The Tuning Lever

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 7: The Tuning Lever

The lever was chrome vanadium steel, eleven inches from the tip of the socket to the end of the handle, and the handle was rosewood, shaped by Leonard on the lathe in the garage of the house on Southeast Ankeny, shaped to fit Leonard's hand, which had been larger than Clara's, broader across the palm, thicker through the fingers, and the handle bore the evidence of this original fitting in its proportions — slightly wider than Clara would have chosen, slightly longer, the grip accommodating a hand that was not hers — and yet Clara had used this lever for twenty-eight years and the rosewood had adjusted to her grip, had worn under her fingers in a pattern that was hers, not Leonard's, the original shaping overlaid with the secondary shaping of use, the way a path through a forest is first cut by one person and then worn deeper by everyone who follows, the original intention still visible in the route but the surface shaped by later feet.

Clara was holding the lever now, not using it but holding it, sitting in the passenger seat of her car while Yuki drove them east on Powell Boulevard toward Franklin High School, where a Yamaha C3 grand lived in the music room and needed tuning, and Clara had decided, this morning, that Yuki would tune the Yamaha alone — not observed, not corrected, not guided, but alone, the way Clara had tuned Margaret Poole's Story & Clark alone twenty-eight years ago — and Clara would sit in a chair in the music room and listen but not speak, would hear but not intervene, would let Yuki's ear be the only ear that mattered.

This was the next step. Clara had been considering it for several weeks, since before the audiologist, since before the audiogram, and the consideration was not connected to the hearing loss — or was not only connected to it, was also connected to the natural progression of an apprenticeship, the point at which the teacher must step back and let the student work without the safety net, the point at which the teacher's presence becomes not a support but a constraint, a ceiling, a limit on the student's ability to develop her own judgment. Yuki needed to tune without Clara's ear in the room. Yuki needed to hear her own errors and find them and fix them without Clara's voice saying "the third is wide" or "the fifth is narrow." Yuki needed to be alone with the piano.

But Clara was also thinking about the lever. She was thinking about the object in her hand, the tool that Leonard had used and that she had used and that would, at some point, need to be used by someone else, and the someone else was Yuki, and the passing of the lever from Clara to Yuki would be the passing of the tradition, the lineage, the chain of ears that began at the Leningrad Conservatory with a man whose name Clara did not know and continued through Leonard to Clara and would continue through Clara to Yuki, and each link in the chain was an ear, a specific ear with specific capabilities and specific limitations, and the chain was only as strong as the weakest ear, and Clara was beginning to understand that her ear was becoming the weakest link.

Not yet. Not definitively. The audiogram showed a mild to moderate loss above 6,000 hertz, not a catastrophic loss, not the kind of loss that would prevent her from tuning effectively — the vast majority of the tuning happened below 6,000 hertz, in the range where her hearing was normal — but the loss was there, was real, was documented, was progressive, and the progression meant that what was mild today would be moderate tomorrow and what was moderate tomorrow would be severe eventually, and the eventually was not a fixed date but a trajectory, a curve on a graph that descended at a rate Clara could not predict, and the unpredictability was the worst part, worse than the loss itself, because the loss could be adapted to, could be managed, could be incorporated into a working life, but the unpredictability could not be managed, could only be endured, the way weather could only be endured, the way aging could only be endured.

Yuki parked in the lot behind the school and they got out and gathered their bags and walked through the main entrance, where the security guard checked them in and gave them visitor badges, and they walked through the halls — the particular halls of a public high school, linoleum and lockers and the smell of institutional cleaning products and the distant sound of a class in session, a teacher's voice carrying through a closed door — and they reached the music room, which was large and windowless and arranged with chairs and music stands in a semicircle around the conductor's podium, and the Yamaha C3 sat in the corner, its lid closed, its bench tucked under, a music stand beside it holding a stack of sheet music that the school's accompanist used for choir rehearsals.

Clara opened the lid and propped it on the short stick — the music room was too small for the long stick, the sound too loud in the enclosed space — and she pulled a chair to a position about six feet from the piano, far enough that she was out of Yuki's way but close enough that she could hear the tuning clearly, and she sat down and set the lever on the music desk beside Yuki's bag.

"Tune the piano," Clara said.

Yuki looked at her. "The whole piano."

"The whole piano. Temperament, octaves, unisons. Everything."

"And you'll — "

"I'll listen. I won't speak. If you have a question, work through it. Don't ask me. The question is yours. The answer is yours."

