The Burin

The burin finds the copper the way grief finds the body — not all at once but in the specific channel it has chosen, the angle of entry predetermined by the shape of what came before, by the particular cant of the wrist and the degree to which the palm has learned over decades to distribute pressure across the heel of the hand so that the cut, when it comes, is neither too deep to be corrected nor too shallow to hold ink when the plate is finally pressed against the dampened sheet and the proof emerges bearing whatever truth the engraver has managed to commit to metal.

Abigail Voss had been cutting copper for thirty-one years.

She arrived at the workshop on Sansom Street each morning at six forty-five, fifteen minutes before anyone else, not because she was asked to but because the building in those minutes before the others arrived held a quality of silence that she had come to need the way other people needed coffee or the particular arrangement of objects on their desk before the workday could properly begin. The silence of the Hartwell & Loewe workshop was not the absence of sound — the old radiators clanked and ticked as the boiler struggled through its morning cycle, and the street outside was already alive with delivery trucks and the scrape of metal gates being raised over storefronts — but rather the absence of intention, of anyone else's purpose pressing against the air, and in that absence Abigail could stand at her bench and lay her hands flat on the maple surface and feel the particular grain of it, worn smooth in the places where her forearms rested during the long hours of engraving, and rough still at the edges where the wood had never been touched.

The bench was original to the building. Hartwell & Loewe had occupied this space since 1936, when Friedrich Hartwell, a German emigrant who had apprenticed at Breitkopf & Hartel in Leipzig before the first war made such arrangements impossible, leased the second floor of the narrow brick building and installed six engraving stations, each with a maple bench, a rotating copper-plate holder, an adjustable lamp, and a leather-padded stool that could be raised or lowered by means of a brass screw mechanism that Friedrich had designed himself and that still, ninety years later, functioned with a smoothness that shamed every piece of modern office furniture Abigail had ever encountered. She sat on that stool now, adjusted it one quarter-turn higher — her back had been troubling her since February, a dull ache in the lower lumbar that she managed with ibuprofen and the careful positioning of a folded towel behind her — and pulled the green-shaded lamp down until the light fell in a precise circle on the plate she had left the night before.

The plate was a half-sheet, fourteen inches by ten, and it held the first eight measures of a viola part for a string quartet by a living composer whose name Abigail could not recall without looking at the job sheet pinned to the cork strip above her bench. She did not need to recall the name. The music was the music, and her relationship to it was not interpretive but spatial: the placement of the G clef on the staff, the precise distance between the noteheads, the angle of the stems, the thickness of the beams, the arc of the slurs. These were not aesthetic choices. They were the accumulated grammar of five centuries of music engraving, codified in the house style manual that Friedrich Hartwell had written in 1942 and that his partner, Joseph Loewe, had revised in 1961, and that no one had revised since because no revision was needed, because the rules of music engraving, unlike the rules of nearly everything else, had achieved a kind of perfection that did not require improvement, only faithful execution.

Abigail was faithful.

She picked up the lozenge graver — a small steel tool with a mushroom-shaped wooden handle and a cutting face ground to a diamond cross-section — and held it at the angle her hands remembered without instruction, approximately fifteen degrees to the plate surface, the handle resting in the cup of her palm, the shaft guided by her index finger and thumb. The position was identical to what it had been on her first day at the workshop, when Joseph Loewe himself, then seventy-three and nearly blind in his left eye, had placed the tool in her hand and adjusted her fingers with a patience that she understood only later was not patience at all but precision, the same precision he brought to every aspect of his work, and that he was now transferring to her not as a kindness but as a necessity, because the work required it and the work was what mattered.

She had been twenty-four. Fresh from the Curtis Institute, where she had studied oboe and where she had learned, in the practice rooms on Locust Street, that her talent was real but not remarkable, that she could play the notes but not the spaces between them, that she could execute but not inhabit the music, and that this distinction, which sounded like a small thing when stated plainly, was in fact the entire distance between a life in music and a life adjacent to it. She had chosen adjacency. She had chosen the tools.

