The Burnisher

The burnisher was a tool for undoing. A smooth steel blade, curved like a spatula, polished to a mirror finish, it was pressed against the copper plate and rubbed firmly over an engraved line until the displaced metal was pushed back into the groove, filling it, sealing it, erasing the cut as if it had never been made. The process was not perfect — a burnished area never fully returned to the state of virgin copper, the metal retaining at a microscopic level the memory of its deformation, the way a crease in paper retains a faint line even after the paper is smoothed flat — but it was the only remedy available for an error that had been cut into the plate, and Abigail used it with the reluctance and the precision of a surgeon performing an amputation, removing what had to be removed and preserving what could be preserved.

She had made a serious error. Not a missing accidental, not an overlong stem, not the small cosmetic imperfections that every first proof contained and that she corrected as a matter of course. This was structural. She had engraved four measures of the solo violin part in the wrong transposition — the passage was written in the manuscript using a notational shorthand that indicated a transposition up one octave, a small "8va" marking above the staff that she had missed, with the result that the four measures she had engraved were an octave lower than Barlow intended, the notes sitting on the staff where they should have been on ledger lines above it, the entire passage brought down from the violin's stratospheric upper register to its comfortable middle register, a difference that was not merely cosmetic but musical, because the choice of register was an expressive choice — the high register carrying a tension and an intensity that the middle register did not, the thin, piercing quality of the violin's upper range serving a dramatic function that the warm, rounded quality of the middle range could not replicate.

She discovered the error on a Saturday morning when Eliot, who had been comparing her proofs against his clean copies, pointed to the passage and said, "This is an octave low."

She looked at the proof. She looked at the manuscript. She saw the "8va" marking, partially obscured by a coffee stain, a faint dotted line above the staff that she should have noticed and had not. The error was hers. It was unambiguous, indefensible, the result of a moment's inattention during the long hours of engraving, a moment when her eye had skipped over the marking and her hand had continued cutting and four measures of music had been permanently committed to copper in the wrong octave.

"I see it," she said.

She did not apologize. She did not explain. She pulled the plate from the rack where it had been stored after the proof was pulled and carried it to her bench and clamped it in the holder and turned on the lamp and examined the error under the magnifying glass. The four measures occupied approximately two inches of horizontal space on the plate — a small area, relative to the full page, but densely engraved, containing not only the solo violin line but the corresponding orchestral parts beneath it, which were correct and which she would have to protect while she burnished out and re-engraved the solo part above them.

She selected the burnisher from the tool case. The blade was cool in her hand, the steel slightly heavier than the graver, the handle smooth from use. She had used this particular burnisher for twenty-three years — it was not one of Friedrich Hartwell's original tools but a replacement that Joseph Loewe had commissioned in the early 1990s from a toolmaker in Sheffield, the last toolmaker in England who still produced hand-engraving tools to the old specifications, and Loewe had bought six burnishers and given one to each engraver in the workshop with the instruction that they should be maintained with the same care as the punches and the gravers, oiled after use, stored in felt-lined slots, never allowed to contact other metal tools.

Abigail positioned the burnisher over the first of the four erroneous measures. She pressed the blade against the copper and began to rub, applying firm, steady pressure in the direction of the engraved line, the steel pushing the displaced metal back into the groove, the bright line of the engraving gradually dimming as the groove filled and the surface leveled. The sound was a low, sustained hiss — metal against metal, friction without cutting, the opposite of the graver's sharp, incisive whisper. She worked slowly, moving the burnisher back and forth in short strokes, checking her progress frequently under the magnifying glass, looking for the moment when the groove was fully filled and the surface was smooth enough to accept a new engraving.

The first measure took twenty minutes. She burnished the notehead first — pressing the oval shape back into the copper until it was no longer a depression but a slight irregularity in the surface, a faint discoloration that would need to be polished out before the new note could be cut. Then the stem, a longer groove, requiring more passes of the burnisher. Then the accidentals, the beam, the slur that extended from the previous measure into this one and that she had to partially burnish and then redraw to accommodate the new, higher position of the notes.

The slur was the hardest part. A burnished slur could not be fully erased — the curve of the groove, wider and shallower than a notehead or a stem, left a broader trace in the copper, and the burnisher had to be applied with extra care to avoid creating a depression in the surrounding surface that would print as a faint shadow on the page. Abigail worked the burnisher over the slur in small, circular motions, blending the edge of the groove into the surrounding metal, and she thought about what she was doing — the act of erasure, the attempt to return the copper to its unblemished state, the knowledge that the return was imperfect, that the metal remembered.

Eliot watched from Helen's bench. He had stopped his own work — the deciphering of the third movement's final section, the nearly illegible last thirty measures — and he was watching Abigail burnish with an attention that she found both comforting and uncomfortable, comforting because it meant he was interested in the process, interested in the craft, interested in the thing she did every day that he had never seen her do, and uncomfortable because the process he was watching was the correction of an error, the undoing of a mistake, and she did not like being watched while she undid her mistakes.

