The Break

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 6: The Break

The break on a piano is the point where the bass strings end and the treble strings begin, the transition from wound copper over steel to plain steel, from the thick, heavy strings that produce the piano's lowest notes to the thinner, lighter strings that produce everything above, and the break is one of the most difficult areas to tune because the tonal quality changes abruptly at this point, the dark warmth of the wound strings giving way to the brighter, thinner sound of the plain strings, and the tuner must manage this transition so that the change in quality does not produce a change in perceived pitch, so that the listener hears a continuous scale rather than two different instruments bolted together at the seams.

Clara was thinking about breaks — this kind and other kinds — on the following Monday as she drove to her second appointment of the day, a piano she had not tuned before, a Chickering parlor grand in a house on Northeast Fifteenth Avenue that belonged to an estate, the owner recently dead, the piano to be assessed for sale or donation, and the call had come from the executor, a woman named Anne Whitfield who was the dead man's niece and who knew nothing about pianos but who had been told by someone — a friend, a lawyer, a real estate agent — that the piano should be tuned and assessed before it was sold, and Clara had agreed to the appointment with the professional detachment she brought to estate calls, which were a regular part of her work, two or three per year, each one a visit to a piano that had lost its player, a piano that sat in a room that was being emptied, a piano that was, in the language of the trade, an orphan.

The house was a foursquare from 1918, two stories, dark green paint, a porch with turned columns, and the door was opened by Anne Whitfield, who was perhaps forty-five, who wore the expression of a person who had been dealing with the logistics of death for several weeks and was tired of it, the fatigue not emotional but practical, the fatigue of sorting and discarding and deciding, the fatigue of converting a life into paperwork.

"Thank you for coming," Anne Whitfield said. "The piano is in the parlor. Uncle Stephen played it every day. He was — he loved that piano."

"How long did he have it."

"Since before I was born. Forty years, maybe. Maybe longer."

Clara followed Anne Whitfield through the house, past rooms that were in various states of dismantlement — boxes on floors, furniture draped with sheets, bookshelves half-emptied, the archaeology of a life being excavated not for study but for disposal — and into the parlor, which was a front room with tall windows and a bay that looked out onto the street, and in the bay sat the Chickering.

It was a parlor grand, five feet four inches, from approximately 1925 based on the style of the case and the design of the legs, and the first thing Clara noticed was the finish, which was a dark mahogany that had been cared for — polished, dusted, protected from sunlight by the lace curtains that hung in the bay windows — and the care was visible in the depth of the finish, the warmth of the wood, the way the surface reflected the room's light with a clarity that neglected finishes lost, the way a polished shoe reflects light differently from a scuffed one.

The second thing Clara noticed was the lid, which was closed. On most pianos Clara tuned, the lid was simply a cover that the owner opened and closed for practical reasons — to access the strings, to increase the volume, to look inside. But on this piano the lid was a surface, a shelf, and on it were arranged a collection of framed photographs, perhaps a dozen, showing the same man at various ages — young, in a suit, at what appeared to be a wedding; middle-aged, at a desk, in an office; older, in the garden, holding a pair of pruning shears — and the photographs constituted a biography in miniature, the life of Stephen Whitfield told in a dozen images arranged on the lid of the piano he had played every day for forty years.

Clara moved the photographs to a side table, carefully, handling each frame with the attention their position on the piano indicated they deserved, and she lifted the lid and propped it open and looked inside, and what she saw made her stop.

The soundboard was cracked.

The crack ran diagonally from the treble side of the bridge to the edge of the soundboard, a line approximately eighteen inches long, visible as a dark seam in the spruce, the grain of the wood separated along its length, the two halves of the board no longer continuous, no longer a single vibrating surface but two surfaces connected by a wound, and Clara looked at the crack and felt the recognition that a tuner feels when confronted with damage — not surprise, because soundboard cracks were common in old pianos, especially in the dry climate of a heated Portland house, but a specific recognition, a reading of the damage, an assessment of its severity, its cause, its implications.

The crack was not cosmetic. A cosmetic crack — a crack that affected the appearance of the soundboard but not its function — would be narrow, hairline, sealed by the wood's own compression, and it would not affect the sound because the soundboard would still vibrate as a unit, the crack too tight to allow air to pass through, the wood still transmitting the strings' energy to the room. This crack was wider. Clara could see light through it in places, could see the bottom of the piano's case through the gap, which meant the crack was open, which meant air could pass through it, which meant the soundboard had lost its seal, its integrity, its ability to function as a single resonating surface.

