The Steinway

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 4: The Steinway

The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall occupied a full block on Southwest Broadway between Main and Madison, a building that had been, in its previous life, a movie palace called the Portland Publix, built in 1928 in the Italian Rococo Revival style, with a terra-cotta facade and a marquee and an interior of such ornate excess — gilded plasterwork, painted ceilings, crystal chandeliers — that it seemed to belong not to Portland but to some more theatrical city, some city that did not apologize for grandeur, and Clara had been entering this building twice a month for nineteen years, since Leonard had passed her the symphony account along with the lever and the fork and the clients, and in nineteen years the building had not changed in any way that mattered, the lobby still gilt and crimson, the auditorium still vast and hushed, the stage still lit by the same combination of house lights and work lights that the stagehands turned on for tunings, a light that was functional rather than dramatic, that illuminated the piano without romanticizing it, that showed the Steinway as what it was — a working instrument, a machine for producing sound, a tool that required maintenance.

The Steinway Model D, serial number 507,281, was a nine-foot concert grand in satin ebony, built in 1978 at the Steinway factory in Astoria, Queens, selected by the Portland Symphony from a group of six instruments that Leonard had traveled to New York to evaluate, and Leonard had chosen this one because of its bass, which had a depth and a darkness that the other five instruments lacked, a quality that Leonard had described to Clara, years later, as "the sound of a room with no windows," by which he meant a sound that was enclosed, complete, self-sufficient, a bass that did not need the treble to justify it, that was satisfying on its own, that had the weight and the resonance of a sound that came from somewhere deep, from somewhere below the range of ordinary conversation, from the place where the piano's voice began.

Clara let herself in through the stage door with the key the symphony's operations manager had given her when she took over the account. She walked through the backstage corridors, past the dressing rooms and the storage areas and the cases of percussion instruments standing like sentinels against the wall, and she emerged onto the stage, which was bare except for the chairs and stands arranged for rehearsal and the Steinway, which sat at center stage, its lid open on the long stick, its keyboard facing the empty auditorium, the 2,776 seats unoccupied, the balconies dark, the chandeliers off, and in the work light the Steinway looked not like a concert instrument but like a patient, like something awaiting examination, open and exposed, its interior visible, its strings and hammers and dampers accessible to the tuner's hands and eyes and ears.

Clara set her bag on a chair in the first row and climbed the three steps to the stage and walked to the piano and stood beside it and put her hand on the rim, the curved side of the case, and the wood was cool under her fingers, the satin finish smooth, and she felt what she always felt when she touched this piano, which was a connection that was not sentimental but physical, tactile, the recognition of a surface her hands had touched hundreds of times, the way you recognize a handrail or a doorknob or the steering wheel of your car, not by looking but by touching, by the fit of the hand to the object, the correspondence between the shape of your grip and the shape of the thing gripped.

This had been Leonard's piano. Not owned by Leonard — owned by the Portland Symphony Association — but Leonard's in the sense that mattered, which was the sense of care, of custodianship, of the sustained attention that transforms ownership into stewardship. Leonard had tuned this piano for thirty-two years, had known its voice the way he knew his own voice, had tracked its changes — the gradual hardening of the hammer felt, the slow drift of the bridge as the soundboard aged, the incremental loosening of the pins in the pinblock — the way a doctor tracks a patient's health over decades, noting the changes, anticipating the problems, maintaining the function.

Clara knew the piano differently than Leonard had known it. She had inherited it, had received it not as a new relationship but as a continuing one, the way a doctor inherits a patient from a retiring colleague, the chart already thick with history, the body already marked by time, and Clara's knowledge of the Steinway was layered — her own nineteen years of observation layered on top of Leonard's thirty-two years of stories, of comments, of the casual remarks that Leonard had made over dinner or while driving or while tuning another piano, remarks like "the D above middle C on the Steinway is beginning to sound thin, the hammer needs reshaping" or "the bass bridge has shifted, I can hear it in the octave between A1 and A2," remarks that Clara had stored without intention, the way a child stores everything a parent says, the information filing itself in the brain's deep archive, to be retrieved years later when the child becomes the custodian and the parent's knowledge becomes the child's inheritance.

She struck the fork.

The A bloomed on the Schnitzer stage and traveled out into the auditorium, and the auditorium's acoustics — a reverb of approximately 1.8 seconds, warm and clear, designed by the acousticians who had renovated the hall in the 1980s — gave the fork's tone a spaciousness that no living room or fellowship hall could match, the sound expanding into the volume of the auditorium the way a stone's ripples expand across a pond, and Clara listened to the A decay through the reverb and heard in it the hall's signature, the particular quality of resonance that made this space unlike any other space in Portland, the quality that musicians described as "generous," meaning that the hall gave back more than you put in, amplified not just the volume but the nuance, the detail, the subtlety of the sound, so that a pianissimo here was not merely quiet but intimate, and a fortissimo was not merely loud but immense.