Yuki stood for a moment, looking at the piano, at the strings and the hammers and the dampers and the tuning pins, the familiar landscape of the instrument's interior, and Clara could see her processing the situation, could see the shift in her posture from student to practitioner, from the person who is guided to the person who must guide herself, and the shift was visible as a straightening, a squaring of the shoulders, a setting of the jaw, the physical expression of a decision to be ready even if you are not sure you are ready.

Yuki took the fork — Clara's fork, Leonard's fork — and struck it against her knee, and the A bloomed in the music room, the sound absorbed by the acoustic tiles on the ceiling and the carpet on the risers and the felt-covered walls, the room designed to dampen sound so that an orchestra of high school students would not deafen itself, and the A was quieter here than in a living room or a concert hall, the decay shorter, the reverb almost nonexistent, and Yuki touched the fork to the soundboard and set the lever on the A4 pin and began.

Clara watched and listened.

The A came into tune quickly — Yuki's unison was clean, the three strings merging into one without hesitation, the beats disappearing with a decisiveness that told Clara that Yuki's ear was confident at this frequency, that 440 hertz was well within her comfort zone, that the judgment was immediate and accurate. Clara allowed herself to feel the small satisfaction of a teacher watching a student do well, the satisfaction that was not pride exactly — pride would have been presumptuous, would have been claiming credit for what was Yuki's accomplishment — but something like pride, something in the same family, the quiet pleasure of seeing a skill you have taught being executed with competence.

Yuki began the temperament. She tuned F3 as a fourth below A3, and Clara listened to the interval and heard it — wide, approximately one beat per second, correct — and felt another pulse of satisfaction, because the last time Yuki had set this interval, in the lesson at Clara's house, she had set it narrow, had tuned toward purity rather than temperament, and this time she had set it correctly, had heard the beating fourth as the target rather than the error, had internalized the lesson that correct was not pure, that the right amount of wrong was not wrong but right.

The temperament progressed. Yuki worked through the intervals methodically, each one struck and assessed and adjusted, and Clara heard the temperament taking shape, heard the grid of equal temperament being laid across the middle octave of the Yamaha, and the grid was — Clara searched for the right word — the grid was competent. The intervals were correctly tempered. The beat rates were close to the targets. The cross-checks, when Yuki played them, confirmed the consistency of the intervals. It was not Clara's temperament — it lacked the refinement that twenty-eight years of practice produced, the microscopic adjustments that made Clara's temperaments not just correct but smooth, the quality of a road that has been graded not once but a thousand times until every bump is gone — but it was a good temperament, a temperament that a client would accept, a temperament that would serve the music.

Yuki finished the temperament and began the octaves, working down into the bass first, and Clara listened as the bass came into tune, each octave set, each stretch applied, and she heard Yuki making decisions about the stretch, heard her choosing how much to flatten the bass notes, and the choices were slightly different from the choices Clara would have made — Yuki stretched a fraction more than Clara would have, the bass notes slightly flatter — but the choices were within the range of acceptable, were defensible, were the choices of a tuner who was developing her own sense of what the bass should sound like, her own aesthetic within the framework of equal temperament, and this development was what Clara wanted, was the goal of the apprenticeship, because a tuner who could only reproduce her teacher's tuning was not a tuner but an imitator, and imitation was a stage, not a destination.

The bass was done. Yuki turned to the treble.

Clara leaned forward in her chair slightly, not conspicuously, not in a way that Yuki would notice, but slightly, because the treble was where the test was, where Yuki's ear and Clara's ear would be most directly compared, where the question of who could hear what would be most clearly answered. Yuki tuned up from the temperament, octave by octave, each note set against the note an octave below, the lever turning the pins with a steadiness that told Clara that Yuki's hands were improving, that the physical component of the craft was being learned alongside the auditory component, the hands and the ears developing together the way a pitcher's arm and eye develop together, each informing the other, each refining the other.

Yuki reached C6. She tuned C6 against C5, and the octave was clean. She moved to C-sharp 6, D6, D-sharp 6, working up through the register where the strings shortened and the inharmonicity increased and the tone became brighter and thinner and the stretch became more critical, and Clara listened to each octave and heard them — clean, correct, the stretch appropriate for this piano at this pitch level — and she continued listening as Yuki crossed C7 and entered the top octave, the octave where Clara's hearing was diminishing, the octave where the beats between the partials were in the frequency range that the audiogram showed as compromised.

