the espresso machine and read novels during the slow hours between two and four, and the anonymity had been a relief, had been a rest, had been the silence after a long passage of music, the silence that the body needed in order to hear itself again.

She had found Clara's advertisement on a bulletin board at the coffee shop — a small card, handwritten, "Piano Tuner Seeks Apprentice. Aural tuning. Must have musical training and good ear. Contact Clara Resnikoff" — and Yuki had taken the card and held it for three days before calling, the three days a period of consideration, of weighing, of asking herself whether she wanted to enter the world of the piano again, even through the side door of tuning rather than the front door of performance, and the answer had been yes, had been a tentative yes, a yes that was willing to try, and she had called and Clara had answered and they had met at the kitchen table on Yamhill and Clara had struck the fork and Yuki had heard the A and had felt, for the first time in two years, the feeling that the piano produced in her — not the piano as an instrument she played but the piano as an object that existed in the world, a physical thing with strings and hammers and a voice, a thing that could be known and tended and cared for.

That had been fourteen months ago. Fourteen months of Wednesdays, of lessons at the kitchen table, of the fork and the lever and the mutes, of the Knabe and the temperament and the beat rates, fourteen months of Clara's teaching, which was Leonard's teaching, which was the teaching of the tuner at the Leningrad Conservatory whose name no one knew, the lineage transmitted through the ear, through the sound, through the act of listening together to the same interval and hearing the same beats and agreeing, without words, that the interval was correct or was not correct, that the beats were right or were not right, and the agreement was the teaching, was the moment when the apprentice's ear aligned with the master's ear and the two ears heard the same thing.

Today was a Tuesday in August and Yuki was driving to a house in the Woodstock neighborhood, a house she had never been to, a piano she had never tuned, and Clara was not with her.

Clara had given her the appointment three days ago, at the Wednesday lesson, had said, "There's a new client. A Yamaha C1 in Woodstock. I want you to tune it alone," and the word "alone" had landed in the kitchen with a weight that was disproportionate to its two syllables, the weight of everything the word implied — that Yuki was ready, that Clara trusted her ear, that the time had come for the apprentice to do the work without the master present, without the master's ear available to confirm or correct, without the safety net of Clara's judgment.

"Alone," Yuki had said.

"Alone. You've tuned forty pianos with me. You've done the temperament on thirty of them. You've tuned the full piano — bass to treble, temperament to unisons — on twelve of them. With me standing behind you. With my ear checking your work. And every one of those twelve was correct. Not adequate. Correct. You're ready."

"What if I'm not."

"Then the piano will be slightly out of tune and the client will call me and I'll send you back and you'll fix it and you'll learn from the fixing, which is how every tuner who has ever lived has learned — by tuning and being wrong and tuning again and being less wrong and tuning again and being right."

Yuki had taken the appointment card — the index card with the client's name and address and phone number and piano make and model, the card that Clara wrote by hand for each appointment, the same format Leonard had used, the same system, the analog record that Clara preferred to the digital — and she had put the card in her pocket and had ridden the bicycle home and had thought about the appointment for three days.

She was thinking about it now, driving Clara's car — Clara had lent her the car for the appointment because the tuning tools were too heavy for the bicycle and Yuki did not own a car, had not owned a car since she moved to Portland, the bicycle sufficient for the city but not for the tuning bag, not for the lever and the mutes and the Korg and the notebook and the fifteen pounds of tools that a tuner carried — and she was driving south on Woodstock Boulevard, through the neighborhood of small houses and mature trees and the particular Portland quality of a neighborhood that was neither wealthy nor poor but settled, established, the houses built in the 1940s and 1950s and maintained with the steady attention of owners who planned to stay.

The house was a bungalow on a side street, and the woman who opened the door was in her thirties, holding a toddler on her hip, the toddler with the wide eyes of a child encountering a stranger, and the woman said, "You're the tuner? You're younger than I expected," and Yuki said, "I am," which answered both statements, and the woman led her to the piano.