"How many times have you had to do this?" he said.

"This year? Twice. Including this."

"In your career?"

"I don't count."

This was not true. She counted everything. She knew exactly how many times she had used the burnisher to correct a serious error — forty-seven times in thirty-one years, an average of approximately one and a half times per year, a frequency that she considered acceptable but not exemplary, because Joseph Loewe, according to his own account, had averaged fewer than one per year, and Friedrich Hartwell, according to Loewe, had claimed to have used the burnisher for serious corrections only nine times in his entire career, a claim that Abigail believed was exaggerated but that she respected as an aspiration, a standard to aim for even if it could not be reached.

She finished the first measure and moved to the second. The work was the same — notehead, stem, accidentals, beam, slur — but the second measure was more densely engraved than the first, the solo violin playing a rapid passage of sixteenth notes that filled the measure with closely spaced noteheads and short beams, each element requiring its own burnishing, its own careful erasure, and the density of the work meant that the risk of accidentally burnishing into an adjacent note was higher, and Abigail moved with the exaggerated care of someone walking on ice, each stroke of the burnisher placed with a deliberateness that was, she recognized, excessive — she did not need to be this careful, her hands were steady, her experience was sufficient — but that she could not relax, because Eliot was watching and because the error was hers and because the burnishing was, in some way she did not fully understand, more personal than the engraving, more revealing, the engraving being a display of skill and the burnishing being a display of fallibility, and she did not like displaying her fallibility, to Eliot or to anyone.

"Everyone makes mistakes," Eliot said.

The remark was offered lightly, conversationally, without the weight of implication that a more fraught statement would have carried, and Abigail recognized it as an attempt to alleviate the discomfort he had seen in her posture, in the set of her shoulders, in the particular tightness of her jaw that she was aware of but could not release. She appreciated the attempt. She did not acknowledge it.

"The 8va marking was obscured," she said. "I should have caught it. I didn't."

"The manuscript is in terrible shape. Anyone could have missed it."

"I'm not anyone."

She said this without pride, without self-aggrandizement, as a simple statement of professional identity. She was not anyone. She was the person who had been engraving for thirty-one years, who had been trained by Joseph Loewe, who used Friedrich Hartwell's tools, who maintained a standard that was not abstract but specific, measurable, embodied in the plates she had produced and the proofs she had approved and the scores that bore the Hartwell & Loewe imprint and that sat on music stands around the world, and the standard did not include missing an 8va marking, however obscured, and the fact that she had missed it was not a failure of the manuscript but a failure of her attention, and she would correct it and move on and not forgive herself because forgiveness was not relevant to the craft, only correction was relevant, only the burnisher and the re-engraving and the new proof that would be clean.

She finished the second measure and the third and the fourth. An hour and twenty minutes for four measures. She polished the burnished area with a fine emery cloth, restoring the surface to something close to its original smoothness, and then she re-applied the wax ground over the burnished area, heating it with the spirit lamp and spreading it with the felt roller, and she let it cool for ten minutes and then she picked up the graver and began to re-engrave the passage, this time in the correct octave, the notes on the first, second, third, and fourth ledger lines above the staff, the violin's upper register, the territory where the sound was thin and intense and where the notation required the freehand ledger lines that she cut one by one beneath each notehead, the small horizontal strokes that extended the staff upward to accommodate the music that exceeded it.

The re-engraving took another forty minutes. When it was done she pulled a proof of the corrected page and examined it under the magnifying glass. The correction was invisible. The burnished area had accepted the new engraving cleanly, without the shadow or the roughness that sometimes resulted from burnishing, and the proof showed the solo violin line in the correct octave, on the ledger lines where Barlow had intended it, the notes climbing into the upper register with the tension and intensity that the passage demanded.

"Clean," she said.

Eliot came to her bench and looked at the proof. He compared it to his clean copy. He nodded.

"You can't tell," he said. "That it was corrected. There's no trace."

"There's always a trace," Abigail said. "On the plate. The copper remembers. But on the proof — no."

"The copper remembers."

"The metal is compressed differently where the burnisher has been. The grain is changed. If you looked at the plate under a microscope you could see the difference between the virgin copper and the burnished area. But the ink doesn't know the difference. The ink fills the grooves equally. The proof comes out clean."

Eliot looked at the plate. He looked at the proof. He looked at Abigail, and his expression was the one she had learned to recognize over the past three weeks — the expression that meant he was thinking about more than what was in front of him, that he was using the specific thing he was looking at as a lens through which to see a more general thing, the way a composer used a specific instrument as a lens through which to project a more general musical idea.

"The copper remembers but the proof comes out clean," he said.

"Yes."

He nodded. He returned to Helen's bench. He opened the manuscript to the last thirty measures of the third movement, the measures he had been working on all morning, the nearly illegible pages where Barlow's handwriting had deteriorated to the point of near-collapse, and he bent over them and resumed the work of deciphering, and Abigail returned to her own bench and resumed the engraving, and they worked in silence for the rest of the morning.