The lozenge graver entered the copper and Abigail drew it toward her in a smooth, continuous motion, cutting the stem of a half note in the second measure. The copper curled away from the cut in a thin bright ribbon that she would later sweep from the plate with a soft brush. The cut was clean. She could feel its cleanness in the resistance of the metal, which was uniform and spoke of a plate properly prepared — hammered to consistent thickness, polished with increasingly fine grades of emery until the surface held a mirror finish, then coated with a thin ground of hard wax through which the staff lines had already been ruled using the five-pointed rastrum that Friedrich Hartwell had commissioned from a toolmaker in Solingen in 1938 and that still produced lines of a parallelism so exact that Abigail had once, in an idle moment, measured them with a machinist's caliper and found the deviation across the full width of the plate to be less than three-thousandths of an inch.

She did not often have idle moments.

The workshop employed four engravers now, down from the twelve it had sustained during the decades when every orchestral part, every piano reduction, every choral score in the Hartwell & Loewe catalog had been engraved by hand on copper plates. The shift to computer-set music had begun in the early 1980s and had accelerated through the 1990s until, by the time Abigail's son was born in 1997, the workshop's hand-engraving operation had contracted to a specialty service offered to composers and publishers who wanted, or believed they wanted, the particular look of a hand-engraved score — the subtle variations in line weight, the slight organic irregularities in notehead shape, the way a hand-drawn slur followed the musical phrase rather than the mathematical curve that a computer would impose.

Some of those clients were genuine in their preference. Others were simply paying for the idea of tradition, for the satisfaction of knowing that somewhere in Philadelphia a woman was bending over a copper plate with a steel tool and cutting their music into metal the way it had been done since the seventeenth century, when the first music engravers in Amsterdam and London had developed the techniques that Abigail still used, substantially unchanged, because the physics of copper and steel and ink and paper had not changed, and the music — the abstract pattern of pitch and duration that the notation represented — had not changed either, not in its fundamental nature, not in the way it needed to be made visible on the page so that a musician could read it and transform it back into sound.

Abigail completed the stem and began the notehead, rotating the plate holder with her left hand while her right guided the graver in the careful oval that would become, when printed, a half note on the third line of the staff. The notehead in hand engraving was not a circle or an ellipse but a specific shape that had evolved over centuries to be maximally legible at the reading distances common to orchestral performance: approximately twenty-four inches for a musician reading from a stand, farther for a pianist reading from the rack of a grand piano, closer for a conductor studying a full score at a desk. The shape was wider than it was tall, tilted slightly to the right, with a thickness that varied around its circumference — thinner at the top and bottom, thicker at the sides — in a way that was not decorative but functional, because the human eye, scanning a page of music at performance speed, needed every possible aid in distinguishing a notehead from the staff lines it sat upon, and the slight thickening at the sides provided exactly this distinction.

These were the things Abigail knew. These were the things that filled her mind as she worked — not the music itself, not the emotional content of the viola line she was cutting, but the geometry of its representation, the craft knowledge that had been transmitted to her by Joseph Loewe and that she was transmitting to no one, because none of the three other engravers in the workshop were young enough to carry it forward, and because the world had decided, reasonably and irrevocably, that music could be set by computer in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost, and that the difference between a hand-engraved score and a computer-set score, while real, was not worth the difference in price.

Abigail did not argue with this. She did not argue with much of anything. She came to the workshop, she sat at her bench, she cut the copper, she pulled the proofs, she corrected the errors, she delivered the finished plates to the printing room on the first floor where Marcus Bell, who had operated the flatbed press since before Abigail arrived, would ink them and run the edition. This was her life. It had been her life for thirty-one years and she could not see its end, not because she lacked imagination but because the work itself had no natural terminus — there was always another plate to prepare, another score to engrave, another proof to check — and she had built herself around this continuity the way the workshop had been built around its benches: solidly, without ornament, with an attention to function that precluded the question of whether function alone was sufficient.

Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She did not look at it. It would be either the pharmacy confirming a prescription refill or her sister in Wilmington asking whether she was coming for Easter, and neither of these required immediate attention. It would not be Eliot. Eliot did not call in the morning. Eliot did not call much at all, and when he did it was in the evening, usually after nine, and the conversations were brief and careful, two people walking across ice that might or might not hold, each word placed with a deliberateness that should have felt like tenderness but felt instead like the opposite of tenderness — like the controlled precision of someone trying very hard not to break through.

She had not seen him in eleven days.

This was not unusual. Eliot lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Fishtown, twenty minutes by car from Abigail's house in Mount Airy, a distance that was nothing and that had become everything, because distance in a city is not measured in miles but in the willingness to cross it, and Eliot's willingness had contracted over the past three years like a muscle that is not used, growing tighter and smaller and less capable of the movement it was designed for. He went to the grocery store. He went to the laundromat on Girard Avenue. He went, occasionally, to the used bookshop on Frankford where he bought paperback novels that he read once and left in a growing pile beside his bed. He did not go to concerts. He did not go to the university where he had, until three years ago, taught a graduate seminar in composition. He did not open the piano in his living room, the old Bechstein upright that Abigail had bought for him when he was eleven, from a dealer in Germantown who had taken it in trade from an estate and who had told Abigail, correctly, that the instrument had a tone that exceeded its price by a factor she would not believe until she heard it.

The Bechstein sat in Eliot's apartment with its lid closed and a stack of unopened mail on top of it.

Abigail knew this because she had seen it the last time she visited, eleven days ago, when she had brought him a container of lentil soup and a loaf of bread from the bakery on Chelten Avenue and had sat on his couch while he heated the soup in the kitchen and they had talked about the weather and about a documentary he had watched about the construction of the Panama Canal and about nothing else, nothing that mattered, nothing that approached the question that sat between them like a closed piano — the question of when, or whether, he would write again.

She returned to the plate. The second measure was nearly complete: a half note, a quarter rest, two eighth notes beamed together. The eighth notes required particular care because the beam — the thick horizontal line connecting the two stems — had to be precisely parallel to the staff lines and of a specific thickness, slightly greater than the thickness of a staff line, and the stems had to be exactly perpendicular to the beam unless the notes were on a slant, in which case the beam would follow the slant and the stems would adjust accordingly, and all of this had to be calculated not in the abstract but in the specific context of this measure, on this plate, with these particular notes at these particular positions on the staff.

Abigail calculated. She cut. The beam emerged clean and true from the copper, and she moved on.

The workshop door opened at seven o'clock and George Parrish came in, hanging his coat on the hook by the door and crossing to his bench without greeting her, not because he was unfriendly but because they had worked together for nineteen years and had long ago passed the point where daily greetings were necessary. George was sixty-three, a former jazz drummer who had come to engraving through a circuitous path that included a degree in graphic design, a decade of commercial typography, and a chance encounter with Joseph Loewe at a print fair in 1998 that had led to an apprenticeship and then a permanent position. He was the fastest engraver in the workshop, his drummer's hands possessing a dexterity and a rhythmic precision that translated directly to the cutting of musical notation, and Abigail respected him without reservation, which was, in their shared vocabulary of silence and competence, the highest form of affection available.

Helen Sung arrived at seven-fifteen, and David Koss at seven-twenty, and by seven-thirty all four engravers were at their benches and the workshop had settled into the quiet industry that would sustain it until the lunch hour. The sounds were small and specific: the whisper of steel on copper, the click of a plate being rotated in its holder, the scratch of a ruling pen being drawn across a straightedge, the occasional muffled thump of a mallet tapping a punch — the small cylindrical tools with a musical symbol cut into the end face that were used for standard elements like clefs and time signatures, each punch producing, when struck cleanly, a perfect impression in the copper that would print with a sharpness and consistency that no hand-drawn version could match.