She set the A4 and began the temperament.

The Steinway's temperament required a different approach than the Yamaha's or the Kawai's or the Knabe's or even the Bösendorfer's, because the Steinway was a concert instrument played by concert pianists, and concert pianists had expectations that recreational players did not have, expectations about the quality of the intervals, the smoothness of the scale, the consistency of the stretch, expectations that were not unreasonable but that demanded from the tuner a level of precision that was, Clara thought, the equivalent of the precision a jeweler brings to setting a stone — the tolerance was tighter, the margin for error narrower, the consequences of imprecision more audible because the playing was more demanding, the music more complex, the ear of the performer more acute.

She tuned the temperament with the particular care she reserved for this instrument, checking each interval not twice but three times, playing through the fifths in sequence — F3, C4, G3, D4, A3, E4, B3, F-sharp-4, C-sharp-4, G-sharp-3, E-flat-4, B-flat-3, back to F3 — and listening for the consistency of the beat rates, the gradual acceleration as the fifths progressed upward in pitch, each fifth beating slightly faster than the one below because the frequencies were higher and the difference between equal-tempered and pure was therefore larger in absolute terms, and the acceleration had to be smooth, had to be continuous, had to have the quality of a line that curves without breaking, and if the curve was jagged, if one fifth beat noticeably faster or slower than its neighbors, the temperament was uneven, and the unevenness would be audible to a concert pianist, would manifest as a key that sounded different from the keys around it, a bump in the road, a flaw in the grid.

The temperament was clean. Clara moved to the octaves.

She tuned downward into the bass first, because the bass was where the Steinway's particular glory lived, the sound that Leonard had traveled to New York to find, the sound of a room with no windows, and the bass strings responded to the lever with the slow, heavy rotation of pins that held great tension, the wound copper strings pulling against the pins with a force that Clara could feel through the lever, through the rosewood handle, through the bones of her hand, a force that was approximately 160 pounds per string, approximately thirty-six thousand pounds total across the piano's two hundred and thirty strings, eighteen tons of tension held in equilibrium by the cast-iron plate, the steel pins, the laminated maple pinblock, and the structure of the case itself, the rim and the braces and the beams that contained this force the way a dam contains a river, the whole instrument a system of managed stress, of controlled tension, of forces that would, if released, tear the piano apart.

She tuned A2 against A3. The octave rang in the hall, the two notes sounding together, the lower note's second partial aligning with the upper note's fundamental, and Clara listened for the beats and heard them — slow, one every three seconds perhaps — and she adjusted A2 downward, stretching the bass, and the beats slowed further, and she found the point where the octave was clean, where the two notes merged into a single column of sound, and she moved to A1, tuning it against A2, stretching further, the bass descending into the territory where pitch became vibration, where the ear gave way to the body, where you felt the note in your chest as much as you heard it in your ear.

She finished the bass and turned to the treble, and the treble was where the Steinway was most demanding, because the treble strings were short and stiff and the inharmonicity was high and the tone was bright and the stretch was critical — too little stretch and the treble would sound dull, lifeless, the upper notes falling behind the temperament like runners falling behind a pace car; too much stretch and the treble would sound harsh, shrill, the upper notes pushing ahead of the temperament, creating octaves that beat audibly, that wobbled, that announced their own inaccuracy.

Clara tuned up from the temperament, octave by octave, and as she moved above C6 she began to listen with the particular intensity that the upper treble demanded, the intensity that was not just concentration but a physical engagement with the sound, the ear opening, the head tilting, the breath held, the body becoming an antenna for the highest frequencies, and she heard the beats between the octaves, heard them clearly in C6, clearly in C-sharp-6, clearly in D6, the beats present and countable and responsive to the lever's adjustments, and she continued up through E6, F6, G6, A6, each octave checked and set and confirmed, and she reached B6, and then C7, and above C7 the strings were very short, the tone very bright, the decay very fast — the highest notes on a piano sustain for less than a second, the string's energy dissipated almost instantly — and she struck C7 and C8 together and listened for the octave and heard it, heard the relationship between the two notes, heard the quality of the octave, and the quality was — she searched for the word — the quality was adequate. The octave sounded clean enough. The beats were not audible. The stretch was reasonable.