She struck a key — middle C — and listened.

The note sounded wrong. Not out of tune — that was expected, the piano had not been tuned recently, the pitch was flat throughout — but wrong in a more fundamental way, a wrongness of quality rather than pitch. The sound was thin, reedy, lacking the warmth and the resonance that a healthy soundboard would provide, the quality of a voice with a cold, a voice that was still recognizably a voice but that had lost its fullness, its roundness, its ability to fill a room. The soundboard was not amplifying the strings' vibrations properly. The crack was acting as a boundary, preventing the vibrations from traveling across the full area of the board, reducing the effective radiating surface, turning a nine-square-foot resonator into two smaller resonators separated by a gap.

Clara tried other notes. The bass was less affected — the bass bridge was on the opposite side of the soundboard from the crack, and the vibrations traveled a shorter path to reach the edge of the board — but the treble was thin, the notes lacking sustain, the sound dying quickly, the energy leaking through the crack instead of being reflected by the board, and Clara understood, listening to the treble, that this piano was damaged in a way that tuning could not fix, that the problem was not the pitch but the voice, not the frequency but the resonance, and tuning a piano with a cracked soundboard was like tuning a guitar with a hole in its top — you could put the strings at the right frequencies, but the instrument would not sound right because the body could not do its job.

She turned to Anne Whitfield, who was standing in the doorway.

"The soundboard is cracked," Clara said.

"Is that bad."

"It's significant. The soundboard is the part of the piano that produces the sound — the strings vibrate, but the soundboard amplifies the vibration, gives it body and volume. When the soundboard cracks, the piano loses its voice. The sound becomes thin. It loses resonance."

"Can it be repaired."

"It can be repaired, yes. A soundboard crack can be glued and shimmed and reinforced. But the repair is expensive — several thousand dollars, depending on the severity — and on a piano of this age and value, the repair may cost more than the piano is worth."

Anne Whitfield looked at the piano. She looked at the photographs on the side table. She looked at Clara.

"Uncle Stephen never mentioned a crack," she said.

"He may not have known. Or he may have known and not minded. Some people play pianos with cracked soundboards for years. The piano still makes sound. It's just — less."

"Less."

"Less resonant. Less full. Less of what the piano was designed to produce."

Anne Whitfield was quiet for a moment. "He played it every day. Every single day. My mother — his sister — said that when Aunt Carol was dying, Stephen would play for her. She was in the bedroom upstairs and he would play down here and she could hear it through the floor. She died listening to him play."

Clara looked at the piano, at the crack in the soundboard, at the dark seam that ran through the spruce, and she thought about Stephen Whitfield playing for his dying wife, the music rising through the floor of the parlor to the bedroom above, and the music would have been diminished by the crack, would have been thinner, less resonant, less than what the piano could have produced when it was whole, but it would have been enough, would have been audible through the floor, would have carried the melody and the harmony and the intention, the intention of a man playing for a woman who was dying, and the crack would not have mattered, not to Carol Whitfield lying in the bedroom above, not to the music that was not a performance but an act of love, and love did not require a perfect soundboard, did not require full resonance, did not require the piano to be at its best, required only that the piano make sound, that the sound travel through the floor, that the sound reach the person for whom it was intended.

"I can tune it," Clara said. "If you want to sell it, it should be in tune. The buyer will hear the soundboard, will know about the crack, but the tuning should be correct regardless."

"Please."

Clara tuned the Chickering. She set the temperament and tuned the octaves and set the unisons, working through the thin sound of the compromised soundboard, adjusting her expectations, listening not for the full resonance that a healthy piano would produce but for the correctness of the pitch relationships, the accuracy of the intervals, the quality of the tuning itself, which was independent of the soundboard's condition, because a tuning was a tuning whether the piano sounded rich or thin, the way a house's foundation is level or not level regardless of whether the house is well-maintained or falling apart.

The tuning took ninety minutes. The piano came into tune — the intervals were correctly tempered, the octaves were clean, the unisons were alive, or as alive as they could be on a piano whose voice was compromised — and Clara closed the lid and replaced the photographs in their positions, approximating the arrangement she had found them in, Stephen Whitfield's life reassembled on the surface of his piano.