Yuki tuned C7 against C6. Clara heard the octave — heard it clearly, heard the beats, heard the moment when the beats stopped and the octave was clean. The frequency of C7 was 2,093 hertz, well within Clara's normal hearing range. The second partial of C6 was at 2,093 hertz. The interaction between the notes was at frequencies Clara could hear without difficulty. No problem.

Yuki tuned D7. The fundamental was 2,349 hertz. Still within range. The octave sounded clean.

E7. 2,637 hertz. Clean.

F7. 2,794 hertz. Clean.

G7. 3,136 hertz. Clara heard the octave. Heard the beats. Heard them stop. Clean.

A7. 3,520 hertz. Clara listened. The octave — A7 against A6, the interaction between the fundamental of A6 at 1,760 hertz and the fundamental of A7 at 3,520, and the second partial of A6 at 3,520, and the beats between the A7 fundamental and the A6 second partial — Clara heard them, but she heard them with effort, with concentration, with the particular intensity of listening that she had begun to associate with the upper reaches of her range, the listening that was not passive reception but active searching, the ear reaching for the sound rather than the sound arriving at the ear, and she heard the beats and they slowed and they stopped and the octave was clean, or Clara believed it was clean, or Clara's best judgment was that it was clean.

B7. 3,951 hertz.

Clara listened. Yuki struck B7 and B6 together and the octave sounded — and Clara was not sure. The fundamental of B7 was at 3,951 hertz, and the second partial of B6 was at 3,951, and the beats between them were — Clara searched for the beats, listened for the pulsing, the wavering, the rhythmic rise and fall that would indicate the octave was not yet clean — and she found something, a faint undulation in the sound, a barely perceptible movement that might have been beats or might have been the natural tremor of two high-pitched notes sounding in a room with imperfect acoustics, and she could not be sure, could not determine whether the octave needed adjustment or whether the octave was clean and she was hearing artifacts, phantom beats, the noise of the room interpreted by an uncertain ear as a signal.

Yuki adjusted the pin. The sound changed. She struck the notes again and listened, and Clara watched her listen, watched the concentration in her face, and Yuki made a small nod, the nod of a tuner who is satisfied, and moved on to C8.

C8. 4,186 hertz. The piano's highest note.

Yuki struck C8 and C7 together. The octave rang in the music room, two notes in the highest register, bright and percussive, the decay rapid, the sound disappearing almost as soon as it was produced, and Yuki listened and adjusted and listened again and adjusted again and then nodded, satisfied, and the top octave was done.

Clara had heard C8. She had heard the note, had heard the fundamental, had heard the attack and the brief decay. But she had not heard the octave with the resolution she needed, had not been able to determine whether the octave was clean or slightly wide or slightly narrow, had not been able to count the beats or even to determine whether beats were present, and this failure — this inability to make a judgment about the quality of the highest octave — was the first concrete, undeniable manifestation of what the audiogram had predicted, the first moment when the curve on the graph translated into a functional limitation, the first moment when Clara could say, with certainty, that her hearing had lost something that her work required.

She did not say anything. She sat in the chair and watched Yuki tune the unisons, working back down the keyboard from the top, setting each three-string unison with the care that Clara had taught her, and the unisons were good — clean, alive, the three strings merging into one — and Clara listened to the unisons and heard them clearly, because the unisons were in the range where her hearing was normal, where the interactions between the strings occurred at frequencies she could hear without effort, and the relief of hearing clearly again after the uncertainty of the top octave was physical, was a loosening of tension in her shoulders and her jaw, a release that she had not known she was holding until it released.

Yuki finished the piano. She set the lever on the music desk and flexed her wrist and turned to Clara.

"Well."

Clara stood and walked to the piano and played through the temperament, checking the intervals, and the temperament was clean. She played the octaves, from the bottom to the top, and the octaves were clean through the bass and the mid-range and the upper treble, and in the top octave she heard what she could hear, which was the notes, the fundamentals, the presence of sound at the correct frequencies, and she could not hear what she could not hear, which was the fine structure of the octave quality, the beats or absence of beats, the precision of the stretch.