The Yamaha C1 was a baby grand, five feet three inches, the smallest grand Yamaha made, and it sat in the living room against a wall — not the ideal placement, the wall reflecting the sound back into the piano and producing a slightly boxy quality, but Yuki understood that placement in a small house was a matter of space rather than acoustics, the piano occupying the only place it could occupy, the house accommodating the instrument the way a family accommodates a large pet, making room, adjusting the furniture, accepting the inconvenience because the thing was loved.

The woman took the toddler to the kitchen. The house became quiet. Yuki stood beside the piano and looked at it and felt what Clara had described — the particular alertness of the first encounter, the not-yet-known, the ear opening because it did not yet have a template — and the feeling was different from what she felt when she tuned with Clara, because when Clara was present Clara's ear was the template, Clara's judgment was the reference, and Yuki's ear oriented itself toward Clara's the way a compass needle orients toward north, and the orientation was helpful, was educational, was the mechanism by which the apprentice learned, but the orientation also meant that Yuki's ear was never entirely on its own, never entirely responsible, never the sole authority in the room.

Now Yuki's ear was the sole authority. The room was quiet. The toddler was in the kitchen. The piano waited.

Yuki opened the bag and took out the fork.

The fork was not Clara's fork, not Leonard's fork. This fork was Yuki's own — a Wittner A440, purchased new from a supply house in Chicago, the steel bright, the tines straight, the pitch accurate, and the fork did not carry the history that Clara's fork carried, did not contain the ghost of Leningrad or the weight of Leonard's thirty-two years, was simply a tool, a reference, a thing that vibrated at 440 hertz when struck, and Yuki struck it against the heel of her palm and listened.

A440. Clear, present, correct. The sound in this room, in this bungalow in Woodstock with the hardwood floors and the plaster walls and the street noise filtering through the single-paned windows, was the same sound the fork produced in every room, the same pitch, the same partials, the same decay, the fork indifferent to its surroundings, the reference tone that did not change.

She set the A. She seated the lever — her own lever, the Hale number two that Clara had recommended, the chrome shaft and the hardwood handle, a good lever, a professional lever, not the lever with the rosewood handle that was Leonard's and would be Yuki's when Clara passed it — and she turned the A4 pin and brought the string up to pitch, matching the fork, the three strings of the unison merging, and the unison locked, was clean, was correct, and Yuki felt the click, the moment when the three strings agreed, and the click was the same click she had heard when Clara set the A, the same sensation, the same agreement, the physics the same regardless of who held the lever.

She began the temperament.

The temperament was the work she had practiced most, the work that Clara had drilled into her over fourteen months of Wednesdays, the grid of intervals that organized the piano's pitch, and Yuki worked through it the way Clara had taught her — F3 to A3, the fourth; A3 to E4, the fifth; E4 to B3, the fourth; each interval set and checked and cross-checked, the beat rates counted, the cross-references verified, the system building itself interval by interval, the grid assembling — and the work was slow, was methodical, was the pace that Clara had insisted on, the pace that did not rush, that allowed each interval the time it needed to be assessed, and Yuki worked at this pace and the temperament grew under her hands and the temperament was correct.

She knew it was correct. She knew because she could hear it, because the intervals sounded right, because the beat rates were what they should be, because the cross-checks passed, because the ear that Clara had trained could hear what it needed to hear, and the knowing was not confidence exactly — confidence was too strong a word for a tuner on her first solo appointment — but the knowing was present, was real, was the knowledge that the ear was hearing correctly, that the training was sufficient, that the fourteen months of Wednesdays had produced an ear that could set a temperament on its own.

She tuned the octaves. Downward first, into the bass, the sound deepening, the frequencies dropping, the strings getting longer and thicker, the bass stretch applied — how much, how far, the judgment that Clara said was the hardest judgment, the judgment that required knowing the piano, and Yuki did not know this piano, had never heard its bass, had no template — and Yuki applied the stretch carefully, conservatively, listening to each octave, listening for the quality that Clara had described as "the bass singing," the quality that meant the stretch was right, that the low notes were resonating freely, that the inharmonicity was accommodated, and Yuki heard the quality, or thought she heard it, the uncertainty present because uncertainty was the condition of the first solo tuning, the condition of doing the work without the master's ear to confirm.