Abigail had a set of punches that had belonged to Joseph Loewe, and before him to Friedrich Hartwell, and they were kept in a wooden case lined with green felt, each punch in its own slot, labeled in Friedrich's neat Germanic hand: treble clef, bass clef, alto clef, tenor clef, sharp, flat, natural, double sharp, double flat, common time, cut time, and the full set of numerical figures from zero through nine for time signatures and fingering indications. The punches were made of hardened tool steel and their cutting faces were as sharp as the day they had been made, because Friedrich had impressed upon Joseph, and Joseph had impressed upon Abigail, that the punches must never be used on an unpolished plate, must never be struck with a hammer heavier than four ounces, must never be allowed to touch each other in storage, and must be wiped with a light machine oil after every use to prevent the oxidation that would, over time, soften the edges and degrade the impressions.

These rules were not written down. They lived in Abigail's hands and in her habits and they would, she understood with a clarity that was not painful because she did not permit it to be painful, eventually die with her.

She worked through the morning. The viola part progressed measure by measure across the plate, the music accumulating in the copper like sediment, each note a small permanent fact that could not be unsaid once cut, only corrected — and correction in copper engraving was not the simple matter it was on a computer screen, where a wrong note could be deleted with a keystroke, but rather a laborious process involving the burnisher, a smooth steel tool shaped like a curved spatula, which was rubbed firmly over the error to push the displaced copper back into the groove, followed by careful re-polishing of the affected area, followed by re-engraving. A serious error — a wrong key signature, a misplaced clef — could mean starting the entire plate over, and Abigail had, over thirty-one years, started over perhaps a dozen times, each occasion a small catastrophe that she absorbed with the same outward composure she brought to everything, the composure that her sister called stoicism and that Abigail did not call anything because she did not believe in naming what she was, only in doing what she did.

At eleven-thirty the office phone rang and Margaret Hartwell, Friedrich's granddaughter and the current proprietor of the firm, answered it in the front room. Abigail could hear the murmur of Margaret's voice through the partition wall but could not make out the words, and she did not try. The business side of Hartwell & Loewe was Margaret's domain, and Abigail had no interest in it beyond the practical question of whether there would be enough work to keep the workshop open for another year, a question that Margaret answered each December with a combination of existing contracts, new commissions, and what Abigail suspected was a quiet subsidy from Margaret's own funds, drawn from the family money that Friedrich's investments had generated and that Margaret, who had no children and no apparent interest in anything beyond the continuation of her grandfather's enterprise, was content to spend in this way.

Abigail did not ask about the finances. She cut the copper.

At noon she ate lunch at her bench — a sandwich she had made that morning, turkey and Swiss on rye, with mustard — and read two pages of a novel she kept in her bag, a habit she had maintained since her Curtis days when she had read during practice breaks, sitting in the hallway outside the oboe studio with the instrument across her knees and a book propped on the music stand she had dragged out from the room because the hallway had better light. The novel was an English translation of a Japanese book about a woman who made paper, handmade washi paper, in a mountain village, and Abigail read it with the same attention she brought to a proof sheet, noting the precise descriptions of process — the soaking of the kozo bark, the beating of the fibers, the formation of each sheet on the bamboo screen — and finding in them a kinship that required no analysis, only recognition.

At twelve-thirty she put the book away and returned to the plate.

Margaret came into the workshop at two o'clock. This was unusual. Margaret rarely entered the engraving room during working hours, preferring to communicate through notes left on the cork strip or through brief conversations at the end of the day. But she came in now and stood beside Abigail's bench, and Abigail could see without looking up that Margaret was holding something — a large manila envelope, thick with contents, the kind of envelope that contained a manuscript.

"We've had a delivery," Margaret said.

Abigail set down her graver and looked at the envelope. It was addressed to Hartwell & Loewe in a hand she did not recognize, the letters large and unsteady, and it bore a return address in New York — an address on West End Avenue that meant nothing to Abigail but that she noted and would remember because she noted and remembered everything, a habit of attention that was either a gift or a limitation depending on whether you believed that the accumulation of detail was a form of understanding or a substitute for it.

"From the estate of Peter Barlow," Margaret said. "He died in January. His executor sent this with a note requesting that we engrave it. There's a fee arrangement in the letter."

