The Interval

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 31: The Interval

An interval in music is the distance between two pitches. A minor second, a major third, a perfect fifth — each interval has a name and a ratio and a quality, a character that the ear recognizes, the minor second's dissonance, the major third's warmth, the perfect fifth's openness, and the intervals are the building blocks of harmony, the relationships from which chords and melodies and entire compositions are constructed, and a piano tuner's work is the work of setting intervals, of making the distances between pitches correct, of ensuring that every relationship on the keyboard conforms to the grid of equal temperament.

But an interval is also a gap. A pause. A space between two events, the time between the thing that happened and the thing that will happen, and Clara was in an interval — the interval between the last concert tuning at the Schnitzer, which had happened on Thursday, and the visit to Leonard's grave, which she had not yet planned but which she knew was approaching, the way you know a note is approaching in a melody you have heard before, the contour of the phrase predicting the next note before it arrives.

The Schnitzer tuning was done. The Brahms concerto had been played. Elsa Bruckner had played the Brahms on the piano Clara had tuned for the last time, and the Brahms had been beautiful, the B-flat major concerto filling the hall with its weight and its patience, and Clara had sat in the tenth row and listened and had heard the piano she had just tuned — had heard her tuning, her temperament, her octaves, her bass — and the hearing had been a kind of signature, a watermark in the sound, the evidence of Clara's work present in every note the pianist played, invisible to the audience but audible to Clara, the way a builder sees the joinery in a house that a visitor sees only as walls.

Now it was Saturday, two days after the Schnitzer, and Clara was at home, in the house on Yamhill, and the house was quiet, and the Knabe was in the living room.

The Knabe. Clara's piano. The piano she had inherited from Leonard, the piano that had been in the house since 1973, the piano on which Leonard had taught Clara to listen, the piano on which Clara played the Chopin nocturne on the evenings when the playing was needed, the piano that was the private piano, the personal piano, the piano that was not on the client list, was not in the appointment book, was not scheduled for tuning because the tuner's own piano was the piano the tuner neglected, the way a doctor's own health is the health the doctor neglects, the shoemaker's children going barefoot, the pattern universal, the professional's own needs last.

Clara had not tuned the Knabe in two months.

Two months was too long. A piano in Portland in winter should be tuned monthly at minimum — the humidity changes, the soundboard responding, the pitch drifting — and the Knabe had been drifting for two months, the A dropping from 440 to approximately 438, the temperament loosening, the intervals softening, the piano slowly, gradually, becoming what all pianos became without attention: out of tune.

Clara sat at the bench and opened the fallboard and looked at the keys. The keys were ivory — real ivory, legal because the piano predated the ban, the ivory yellowed with age, the surfaces worn by Leonard's touch and Clara's touch, the keys that Leonard had played and that Clara played, the same eighty-eight keys, the same eighty-eight notes, the piano unchanged in its components even as everything around it changed.

She struck a chord. D minor. The chord that opened Beethoven's Ninth, the chord that Martin had played at his last concert, and the D minor was — sour. Not dramatically sour, not the obvious wrongness of a piano that had been neglected for a year, but subtly sour, the intervals slightly off, the thirds slightly too wide, the fifths slightly too narrow, the temperament's grid distorted by the drift, the relationships between the notes no longer correct, no longer conforming to the equal temperament that Clara had set two months ago and that the weather and time had unsettled.

She struck the fork.

A440. The fork was correct. The piano was not. The gap between the fork and the piano was two cents — two cents flat, the A at 438 instead of 440, and the two cents were audible to Clara's ear, were present as a quality, a flatness, a heaviness, the pitch lower than it should be, and Clara heard the gap and felt the gap and recognized the gap as the evidence of her neglect, the proof that she had been so absorbed in the last round, in the farewell tunings, in the eighty-seven pianos on the client list, that she had forgotten the eighty-eighth piano, her own.