She tuned upward. Through the middle octaves, the work flowing, the octaves clean, the unisons locking, the piano coming into tune section by section, register by register, the sound organizing itself under Yuki's hands the way Clara had described it — the piano going from noise to music, from chaos to order, from the disorder of the detuned to the order of the tempered, and the order was beautiful, was satisfying, was the satisfaction that Clara had promised would come, the satisfaction of making a wrong thing right, of hearing the correction take hold, of feeling the piano accept the tuning.

At C7 Yuki did not slow. This was the difference between Yuki and Clara, the difference that the hearing loss created — Clara slowed above C7, leaned closer, struck harder, reached for the Korg; Yuki did not, because Yuki's hearing above C7 was undiminished, was the hearing of a twenty-nine-year-old with no cochlear damage, the hearing that could resolve the beats in the top octave, that could hear the partials above the tenth, that could count and assess and judge in the territory where Clara's ear was compromised.

Yuki tuned the top octave by ear. She tuned it the way Clara had tuned it before the hearing loss, the way Leonard had tuned it, the way every aural tuner tuned it — by listening, by counting beats, by adjusting until the beats were at the rate the temperament demanded and the octaves were clean and the intervals were correct — and the tuning was quick, was fifteen minutes for the top octave, was the speed that Clara had once achieved and could no longer achieve, and Yuki did not think about this, did not compare her speed to Clara's diminished speed, did not feel the advantage that her young ears gave her, because the advantage was not a thought but a condition, was not something she had earned but something she had not yet lost.

She finished the tuning. She played a chromatic scale from A0 to C8, slowly, each note sustained, each note listened to, and the piano sounded — good. The piano sounded tuned. The piano sounded like a Yamaha C1 that had been correctly tempered and correctly stretched and correctly unified, and the sound was the sound of competent work, of professional work, and Yuki heard it and felt the satisfaction and also felt the uncertainty, the question that hovered over the satisfaction like a cloud over a sunny day — was it right? Was it correct? Was the bass stretch right, was the treble stretch right, were the unisons truly clean or were they close to clean, and did close count, and how close was close enough?

She did not have Clara's ear to answer the question. She had only her own ear. And her own ear said yes.

She packed her tools. She closed the lid. The woman came back from the kitchen, the toddler now asleep in her arms, and Yuki said, "Would you like to play?" and the woman shifted the toddler to one arm and sat at the bench and played — she played a simple piece, something Yuki recognized as one of the easier Chopin waltzes, the A-flat major, the one with the melody in the right hand floating above the left hand's accompaniment — and the playing was not professional, was not conservatory-level, was the playing of a woman who had taken lessons as a girl and had continued to play because playing was something she did, was part of her life, was as natural as cooking or reading or the care of the toddler, and the waltz filled the living room and the piano sounded correct and the woman smiled as she played, the smile of a person hearing the piano she loved sounding the way it was supposed to sound.

"That's beautiful," the woman said. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Yuki said.

She drove back to Clara's house. She parked and went inside and Clara was at the kitchen table with tea and the appointment book and the expression of a person who had been waiting.

"How was it," Clara said.

Yuki sat down. She put the bag on the table, the bag that was not yet her bag but was the bag she had been using, the second bag, the newer bag that Clara had given her for field work, and she thought about the question and about the answer and about what the answer meant.

"It was right," Yuki said. "I think it was right. The temperament was clean. The octaves were clean. The bass stretch felt — I'm not sure about the bass stretch. I was conservative. I might have under-stretched."

"Under-stretching is better than over-stretching. You can always stretch further next time. You can't un-stretch."

"The top octave was good. I could hear everything."

