The Emergency

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 30: The Emergency

The call came at four-thirty on a Saturday afternoon in September, the phone ringing in the kitchen where Clara was sitting with tea and the appointment book and the last of the afternoon light, the September light that was shorter than the August light, the season turning, the equinox approaching, and the phone showed a number Clara recognized — the operations manager at the Newmark Theatre, the smaller hall adjacent to the Schnitzer, the hall that hosted chamber music and solo recitals and the kind of intimate concerts that did not require the Schnitzer's 2,776 seats — and Clara answered.

"Clara, we have a problem. The Steinway is wrong."

The Steinway at the Newmark was a Model B, a seven-foot grand that Clara had been tuning for eleven years, a piano she knew well, knew its tendencies, knew its pins, knew its stretch, and the piano had been tuned two days ago, on Thursday, tuned by Clara alone — Yuki had been at a dental appointment — and Clara had tuned it for a recital that was scheduled for tonight, a recital by a pianist named Anton Levesque, a Canadian who played the competition circuit and who was performing a program of Liszt and Ravel, music that demanded a piano in impeccable condition, music that explored the full range of the keyboard, from the lowest bass of the Liszt Sonata to the highest treble of Gaspard de la Nuit, music that would expose any flaw in the tuning the way a spotlight exposes a flaw in the paint.

"Wrong how," Clara said.

"The pianist is here. He's been practicing since three. He says the upper register is — I'm going to quote him — 'unacceptable.' He says the octaves above C6 are uneven. He says he won't play on it."

Clara closed her eyes. The upper register. The territory above C6. The territory where her hearing was compromised. The territory where, on Thursday, she had tuned alone, without Yuki, without the second ear, and had checked the top octave with the Korg and had found it correct — the Korg had shown each note within one cent of the target, the numbers clean, the device confirming that the frequencies were where they should be — and Clara had accepted the Korg's verdict and had closed the lid and had left.

But the Korg measured frequency. The Korg did not measure evenness. The Korg checked each note individually, displayed each note's deviation from the target in cents, and the individual measurements could be correct — each note within one cent — while the relationships between the notes were not, the octaves slightly uneven, the stretch slightly irregular, the treble not wrong in its absolute pitch but wrong in its relative pitch, the intervals between the notes inconsistent, some octaves slightly wider than others, some slightly narrower, the inconsistency producing a quality that a listener with a trained ear would detect as unevenness, as roughness, as the feeling that something was not quite right even if no individual note was wrong.

Clara had tuned the upper register by ear, checking individual notes with the Korg but setting the octaves by ear, and the ear had judged the octaves as clean, had accepted them, had moved on, and the ear had been wrong, or might have been wrong, because the ear in that register was compromised, was hearing approximations rather than measurements, was judging quality rather than counting beats, and the judgments might have been slightly off, might have accepted octaves that were close to clean but not clean, and the closeness that was sufficient for most pianos in most rooms was not sufficient for a concert piano in a concert hall for a concert pianist who played Liszt and Ravel.

"I'll come," Clara said. "I need thirty minutes."

"The recital is at seven-thirty. He needs to practice on a correct piano for at least an hour. That means you need to be done by six."

Clara looked at the clock. Four thirty-five. Thirty minutes to drive to the Newmark. That put her there at five. One hour to retune the upper register. Done by six. The math was possible. The math was tight.

She called Yuki.

The phone rang. Rang again. Voicemail. Yuki's voice, calm and brief — "This is Yuki, leave a message" — and Clara left a message, speaking quickly, the words precise: "It's Clara. The Newmark Steinway needs correction. Upper register, octaves uneven. Recital at seven-thirty. I'm going now. If you get this in the next twenty minutes, meet me there."

She hung up. She gathered the bag. She drove.

The drive from southeast Portland to the Newmark Theatre took twenty-eight minutes in Saturday traffic, and Clara drove without the radio, drove in silence, the silence of the car filled only with the sound of the engine and the tires and Clara's thinking, and the thinking was the rapid, focused thinking of a professional confronting an emergency, the thinking that sorted through the options and assessed the risks and made the decisions that the situation required, and the decisions were:

She would retune the upper register. She would start at C6 and work upward, resetting the octaves, making them even, making them clean, and she would use her ear for the octaves she could hear — everything below C7, the octaves in the territory where her hearing was still functional — and for the octaves above C7 she would use the Korg, but not for the individual notes, not for the absolute pitch, which the Korg had already confirmed was correct, but for the intervals between the notes, checking the consistency of the stretch, measuring the cents between each octave and ensuring they were uniform, the device compensating for what the ear could not perceive.