But.

There was a but. The but was not in the tuning but in the hearing. Clara was not certain that the octave was as clean as it should be, was not certain that the beats were truly absent or merely inaudible to her, was not certain that the stretch was correct or merely acceptable, and this uncertainty was new, was recent, was the thing that had begun six weeks ago at the Steinway B in the Pearl District and that had been growing, not like a tumor but like a shadow, not a presence but an absence, the slow withdrawal of certainty from the region of her hearing where certainty mattered most.

She tuned the remaining notes — C-sharp-7, D7, D-sharp-7, up to C8, the piano's highest note, 4,186 hertz — and she tuned them by ear, as she always did, listening for the octave quality, for the relationship between each note and the note an octave below, and each note sounded acceptable, sounded correct, sounded like what she expected it to sound like, and she could not tell whether this was because the tuning was correct or because her expectation had adjusted downward to match what her ear could now hear, the standard drifting to match the capacity, the way a person with gradually dimming vision adjusts to the dimming without knowing that the adjustment has occurred.

She finished the treble and returned to the temperament octave and played through the intervals one more time, checking, confirming, and the temperament was clean, the intervals correctly tempered, the beat rates consistent, and she felt a measure of relief, not complete relief but partial, the relief of having done the work and produced a result that was, by every test she could apply, correct.

She tuned the unisons. The unisons on a concert grand were the final step, the step that transformed the tuning from a skeleton into a body, the step that gave the piano its voice, its presence, its quality of sounding not like a collection of strings but like a single instrument, and Clara tuned each unison with the care that concert unisons demanded, listening for the moment when two strings — or three, in the treble — became one, when the beats stopped and the sound opened and the note rang with the particular quality that she had learned to call "alive," a quality that was not loudness or brightness or warmth but all of these and something else, something that had no name, something that you recognized not by its presence but by the way the room changed when it arrived, the way the air seemed to thicken, to hold the sound more tenderly, to refuse to let it go.

She finished at 4:15, two hours and twenty minutes after she had begun, and she stood and stretched and looked out at the empty auditorium, the rows of seats ascending into darkness, the balconies curved like the interior of a shell, and she thought about the concerts that had been played on this stage, the pianists who had sat at this keyboard — she had met some of them, had spoken with them before or after a tuning, had heard their preferences, their requests, the small adjustments they wanted: "a little brighter in the upper treble," "can you bring the bass up slightly," "I like the A at 442, can you do that" — and she had accommodated their preferences when she could and explained why she could not when she could not, and through all of this the Steinway had been the constant, the thing that remained while the pianists came and went, the instrument that outlasted the musicians who played it, that would outlast Clara who tuned it, that would be tuned by someone else when Clara could no longer tune it, when Clara's ear could no longer hear what the Steinway needed, when the capacity that Leonard had passed to Clara had exhausted itself and needed to be passed again.

To Yuki, perhaps. To Yuki, probably. Yuki's ear was good and getting better, and in a few years — three, four, five — Yuki would be capable of tuning the Steinway, of hearing what it needed, of providing what Clara provided, and the thought of this — of Yuki sitting at this keyboard with Leonard's lever in her hand and Leonard's fork in her bag, the lineage extending forward, the tradition continuing — should have been a comfort, and it was a comfort, but it was also something else, something less comfortable, something that felt like the first draft of an ending.

Clara packed her tools. She closed the Steinway's lid and covered the keyboard with the felt strip that the symphony kept on the music desk for this purpose, and she walked off the stage and through the backstage corridors and out the stage door into the October afternoon, which was gray and cold, the rain having stopped but the clouds remaining, the light the color of pewter, the air smelling of wet pavement and fallen leaves and the distant mineral smell of the Willamette River, which flowed a few blocks east, under the bridges that connected the east side of Portland to the west side, the bridges that Clara crossed twice a day, the bridges whose tires-on-steel sound she knew by pitch, by frequency, by the specific note that each bridge produced as traffic crossed it.

She sat in her car in the parking lot behind the Schnitzer and did not start the engine. She was thinking about the audiogram that tomorrow's appointment would produce, the graph that would map her hearing, the curve that would show at what frequency her hearing began to decline and how steeply it declined and at what frequency it reached the threshold of inaudibility, and she was thinking about what the graph would mean, not medically — the medical meaning was straightforward, was a diagnosis, was a name for a condition — but professionally, practically, existentially.