She seated the lever on the A4 pin. The pin turned — easily, more easily than it should have, the Knabe's pinblock old, the pin holes slightly enlarged by fifty-three years of tension and relaxation, the grip adequate but not firm, the piano showing its age in the same way that Clara's hearing showed its age, the component that should have been tight gradually loosening, the capacity that should have been full gradually diminishing.

She raised the A to 440. She checked the unison — the three strings merged, locked, clean — and she began the temperament.

The temperament on her own piano was different from the temperament on a client's piano. On a client's piano, Clara tuned for the client, tuned to the standard, tuned with the professional obligation to produce a correct result. On her own piano, Clara tuned for herself, tuned for the ear that would play the Chopin in the evening, tuned for the sound that she wanted to hear in her own house, in her own living room, in the space where the piano was not a professional obligation but a personal companion.

And the difference — the difference between the professional tuning and the personal tuning — was that the personal tuning was slower. Was more careful. Was more attentive. Not because Clara was a better tuner at home than she was at work — she was the same tuner, the same ear, the same hands — but because the personal tuning was not constrained by the schedule, by the appointment book, by the ninety-minute window between arrival and departure, and the absence of the constraint allowed Clara to listen longer, to sit with each interval for an extra moment, to hear the interval not just as a beat rate to be counted but as a sound to be experienced, and the experiencing was a kind of pleasure, a kind of luxury, the tuner listening to the sound for the sake of the sound rather than for the sake of the correction.

She set the temperament in thirty minutes. She did not hurry. She set each interval and listened and let the interval ring and heard it decay and felt the decay in her body, in her sternum, in the bones of her skull where the sound conducted, and the decay was the piano's voice, the Knabe's particular voice, which was different from every other piano's voice — warmer than the Steinway, darker than the Yamaha, softer than the Bösendorfer, the voice of a piano that had been built in the 1920s by a company that no longer existed, a company that had made pianos in Baltimore for seventy years and that had been absorbed by a larger company and that survived only in the pianos it had left behind, the pianos like this one, the survivors, the instruments that carried the company's voice into the future the way the fork carried Leonard's A.

She tuned the bass. The Knabe's bass was Leonard's favorite thing about the piano — "The bass of a Knabe," Leonard had said once, at the kitchen table, when Clara was fifteen or sixteen, learning, "the bass of a Knabe is not loud but it is deep, it goes into the floor, into the foundation, the sound comes up through the feet as much as through the ears" — and Clara tuned the bass and heard what Leonard had heard, the sound deep, resonant, the lower octaves vibrating in the floor of the house, in the joists and the subfloor and the foundation, the piano and the house connected through the floor, the vibrations of the strings transmitted through the legs of the piano into the hardwood and from the hardwood into the structure, and the house became part of the instrument, the house a resonating body, a sounding board, the piano and the house playing together.

She tuned the treble. Through the middle octaves, clean, confident, the intervals correct, the octaves even, the work flowing. At C7 she slowed. At C7 she always slowed now, the slowing as automatic as breathing, as habitual as the morning fork, and she leaned close and struck the octave — C7 to C6 — and listened. She heard the interval. She heard the octave, clean, the two notes aligned, the beats absent or too slow to count, and she moved up to C-sharp 7 and struck the octave and listened. Clean.

She continued up. Each note in the top octave tuned by ear, without the Korg, because this was her piano, her house, and if the top octave was slightly wrong then only Clara would hear it, and if Clara could not hear the wrongness then the wrongness, for Clara, did not exist, was a theoretical wrongness, a wrongness that the audiogram predicted but that the lived experience did not confirm, and Clara chose the lived experience, chose the piano she heard over the piano the audiogram described, chose the sound that was present over the sound that was absent.