But she had heard Yuki tune the top octave. She had watched Yuki listen and adjust and listen again. She had seen the concentration and the satisfaction and the nod of a tuner who had heard what she needed to hear and had made the judgment and had acted on it, and Clara trusted Yuki's ear in the top octave in a way that she was no longer certain she could trust her own, and this trust was — Clara searched for the word — this trust was the beginning of a transfer, the beginning of the process that Leonard had completed in a single conversation over tea at the kitchen table on Ankeny Street, the process of passing the work from one ear to the next.

"It's good," Clara said. "The temperament is clean. The octaves are good. The unisons are alive. You tuned a piano."

Yuki's face showed something that Clara recognized — not pride, not exactly, but the specific satisfaction of having done a thing you were not sure you could do, the satisfaction that was the beginning of confidence, and Clara remembered this satisfaction from her own first solo tuning, remembered the drive home from Margaret Poole's house with the lever in the bag and the bag on the seat and the knowledge that she had done it, had set the temperament and found the error and fixed it and tuned the piano and it was right, and the rightness was hers, not Leonard's, hers.

"The top octave," Yuki said. "I wasn't sure about B7. The octave felt wide. I brought it in."

"It sounded clean to me," Clara said, and this was not a lie but it was not the full truth either, was not the disclosure that the top octave had been beyond Clara's certain judgment, that Clara's assessment of "clean" was not based on hearing the beats but on hearing their absence, which was not the same thing, because the absence of perceived beats could mean the octave was clean or could mean the beats were present but inaudible, and the difference between these two possibilities was the difference between a tuning that was correct and a tuning that was possibly correct, and the difference was the audiogram, the curve, the drop at 6,000 hertz, the loss that Clara had not told Yuki about and was not going to tell Yuki about, not today, not yet, not until Clara had decided what the loss meant, what it required, what it changed.

They packed their tools and left the music room and walked through the halls of Franklin High School, past the lockers and the classrooms and the students who did not notice them, who did not see the two women with bags and badges walking toward the exit, who did not know that these women had just tuned their piano, had adjusted the two hundred and thirty strings of their Yamaha C3 so that the choir accompanist would have a correctly tempered instrument for tomorrow's rehearsal, had performed the invisible maintenance that made the music possible.

In the car, driving west on Powell, Yuki said, "Can I ask you something about your father."

"Yes."

"When he taught you — when you were learning — did he ever let you tune a whole piano by yourself. Like today."

"Once. A Story & Clark on Belmont. I was twenty-four."

"Were you scared."

Clara thought about the question, about the word "scared," about whether what she had felt at Margaret Poole's Story & Clark was fear or something else, something more specific than fear, something that was not about danger but about inadequacy, about the possibility of discovering that you were not what you hoped you were, that the ear your father had trained was not the ear your father had.

"I was concerned," Clara said.

"About what."

"About the temperament. About whether I would hear the errors. About whether my ear was good enough."

"Was it."

"It was good enough. It took me longer than it should have. The cross-check failed on the thirds and I spent twenty minutes finding the error. But I found it. The A was high by one and a half cents."

"One and a half cents," Yuki said, and Clara heard in her voice the awe that a young tuner feels when she hears a number like that, a deviation so small that it is measured in hundredths of a semitone, a fraction of a fraction, and the awe was appropriate, because the ability to hear a deviation of one and a half cents was not ordinary, was not something most ears could do, was the product of training and talent and the specific neurological gift that some people had and some did not, the gift that Leonard had possessed in extraordinary measure and that Clara had inherited or developed and that Yuki was in the process of discovering in herself.

"Your father," Yuki said. "When he let you tune that first piano. Did he know you were ready."

"He decided I was ready. Whether he knew — I don't know. I think he decided, and the decision made it true. Not because the decision changed my ear, but because the decision changed what I was willing to attempt. I was willing to attempt it because he had decided I could. If he had not decided, I would not have attempted."

"And today," Yuki said. "You decided I was ready."

"I decided you were ready."

They drove in silence for a while, the rain on the windshield, the wipers moving in their slow arcs, the city passing — the car dealerships on Powell, the fast-food restaurants, the auto parts stores, the businesses that lined the boulevard like teeth in a jaw — and Yuki drove carefully, attentively, the way she did everything, and Clara sat with the lever in her hand, the rosewood warm from her grip, and thought about Leonard deciding that Clara was ready, and Clara deciding that Yuki was ready, and the deciding being an act of faith more than an act of knowledge, because you could not know whether someone was ready until they had done the thing, and you could not do the thing until someone decided you were ready, and the circularity of this was not a flaw in the system but the system itself, the way apprenticeship worked, the way knowledge was transferred not through certification or examination but through a moment of trust, a decision made by the person who knew in favor of the person who was learning.