And if Yuki arrived, Yuki would tune the top octave by ear, would set the octaves the way they should be set, by listening, by counting beats, by the method that produced the smoothest, most even treble, the method that the Korg could approximate but not replicate, because the Korg measured frequency but the ear measured music.

She arrived at the Newmark at five-oh-three. The stage door was open. The operations manager, a woman named Diane whose job was to make problems go away, was waiting in the corridor.

"He's in the green room," Diane said. "He's not happy."

"I'll fix it."

"Can you fix it in an hour."

"I can fix it."

Clara walked onto the stage. The Newmark's stage was smaller than the Schnitzer's, more intimate, the hall seating 880, the acoustic drier, tighter, the sound more present and less spacious than the Schnitzer's reverberant wash, and the Steinway B sat at center stage, its lid open on the long stick, and Clara set her bag on a chair and approached the piano.

She did not strike the fork. She did not need to set the A — the A was correct, had been correct on Thursday, was still correct, the mid-range holding its tuning, the problem not in the pitch center but at the edge, in the upper register where the pianist had heard the unevenness. She sat at the bench and played a chromatic scale from C6 to C8, slowly, each note sustained, and she listened.

She heard the notes. She heard the fundamentals, each one present, each one at approximately the correct pitch, and she heard — she listened for the unevenness, for the inconsistency that the pianist had detected — she heard something. A roughness. Not in any individual note but in the sequence, in the progression from note to note, the intervals between adjacent notes not perfectly uniform, some slightly wider, some slightly narrower, the treble not smooth but bumpy, the way a road with small imperfections is not smooth even if no individual imperfection is large.

She could hear it now because she was listening for it, because the pianist had identified it, because the knowledge that the unevenness was there focused her attention and her attention found it, and the finding was — Clara sat at the bench and felt the particular shame of a tuner who hears a flaw that she should have heard before, the flaw that was present on Thursday and that her ear had not detected and that another ear — the pianist's ear, the ear that was younger and uncompromised and trained to hear the piano's full range — had detected in minutes.

She took the lever from the bag and began.

She started at C6, retuning the octave C6 to C5, checking the interval, adjusting, making it clean, and then C-sharp 6 to C-sharp 5, and then D6 to D5, each octave checked and corrected, the corrections small — one cent here, half a cent there, the adjustments at the edge of perceptibility but cumulative, the accumulation producing the unevenness, the many small deviations adding up to a treble that was not smooth — and Clara worked quickly, efficiently, the lever moving, the pins turning, the corrections applied, and the octaves below C7 were in her functional range, were in the territory where her ear could still hear the beats and count them and judge them, and the corrections were confident, were certain, were the work of an ear that was diminished in the highest frequencies but was still, in this range, the ear that Leonard had trained.

At C7 she paused.

Above C7 was the territory. The territory where the beats were in the frequencies she could not hear clearly. The territory where the unevenness had originated, where the Thursday tuning had gone wrong, where her ear had accepted octaves that were close but not clean.

She checked her phone. No message from Yuki. No response to the voicemail. Yuki was unavailable.

Clara looked at the piano. She looked at the keys above C7, the short keys at the top of the keyboard, the notes that most pianists rarely played but that this pianist would play tonight — the Ravel required the full range, Gaspard de la Nuit ascending into the highest register, the passage called "Scarbo" climbing to the top of the keyboard in a cascade of octaves and trills — and the notes needed to be right. Not approximately right. Not close to right. Right.

She took out the Korg. She placed it on the music desk. She turned it on and the display glowed green, the device ready, and Clara began the work.