Peter Barlow. The name registered in Abigail's mind with the slow inevitability of a note resolving to its tonic. Peter Barlow, the composer. Peter Barlow, who had written three symphonies and an opera and a body of chamber music that had been performed in every major concert hall in the world. Peter Barlow, who had taught at Juilliard for twenty-five years and who had been, for a period that Abigail could not immediately date but that she knew with a sudden and total certainty had overlapped with her son's time at that institution, one of the most influential teachers of composition in the country.

Peter Barlow, who had known Eliot.

"I'll look at it this evening," Abigail said.

Margaret placed the envelope on the bench and returned to the front room, and Abigail looked at it for a long moment — the heavy manila paper, the unsteady handwriting, the stamps that had carried it from a dead man's apartment on the Upper West Side to this workshop on Sansom Street — and then she picked up her graver and went back to the viola part, because the viola part was due on Friday and Peter Barlow's manuscript, whatever it contained, could wait.

The afternoon passed in the familiar rhythm of cut and check, cut and check, the graver moving across the plate in the small precise increments that would, when accumulated across hours and days, produce a complete musical text — not the music itself but the instructions for its reproduction, the code that would allow a violist to open a part on a music stand and translate the printed symbols back into the physical actions of left hand on fingerboard and right hand on bow that would in turn produce the vibrations of air that were, finally, the thing the notation pointed toward, the thing the notation could represent but never contain.

At five o'clock Abigail covered her plate, cleaned her tools, and put on her coat. She picked up the manila envelope. It was heavier than she had expected, and she held it against her chest as she descended the stairs to the street, where the late-afternoon light of early March caught the envelope's surface and for a moment, in the orange slant of it, Abigail thought she could feel, through the paper, the weight of whatever the dead man had written.

She walked to her car. She drove home to Mount Airy through the ordinary traffic of a Philadelphia evening, the envelope on the passenger seat beside her, and she did not open it until she had made dinner and eaten it and washed the dishes and set them in the rack and poured a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table in the house where she had raised her son, in the chair where she had sat across from him through a thousand meals, in the room where his first compositions — careful, earnest pieces for piano written in pencil on manuscript paper she had brought home from the workshop — had been taped to the refrigerator door.

She opened the envelope.

Inside was a manuscript. Handwritten, in ink, on twenty-four-stave orchestral paper. The pages were not numbered. They were not bound. Some were creased, some were stained, some had passages crossed out and rewritten in margins already crowded with annotations. The handwriting was the handwriting of someone who had once been meticulous and had become, in these pages, desperate — the notes growing larger and more erratic as the manuscript progressed, the stems tilting, the beams wandering, the dynamics scrawled in a hand that seemed to be racing against something, trying to get the music down before whatever was failing in the body finished failing.

It was a violin concerto. Three movements. She could see that much from the instrumentation indicated on the first page — solo violin, double woodwinds, two horns, trumpets, timpani, strings. A large-scale work. Ambitious. The kind of piece that would require weeks to engrave properly, even assuming the manuscript could be deciphered, and Abigail, turning the pages with the care she would give a damaged plate, was not sure it could be.

She turned to the title page. It read, in Peter Barlow's shaking hand:

Violin Concerto No. 2 For E.V.

Abigail set the page down. She placed her hands flat on the table. She sat in the kitchen of her house in Mount Airy, in the chair where her son had once sat doing his homework, and she looked at the two letters that the dead man had written beneath the title of the last piece of music he would ever compose, and she understood that the work she was being asked to do was not the work she had thought it was, not the routine engraving of another commission, but something else, something that had arrived from a dead man's apartment in New York carrying a message she could not yet read, addressed to a boy she could not reach.

She did not call Eliot.

She put the manuscript back in the envelope and placed the envelope on the table and went upstairs to bed, and lay in the dark listening to the house settle around her, the small sounds of wood and plaster adjusting to the cold, and she thought about the two letters — E.V. — and about what they meant and what they would require of her, and she did not sleep for a long time.