Clara looked at the lever in her hand.

It was Leonard's lever. It was Clara's lever. It would be Yuki's lever.

The rosewood handle bore the marks of three sets of hands — Leonard's original shaping, still visible in the proportions; Clara's twenty-eight years of use, ground into the grain; and, faintly, beginning to appear, the marks of Yuki's grip, the places where Yuki's smaller fingers pressed when she borrowed the lever during lessons, the new wear overlaying the old, the tool accumulating the history of its users the way a piano accumulates the history of its players, each set of hands leaving its mark, each mark becoming part of the tool, the tool becoming not just a tool but a record, a genealogy written in rosewood and chrome vanadium steel.

Clara would give the lever to Yuki. Not today. Not soon. But eventually, when the time came, when the ear could no longer do what the lever required the ear to do, when the capacity had diminished to the point where the lever deserved a better ear, a younger ear, an ear that could hear what the lever needed heard. Clara would give the lever to Yuki the way Leonard had given it to Clara, in a single gesture, a single passing, the tool moving from one hand to the next, carrying with it the weight of the tradition, the lineage, the chain of ears.

But not today.

Today the lever was Clara's, and Clara's ear was still good enough — good enough for the temperament, good enough for the octaves through most of the range, good enough for the unisons, good enough for the work — and the work was waiting, and tomorrow there were pianos to tune, and the pianos did not care about audiograms, did not care about the upper limit of their tuner's hearing, cared only about the tuning, the correction, the return to the grid, and Clara would provide the tuning with the ear she had, would provide it for as long as she could, would provide it until the ear told her — or the pianos told her, or Yuki told her, or the silence told her — that it was time to stop, and then she would stop, and she would give the lever to Yuki, and Yuki would take it and use it and shape it and the rosewood would accept a new set of hands, a new set of marks, a new chapter in the tool's long history, and the tuning would continue, the pianos would be tuned, the compromises of equal temperament would be set and reset and maintained, and the tradition would survive the loss of any single ear, because the tradition was not any single ear but the chain of ears, the succession, the passing of the lever from hand to hand, and the lever did not age, did not lose its upper frequencies, did not decline — the lever was like the fork, a fixed point, a thing that endured while the hands that held it changed.

Yuki pulled into the driveway of Clara's house and parked and they sat for a moment in the car with the engine running and the rain on the roof.

"Thank you," Yuki said. "For today. For letting me tune the whole piano."

"You earned it," Clara said.

"Clara."

"Yes."

"The B7. The octave I wasn't sure about. Was it really clean. When you checked."

Clara looked at Yuki, at her face, at the earnestness in her expression, at the need for confirmation that was not weakness but the natural need of a person who has just done something new and wants to know whether she did it right, and Clara said, "It was clean."

And this was true, or was close enough to true, or was the kind of truth that a teacher tells a student when the student needs to hear it, the truth that is not a lie but a choice, a decision about which truth to offer, and the truth Clara offered was the truth that Yuki needed — the truth that her ear was good, that her judgment was sound, that the octave was clean — and the truth Clara kept was the truth that Clara needed to keep, the truth that Clara could not have confirmed or denied the B7 octave because Clara's ear had reached its limit, the truth that the audiogram had predicted and the tuning had confirmed, the truth that Clara was not yet ready to share, not yet ready to make external, not yet ready to pass from the category of private knowledge to the category of shared fact.

Yuki got out of the car and took her bicycle from the rack on the back and saddled her bag in the pannier and waved and pedaled away down Yamhill, and Clara watched her go and then went inside and set the bag on the table and took out the lever and held it and looked at the rosewood and the chrome vanadium steel and the marks of three sets of hands, and she set the lever on the table next to the fork, the two tools side by side, the lever and the fork, the tool that moved and the tool that did not, the instrument of change and the instrument of constancy, and they lay on the table in the kitchen of Clara's small house on Southeast Yamhill while the rain fell on the roof and the afternoon darkened into evening.

Clara did not strike the fork. She did not pick up the lever. She sat at the table and looked at them and thought about the chain of ears and the passing of tools and the progression of loss and the survival of the tradition, and she sat for a long time, and then she got up and made dinner and ate it and went to bed.

Tomorrow there were pianos to tune.

There were always pianos to tune.