At noon Abigail went out for sandwiches — the deli on Walnut Street that she had been going to for twenty years, turkey and Swiss for herself, roast beef and cheddar for Eliot, a preference she remembered from his childhood and that she had guessed, correctly, had not changed — and they ate at their benches, the manuscript open between them, the proofs pinned to the cork strip, the workshop around them quiet and warm, the Saturday light coming through the tall windows and falling on the wooden floor in the same wavering rectangles that it had been falling in for ninety years.

"I called Sarah Chen," Eliot said.

Abigail continued chewing. She did not look up. She did not want her face to show what the words had produced in her — the sharp intake of something that was not quite surprise and not quite relief but that lived in the space between them, the space where the emotions she did not name accumulated like notes on a staff, each one occupying its assigned position, each one contributing to a chord that she could feel but could not sound.

"She's with the Ariel Quartet. They're performing at the Perelman next month. She said she'd look at the solo part."

"Good."

"She asked how I was."

Abigail waited. She took another bite of her sandwich. She looked at the proof pinned to the cork strip, at the corrected passage with its ledger lines climbing into the upper register, and she waited for Eliot to continue or not continue, the way she waited for a plate to cure, the way she waited for a proof to dry, with the patience of someone who understood that the process had its own timing and could not be accelerated by attention.

"I said I was working," Eliot said. "She asked what I was working on. I told her about the Barlow."

"What did she say?"

"She said she didn't know he had written a second concerto. She said she'd heard the first one, in New York, years ago, and it was extraordinary."

The word again. Extraordinary. The word Abigail had used in her text to Eliot, the word that had emerged without permission, and now it had traveled — from Abigail to Eliot to Sarah Chen and back — like a melody passed between instruments in an orchestral score, each repetition slightly different, the same word in a different voice, the same pitch in a different timbre.

"She's coming to the workshop next Thursday," Eliot said. "If that's all right."

"Of course it's all right."

He nodded. He returned to the manuscript. Abigail returned to her sandwich, and then to the plate, and the afternoon passed in the rhythm of work and silence that had become their shared tempo, the pace at which they moved through the days and the measures and the pages, and Abigail cut the copper and Eliot read the notation and the music accumulated between them, the concerto that a dead man had written for a living one, and the burnished area on the plate held its new engraving cleanly, and the proof came out clean, and the copper remembered what had been there before, beneath the surface, in the compressed grain of the metal where the old grooves had been filled but not erased, where the history of the error persisted invisibly, the way all histories persist, beneath the clean surface of the present, in the material that has been worked and reworked and that carries, in its altered structure, the record of everything that has been done to it.

Abigail finished the second movement's engraving that evening, working alone in the workshop after Eliot had left, the last light of the March afternoon fading from the windows as she cut the final measures — a long, sustained tone in the solo violin, a high D on the third ledger line, held over a diminishing accompaniment in the strings, the orchestra gradually falling silent around the solo voice until only the violin remained, alone, holding the note, the sound thinning to nothing as the dynamic marking descended from piano to pianissimo to the three-p marking, pianississimo, that Barlow had written in the margin with a note that read: as quiet as possible, the bow barely touching the string, the sound almost imaginary.

She cut the three p's into the copper. She cut the final barline — a thin line followed by a thick line, the double barline that signified the end of a movement. She set down the graver. She looked at the plate.

The second movement was complete. Engraved in copper, reversed, permanent, ready for the proof that would tell her whether the work was clean, whether the burnished section held, whether the three p's of the final dynamic were legible, whether the high D on the third ledger line was positioned correctly, whether the whole complex, dense, expressive page of music that Peter Barlow had composed in his dying months and that Abigail had spent weeks cutting into metal was, when printed, right.

She would pull the proof on Monday. She would examine it note by note, the way she always did, and she would find the errors and she would correct them and she would pull another proof and another until the proof was clean and the work was done and the second movement joined the first in the folder of approved pages that sat on the shelf above her bench, growing thicker week by week as the concerto took shape.

She covered the plate. She cleaned the burnisher — wiping it with the oiled cloth, returning it to its felt-lined slot — and she cleaned the graver and the mallet and the magnifying glass and all the small tools that she had used during the day, each one restored to its place in the order that had been established before she was born and that would persist after she was gone, the order of the workshop, the arrangement of the tools, the system that contained the work and made the work possible.

She put on her coat. She turned off the lamp. She stood in the dark workshop and she thought about the burnisher — the tool for undoing, the smooth blade that erased the cuts and pushed the metal back into the grooves and made the surface smooth again, smooth but not original, smooth but remembering, the copper carrying in its compressed grain the record of the error and the record of the correction, both histories present in the same material, one visible and one invisible, one printed on the proof and one retained in the plate.

She descended the stairs. She went out into the evening. The air was warm. Spring was arriving, and the trees along Sansom Street were beginning to show the first green of their new leaves, and Abigail walked to her car and sat in it and looked at the trees and thought about new growth, which was not the same as restoration, not the erasure of winter but the continuation past it, the next measure, the next phrase, the music going on.