She struck C7 and C8 together. The octave. She listened with her ear, heard the two notes sounding, heard — a quality, a rightness or wrongness — and then she looked at the Korg. The Korg showed C7 at zero cents and C8 at plus seven cents. The treble stretch. Seven cents of stretch at C8 was — she consulted her memory, consulted the notebook's entry for this piano — was correct for this Steinway B, was the stretch that the piano's inharmonicity demanded, and the stretch was correct but — she struck the octave again and listened — but the seven cents was at C8, and what about the notes between? What about C-sharp 7, D7, E7, each note needing its own stretch, its own incremental increase, the stretch growing gradually from zero at C7 to seven at C8, and the gradualness needed to be smooth, needed to be even, each note's stretch proportional to its position in the octave.

She measured. C-sharp 7: plus one cent. D7: plus one cent. D-sharp 7: plus two cents. E7: plus two cents. F7: plus three cents. She wrote the numbers on the back of the notebook. She calculated what they should be — the stretch increasing approximately one cent per semitone from C7 to C8, twelve semitones, seven cents total, approximately 0.6 cents per semitone — and she compared the measured values to the calculated values and found the discrepancies. D-sharp 7 should have been 1.8 cents, was 2 — a fraction too sharp. F7 should have been 3 cents, was 3 — correct. F-sharp 7 should have been 3.6, was 4.5 — nearly a cent too sharp. G7 should have been 4.2, was 3.5 — too flat.

The inconsistency. The unevenness. The flaw.

Clara corrected each note, bringing the stretch into a smooth, gradual progression, the lever moving the pins by fractions of degrees, the corrections minute, the changes barely audible individually but collectively — she played the chromatic scale from C7 to C8 after the corrections — collectively the change was audible. The treble was smoother. The progression was even. The bumps were gone.

But she was tuning by numbers. She was tuning by the Korg's measurements, by the calculated progression of the stretch, by mathematics rather than by ear, and the tuning by numbers was correct, was defensible, was the method that an electronic tuner would use, the method that produced a treble that was measurably even, and the measurable evenness was good, was professional, was sufficient.

It was not the way Clara tuned. It was not the way Leonard tuned. It was not the way an aural tuner tuned, and the difference between tuning by numbers and tuning by ear was the difference that Clara had spent her career defending, the difference that made her an aural tuner rather than an electronic tuner, the difference that her clients — that Sarah Okada in Lake Oswego, that Mrs. Ashford, that Paul Dreyfus — valued, the difference they paid for.

She was tuning by numbers because she had to. Because the ear could not do what it used to do. Because the concert was in two hours and Yuki was not here and the pianist was in the green room and the treble needed to be right and the only way Clara could make it right, alone, in this register, was the Korg.

She finished the corrections at five-forty. She played the chromatic scale from C5 to C8. She played it slowly, listening, and the scale was — even. Smooth. The treble progressed from the middle register to the top without bumps, without roughness, the stretch gradual and uniform, the notes following each other like beads on a string, each one in its proper place, the order restored.

She played the opening of Gaspard de la Nuit. She did not play it well — Clara was not a performer, was a tuner, her playing adequate for testing but not for performance — but she played the passage that climbed into the upper register and the climb was smooth, was even, was correct, and the piano sounded right.

She packed the Korg. She packed the lever. She put the tools in the bag and closed the bag and stood beside the piano and looked at the keyboard and thought about what she had done — had tuned the upper register of a concert piano by numbers, by device, by Korg, had produced a correct result by an incorrect method, correct in the sense that the piano was now right and incorrect in the sense that the method was not the method she believed in, was not the aural method, was not the method that justified the word "tuner" on Leonard's grave.

She went to find the pianist.

Anton Levesque was in the green room, sitting on a couch with his legs crossed and a score in his lap — the Liszt Sonata, the pages covered with pencil markings, fingerings and dynamics and the annotations that a performer makes on a score they have been living with for years — and he looked up when Clara entered and his expression was neutral, was the expression of a person waiting for information.

"I've corrected the upper register," Clara said. "The octaves are even. The stretch is smooth. Would you like to try it."

He stood. He was tall, thin, with the long fingers that the public imagined all pianists had, though Clara knew from twenty-eight years of watching pianists that the correlation between finger length and pianistic ability was approximately zero, that great pianists had great ears and great minds and great discipline and their fingers were whatever their fingers were. He walked to the stage and sat at the bench and played.

He played the Ravel. He played the passage from Scarbo, the ascending passage, the octaves climbing into the upper register, and the octaves were even, were smooth, and he played the passage again, faster, at performance tempo, the notes cascading, and then he stopped and sat at the bench and looked at the piano.