"What do you think it's worth," Anne Whitfield said.

"As it is, with the cracked soundboard, probably between five hundred and fifteen hundred dollars. It's a Chickering, which has some name value, and the case is in good condition. But the soundboard crack limits the value. A buyer would need to either accept the diminished sound or invest in the repair."

"And if it were repaired."

"Repaired, with a new soundboard or a properly restored original, the piano might be worth five to eight thousand. Chickering parlor grands from this era, in good condition, have a market. But the cost of the repair would consume most of that value. It's a break-even proposition, at best."

Anne Whitfield looked at the photographs. She picked up one — the wedding photo, Stephen young and formal in a dark suit, a woman beside him in white, the woman who must have been Carol — and she held it and looked at it for a long moment.

"I'll donate it," she said. "Is there a school that would want it. A church. Somewhere it would be played."

"I can ask. There are organizations that place donated pianos. The condition is — they'll need to know about the soundboard."

"Tell them it was played every day for forty years. Tell them a man played it for his dying wife. Tell them it has a crack in its soundboard and it still makes music."

Clara said she would. She packed her tools and left the house and sat in her car and thought about cracks, about breaks, about the places where a continuous surface separates into two surfaces, where a whole becomes two halves, where the integrity of a thing is compromised and the thing continues to function but differently, less fully, with a diminished capacity that is not the same as an absence of capacity, that is a reduction rather than an elimination, a loss of degree rather than a loss of kind.

The soundboard crack was a physical break. Clara's hearing loss was a physiological break. Both were irreversible — the soundboard could be patched but not restored to its original state, the hair cells could not be regenerated. Both diminished the capacity of the instrument — the soundboard's ability to resonate, the ear's ability to resolve high frequencies. Both left the instrument functional — the piano still made sound, the ear still heard — but the function was compromised, the output less than what it had been, the gap between what the instrument could produce and what it was producing visible only to someone who knew what the instrument had been capable of at its best.

Clara was that someone, for both instruments.

She drove to her next appointment, a Yamaha baby grand in a house on Northeast Broadway, a piano she had been tuning for six years, a piano that belonged to a couple who played duets on Sunday mornings, and the piano was in good shape, the soundboard intact, the pins tight, the hammers soft, and Clara tuned it in eighty minutes and left and drove to her next appointment, and the day continued the way her days always continued, piano after piano, house after house, the rhythm of the work carrying her through the hours the way a current carries a boat, and she did not think about the audiogram, did not think about the crack, did not think about the break, but these things were present in her the way a held note is present in a room — not the dominant sound but the sustaining one, the tone beneath the melody, the pedal point that continued while everything above it changed.

She finished her last tuning at five o'clock, a Kawai upright in a studio apartment on Southeast Hawthorne, a young man's piano, a songwriter's piano, the keys worn in the pattern of someone who played the same chords repeatedly — G, C, D, E minor, the folk-pop chord progression that a thousand songs used — and the piano was in reasonable shape and the tuning was quick and the young man offered Clara a beer, which she declined, and she left and drove home through the early dark, the October sunset already past, the streetlights on, the headlights of oncoming traffic bright in the dusk.

At home she set the bag on the table and took out the audiogram and unfolded it and looked at it again. The curve. The drop. The numbers: 25 decibels at 6,000 hertz in the right ear, 30 in the left. 35 at 8,000 in the right, 40 in the left. Mild to moderate high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss. Consistent with presbycusis. Age-related. Common. Progressive. Irreversible.

She put the audiogram in the filing cabinet in the second bedroom, in a folder she labeled MEDICAL, a folder that had not existed before today, a new category in the filing system of her life, a category that she had not needed before because her body had not required its own file, had not generated paperwork, had not produced documents that needed to be preserved, and the creation of the folder was, she understood, an acknowledgment, a formalization, the conversion of a suspicion into a record, and records were permanent, were official, were the opposite of the suspicions and fears and uncertainties that preceded them, because a record was a fact, and a fact was a thing you could not unfold and refold and put in a different pocket, a thing that sat in a folder in a cabinet and waited to be consulted.

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

A440.