She finished the tuning at eleven o'clock. She had been tuning for ninety minutes, the same duration as a client tuning, but the ninety minutes had felt different — had felt like an hour, like forty-five minutes, the time compressed by the attention, by the pleasure, by the absorption that occurred when the work was done for its own sake rather than for a client's satisfaction, and Clara sat at the bench and played a chord — D major this time, not D minor, the bright chord, the resolution — and the chord was clean, was warm, was the sound of the Knabe in tune, the sound that Leonard had heard and that Clara heard and that the house contained, the chord ringing in the living room and decaying into the silence that followed it.

She played the Chopin. The Nocturne in C-sharp minor. The dark one. She played it slowly, with the care that the piece demanded, the melody in the right hand singing over the left hand's accompaniment, the two hands in conversation, the right hand asking and the left hand answering, the dialogue that Chopin had composed and that Clara performed not as a concert but as a practice, a ritual, a way of hearing the piano she had just tuned.

The nocturne was beautiful. The tuning was right. The piano's voice was present — warm, dark, deep, the Knabe's particular quality — and Clara heard the voice and felt the rightness and thought about the interval she was in, the gap between the Schnitzer and the grave, between the last concert tuning and the visit to Leonard, between the professional act and the personal act, and the interval was a space, a pause, a silence between two notes, and the silence was not empty but full, full of the Chopin, full of the Knabe, full of the tuning she had just done, the tuning of her own piano, the piano she had neglected, the piano she had returned to.

She thought about Leonard tuning this piano. Leonard had tuned it every month for twenty-seven years, from 1973 to 2000, and the tuning had been Leonard's ritual, the way the morning fork was Clara's ritual, and Leonard's tuning of the Knabe had been — Clara remembered it, remembered sitting in the kitchen as a child and hearing Leonard tune in the next room, the sound of the lever and the fork and the intervals being set, the sound of the temperament being built, and the sound had been the soundtrack of Clara's childhood, had been as familiar as the rain on the roof or the furnace cycling on or any of the other sounds that constituted the acoustic environment of the house on Ankeny where Clara had grown up, and the familiarity had been so complete, so total, that Clara had not recognized it as extraordinary until she was older, until she understood that most children did not grow up hearing a piano being tuned in the next room, that most children's fathers were not tuners, that the sound of the fork and the lever and the temperament was not universal but specific, was the sound of Clara's particular childhood, her particular father, her particular life.

She finished the nocturne. She sat at the bench and let the last chord decay. The house was quiet. The Knabe was in tune. The living room held the ghost of the sound, the air still organized by the frequencies that had just passed through it, the room remembering the Chopin the way a tuned piano remembered its tuning — temporarily, imperfectly, the memory fading with time, the drift beginning as soon as the tuning ended, the return toward disorder as inevitable as the return of rain in Portland, the cycle never ending, the work never done.

She closed the fallboard. She went to the kitchen and struck the fork.

A440. The same pitch. In the living room, the Knabe's A was at 440 — Clara had just set it — and in the kitchen, the fork's A was at 440, the two As the same, the piano and the fork in agreement, the agreement that Clara had created by tuning the piano to the fork, the piano brought to the reference, the reference unchanged.

She held the fork and thought about Leonard's grave. She would go tomorrow, she decided. Sunday morning. She would drive to River View Cemetery and stand at the flat granite marker and not speak and not bring flowers and not perform the ceremony, but she would be there, would stand on the ground that covered Leonard, and the standing would be — would be the interval. Would be the pause between the notes. Would be the silence that contained the sound that had preceded it and the sound that would follow it, the silence between the last concert tuning and the last tuning, between the Schnitzer and the Bösendorfer, between the professional life and the end of the professional life.

She set the fork on the table. She went to bed. The house was quiet. The Knabe was in tune. The fork waited on the table.

The interval continued.

In the morning Clara would go to the cemetery. In the afternoon she would come home. On Monday she would begin the last week of the last round — the Bösendorfer on Monday, the passing of the lever on Wednesday, the end.

But tonight the Knabe was in tune and the Chopin lingered in the air and the house was quiet and the fork was on the table and the A remained.

The A always remained.