"Yes," he said. "That's correct. Thank you."

He did not ask what had been wrong. He did not ask how she had fixed it. He was a pianist, not a tuner, and his concern was with the result, not the method, with the sound, not the process, and the sound was now correct and the pianist was satisfied and the recital would proceed.

Clara gathered her bag and walked off the stage and through the corridor and past the green room and through the stage door and into the September evening, and the evening was cool, the summer fading, the equinox near, and she sat in her car in the parking garage and held the steering wheel and did not start the engine.

The phone buzzed. Yuki.

"I just got your message. I'm sorry — I was at a movie. Is everything —"

"It's fine. I fixed it."

"The Newmark? What happened?"

"The upper register was uneven. The stretch was inconsistent. The pianist heard it. I corrected it."

A pause. Yuki's pause, the pause of a person who heard what was not said, who understood the implication — that Clara had tuned the upper register alone, that Clara had used the Korg, that the correction had been necessary because the original tuning, Clara's Thursday tuning, had been wrong in the register where Clara's hearing was compromised.

"Are you okay," Yuki said.

Clara thought about the question. She thought about the Korg on the music desk and the numbers on the back of the notebook and the corrections applied by calculation rather than by ear and the pianist saying "that's correct" and the correctness that was correct by numbers and not by ear.

"I'm okay," Clara said.

"Do you want me to come over?"

"No. Go back to your movie."

"The movie is over."

"Then go home. I'll see you Wednesday."

Clara hung up. She started the car. She drove home through the September evening, through the city that was turning from summer to fall, the light shorter, the air cooler, the season changing the way seasons change — gradually, imperceptibly day by day, the change visible only across weeks, the way the hearing loss was visible only across months, the day-to-day the same but the trajectory clear, the direction clear, the destination approaching.

At home she sat at the kitchen table and struck the fork.

A440. Clear. True. Present. The fork did not care about the Newmark, did not care about the uneven octaves, did not care about the Korg or the pianist or the shame. The fork vibrated at 440 hertz and the vibration was correct and the correctness was not contingent on the method, was not different depending on whether the ear or the device had set it, was simply the frequency, the pitch, the physical fact.

Clara held the fork and listened to the decay and thought about the evening and thought about the correction she had made and thought that the correction was correct, that the piano was right, that the recital would be good, and the correctness was the thing that mattered, was the professional obligation, was the promise the tuner made to the pianist — that the piano would be right — and the promise had been kept.

But the method. The method was not the method she had spent her life defending. The method was the method she had spent her life arguing against, the electronic method, the method of numbers and devices and measurements, and she had used it tonight because she had to, because the alternative was a piano that was wrong, and a piano that was wrong for a recital was worse than a piano that was right by the wrong method.

She set the fork on the table. She thought about Leonard. She thought about Leonard losing the seventh partial of C8 and stopping. She thought about the clarity of Leonard's metric — a single frequency, a single moment, a single decision. She thought about her own metric, which was not a single frequency but a situation, not a single moment but an accumulation of moments — the Paul Dreyfus incident, the leaning, the Korg, the dependency on Yuki, and now this, the emergency correction by numbers, the concert piano tuned by device because the ear could not do it alone.

The accumulation was the metric. The accumulation was telling her what the single frequency had told Leonard — that the time was approaching, that the slope was steepening, that the ear that had been sufficient was becoming insufficient, and the insufficiency was no longer theoretical, no longer a line on an audiogram, but practical, professional, the insufficiency manifesting in the work, in the pianos, in the upper registers of concert instruments where the stakes were highest and the tolerance was lowest.

She went to bed. The September night was cool. The fork waited on the table. The A remained.

Tomorrow was Sunday. No pianos on Sunday. On Monday she would tune, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday she would see Yuki, and on Thursday she would tune the next piano and the next and the next, and the tuning would continue, would continue as long as Clara could do it, as long as the ear and the Korg and Yuki could produce tunings that were correct, and the continuation was — was what? Was the right thing? Was the professional thing? Was the thing a tuner should do, or was it the thing a tuner should stop doing?

The question waited with the fork.

Clara did not answer it tonight.