She held it close to her ear and listened, not for the fundamental — the fundamental was clear, was always clear, was in the range that the audiogram showed as normal — but for the upper partials, the harmonics above the fundamental, the tenth partial at 4,400 hertz, the twelfth at 5,280, the fourteenth at 6,160, and she tried to hear the fourteenth, tried to isolate it from the background, tried to perceive the specific frequency where her audiogram showed the drop beginning, and she heard something at 6,160, or thought she heard something, or wanted to hear something, the distinction between hearing and wanting to hear becoming unstable at the boundary, at the edge, at the place where the audiogram's curve began its descent.

She put the fork down.

She went to the living room and sat at the Knabe and opened the fallboard and played — not a piece, not a composition, but a slow chromatic scale from the bottom of the piano to the top, each note held, each note listened to, each note assessed not for its tuning but for its presence, for whether Clara could hear it fully, could hear not just the fundamental but the overtones that gave each note its color, its character, its identity, and as she climbed the keyboard the notes became higher and thinner and brighter and the overtones became harder to hear, not because they were absent but because they were in the territory where Clara's hearing was diminishing, where the audiogram showed the drop, where the hair cells were dying.

She reached C8, the piano's highest note, and held it, and listened.

The note was there. The fundamental was there. The first partial was there. But the quality of the note — the shimmer, the brightness, the complex of upper harmonics that gave the highest notes their particular character, a character that was more like the sound of a bell than the sound of a string — the quality was less than Clara remembered. Less bright. Less shimmering. Less present. As though the note were being heard through a cloth, through a filter, through a membrane that let the fundamental pass but absorbed the overtones, leaving a sound that was recognizable but diminished, a sound that was the note but not the full note, the way a photocopy is the document but not the full document.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the quality was the same as it had always been, and Clara's memory of the quality was false, was idealized, was the memory of a twenty-five-year-old's hearing superimposed on a fifty-two-year-old's perception, the past distorting the present, the remembered perfection making the current reality seem diminished. Perhaps C8 had always sounded like this — thin, percussive, more attack than sustain — and Clara was hearing it correctly and remembering it incorrectly, and the loss was not in the ear but in the comparison, in the gap between memory and perception that aging opened, the gap that could not be closed because you could not go back and listen with your younger ears, could not perform the comparison that would settle the question, could not know whether the sound had changed or the hearing had changed or both had changed in ways that were impossible to separate.

She closed the fallboard. She sat on the bench in the quiet living room and looked at the Knabe, at the walnut case, at the brass hinges of the fallboard, at the music desk that held nothing, and she thought about Stephen Whitfield's Chickering, about the crack in the soundboard, about the music that had traveled through the floor to Carol Whitfield's bedroom, and she thought about the break — the break on the piano where bass became treble, the break in the soundboard where whole became cracked, the break in the ear where hearing became not-hearing — and she thought that perhaps breaks were not endings but transitions, not failures but changes, not the death of a thing but its transformation into something else, something less than what it had been but still something, still functional, still capable of carrying music through a floor to a dying woman's ear.

This was a generous thought, a comforting thought, and Clara held it for a moment the way she held the fork, lightly, attentively, feeling its weight and its temperature, testing whether it was true.

She was not sure it was true. She was not sure that a diminished capacity was the same as a transformed capacity, that less was different rather than less, that the break was anything other than what it was — a break, a separation, a loss.

But she held the thought anyway, because holding it was better than putting it down, and because the alternative — the thought that the break was simply a break, that the loss was simply a loss, that the diminishment was simply a diminishment and led nowhere except to more diminishment — was not a thought she was prepared to hold, not tonight, not alone in her living room with the Knabe and the fork and the audiogram in the filing cabinet and the pianos waiting in their houses across Portland for her to come and tune them, seventeen of them this week, seventeen instruments that needed her ear, her hands, her attention, and she would give them what she had, would give them the ear she had, the hearing she had, the capacity she had, and the capacity was still large, was still functional, was still sufficient for the work, and the work was waiting, and the work did not care about audiograms, did not care about breaks, did not care about anything except the tuning, the correction, the return to the grid, the grid of equal temperament that made all keys equally playable by making all intervals equally impure.

She went to bed. She did not strike the fork again. She had struck it enough for one day.

Tomorrow there were pianos to tune.