If the loss was mild — a drop of ten or fifteen decibels above 6,000 hertz — it might not affect her work. She might be able to compensate, to use the lower harmonics to infer the higher ones, to tune by inference rather than by direct perception, the way a chess player can infer the position of a piece she cannot see from the positions of the pieces she can see. But inference was not perception. Inference was calculation. Inference was the mind's attempt to replace what the ear could no longer provide, and the mind was not as fast as the ear, was not as precise, was not as reliable, and a tuning built on inference rather than perception would be different from a tuning built on hearing, would be correct perhaps but not alive, would be the map rather than the landscape, and Clara had spent twenty-eight years providing the landscape.

If the loss was moderate — a drop of twenty-five or thirty decibels above 6,000 hertz — it would affect her work. The beats in the upper treble would become inaudible to her. The quality of the top octave's intervals would become a matter of guesswork rather than hearing. She could use the electronic tuner for the top octave, could let the Korg do what her ear could not, and most clients would not know the difference, and the tunings would be acceptable, would be within tolerance, would satisfy anyone who did not have the ear that Clara had, or had had.

If the loss was severe — if the audiogram showed a cliff, a sudden drop-off, a frequency above which Clara's hearing was functionally absent — then the question became different. The question became Leonard's question. The question became: when do you stop.

Leonard had known when to stop. Leonard had known because Leonard had a clear metric — the seventh partial of C8, a specific frequency, a specific sound — and when that sound disappeared, the metric was met and the decision was made. Clara did not have Leonard's clarity. Clara's loss, if it was loss, was not a disappearance but a dimming, not a cliff but a slope, and the slope made the decision harder because there was no single moment when the answer changed from "I can" to "I cannot," only a gradual, continuous movement from "I can hear it clearly" through "I can hear it if I try" through "I can hear something" through "I think I can hear something" to "I cannot hear it at all," and at what point on that slope did you stop, at what point did you put down the lever and say, as Leonard had said, "I can no longer hear" — how much loss was too much loss, how much dimming was too much dimming, and who decided, and by what standard.

She started the car. She drove home. She did not strike the fork when she got home. She ate dinner. She sat in the living room with a book she did not read. She went to bed.

Tomorrow.

She lay in the dark and thought about the Steinway, about serial number 507,281, about the piano Leonard had chosen from six in a showroom in Astoria, Queens, in 1978, and she thought about what Leonard had heard when he played those six pianos, what quality in the bass had made him choose this one, what sound had spoken to him, and she wondered whether Leonard's ear at that moment — Leonard at forty-four, twenty-seven years younger than the age at which he would stop tuning, forty-two years younger than the age at which he would die — had been at its peak, at the summit of its capacity, hearing everything there was to hear, every partial, every harmonic, every beat, every nuance, the full range of human hearing available to him, deployed in the service of selecting one piano from six, the most consequential decision a tuner can make, the decision that would determine what the Portland Symphony sounded like for the next half-century.

She wondered whether her ear, at fifty-two, was still at a point where she could make such a decision. Whether, if she were sent to Astoria tomorrow to choose a piano from six, she would hear what Leonard had heard, would hear the bass that sounded like a room with no windows, would hear the quality that made one instrument superior to the others, or whether she would hear five pianos that sounded similar and one that sounded slightly different, the difference a shadow of the difference Leonard would have heard, the discrimination blurred by the loss, the judgment compromised by the compromise of the ear.

She turned on her side and closed her eyes and tried not to think about tomorrow, and the trying not to think was itself a form of thinking, the mind circling the subject the way a moth circles a lamp, not approaching it directly but never leaving its orbit, the subject always there, always present, always pulling.

She slept eventually. She dreamed, though she would not remember the dream. In the morning she would wake and shower and dress and drive to the audiologist's office and sit in a soundproof room and put on headphones and listen for tones that would get higher and higher, and at some frequency she would stop hearing them, and the frequency at which she stopped would be marked on a graph, and the graph would tell her what she already knew but had not yet confirmed, what she suspected but had not yet measured, what she feared but had not yet named.

The fork was on the kitchen table, where she had left it. It waited in the dark, cool and still and silent, vibrating at no frequency at all, because a tuning fork at rest does not vibrate, does not produce sound, does not do anything — it simply exists, a piece of steel with a specific mass and a specific stiffness, the potential for 440 hertz stored in its structure the way a word is stored in a book, present but unspoken, available but not yet called upon, and it would wait all night, and it would be there in the morning, and it would vibrate at 440 hertz when Clara struck it, the same 440 hertz it had always produced, the same 440 hertz it would always produce, regardless of what the audiogram showed, regardless of what Clara could or could not hear, regardless of everything.

The fork was the one thing that did not change.

Clara slept.