Clara looked at Yuki when she said this, and the look contained something that Yuki had not seen before in Clara's face — a quality that was not jealousy and not resentment and not grief but was adjacent to all three, was the complex emotion of a person hearing someone describe a capacity that the person once had and no longer had, the capacity to hear everything in the top octave, and the emotion was brief, was controlled, was present for a moment and then replaced by the expression that Clara usually wore, the expression of professional attention, of the teacher assessing the student's report.

"Good," Clara said. "Next week there's a Baldwin in Sellwood. You'll do that one alone too."

"And the week after?"

"We'll see. One piano at a time. One tuning at a time. That's how you build the list. That's how Leonard taught me. One piano, then another piano, then another, until the pianos accumulate and the accumulation becomes a practice and the practice becomes a life."

Yuki nodded. She picked up her tea — Clara had made it for her, had set it on the table, had known she would come back and would want tea, the prediction a form of attention, a form of care — and she drank the tea and thought about the Yamaha C1 in Woodstock and about the woman with the toddler and the Chopin waltz and the bass stretch that might have been slightly conservative, and she thought that Clara was right, that the building was one piano at a time, that each tuning was a sentence in a conversation that was just beginning, and the conversation would be Yuki's conversation, conducted in Yuki's voice, with Yuki's ear.

She finished her tea. She stood.

"Same time Wednesday," Yuki said.

"Same time Wednesday," Clara said.

Yuki left. She rode the bicycle home — her apartment was on Division Street, a studio above a bookshop, the apartment small and spare and containing a Yamaha upright and a futon and the books she had brought from Ohio and not much else — and she went inside and sat at the Yamaha and played the Chopin waltz, the same A-flat major waltz the woman in Woodstock had played, and Yuki played it better, played it with the training and the technique that Oberlin had given her, played it with the left hand that could still do this, that could play a waltz if not a concerto, that could make music if not a career, and the waltz filled the small apartment and the piano was slightly out of tune — Yuki had not tuned her own piano in three weeks, had been busy with Clara's schedule, the irony of a tuner whose own piano was neglected — and the slight detuning was audible to Yuki's ear, was present as a quality, a roughness in the unisons, a drift in the temperament, and Yuki heard it and thought: tomorrow. Tomorrow she would tune her own piano. Tonight she would play.

She played the waltz. She played it again. She played it a third time, slower, listening not to the music but to the piano, to the sound, to the frequencies and the partials and the beats, listening the way Clara had taught her to listen — with the full body, with the immersion, the swimmer in the water — and the listening was both the musician's listening and the tuner's listening, the two modes overlapping, the two ears hearing the same sound differently, the pianist hearing the music and the tuner hearing the instrument, and Yuki was both, was the pianist who had become a tuner, the performer who had become a craftsperson, and the becoming was not a diminishment but a transformation, not a loss but a change, the way a modulation is not a loss of the original key but a movement to a new key, the music continuing in a different register.

She closed the fallboard. She went to the window and looked out at Division Street in the summer evening, the restaurants and the pedestrians and the long light, and she thought about Clara's look when Yuki had said "I could hear everything," the brief complex emotion that had crossed Clara's face, and Yuki understood the emotion, understood it in the way that a young person understands an older person's loss — incompletely, abstractly, the understanding of a person who has not yet experienced the thing but who can imagine it, can feel its shadow, can hear its approach the way you can hear a distant sound before you can identify it.

Yuki could hear everything. She could hear the top octave and the beats and the partials above the tenth. She could hear what Clara could not hear. And the hearing was a gift, was a capacity, was the instrument that made the work possible, and the gift was temporary — Yuki knew this, knew that the hearing would diminish with age, knew that the ear that heard everything today would hear less in twenty years and less in thirty and less in forty, and the trajectory was the trajectory of every ear, the universal decline, the presbycusis that came for everyone eventually — but the knowing was abstract, was distant, was the knowledge of a thing that existed in the future rather than the present, and the present was the present, and in the present Yuki could hear everything, and the everything was the beginning.

She went to bed. The summer light lingered in the window. The Yamaha was slightly out of tune in the corner. Tomorrow she would tune it.

Tonight she was a tuner who had tuned a piano alone and the piano had been correct and the work had been hers.