The Rastrum

The rastrum was the first tool and the last argument — five steel points set in a brass holder at intervals of precisely two millimeters, each point ground to a chisel edge no wider than a human hair, the whole assembly mounted on a wooden handle that had been turned on a lathe by a man who had been dead for eighty-eight years and that bore, on its underside, the faintest impression of the maker's stamp: Klingenthal, Solingen, 1938. It was the tool that made the staff. Without it, there was no music — or rather, there was music but no way to fix it to the page, no grid of five lines and four spaces on which the notes could be placed and given their specific meaning, because a note without a staff was only a dot, a mark without reference, and music engraving was, at its foundation, the art of reference, of establishing the coordinates within which each symbol acquired its identity.

Abigail held the rastrum against the straightedge and drew it across the copper plate in a single continuous stroke, left to right, the five points cutting five parallel grooves into the polished surface with a sound like the tearing of fine cloth. The stroke had to be continuous. If she lifted the rastrum and set it down again, even a fraction of a millimeter off, the lines would show a discontinuity that would be invisible on the plate but would appear on the printed page as a slight thickening or doubling at the point of interruption, and this imperfection, though it would not affect the readability of the music, would be a failure of craft that Abigail would know about for the rest of her life, a knowledge that would attach itself to the plate and to every copy printed from it and would become, in her private accounting, a debt that could never be repaid because the plate, once cut, was permanent, and the only remedy for a flawed staff line was to burnish it out and re-rule it, a process so time-consuming that it was almost always better to start the plate over.

She did not start over. She had not had a discontinuous staff line in fourteen years.

The plate before her was new — a full sheet, eighteen by fourteen inches, larger than the half-sheets she used for individual parts, because this plate would carry a page of the full orchestral score of Peter Barlow's Violin Concerto No. 2, and a full score required more staves: one for each instrument, arranged vertically down the page in the standard orchestral order that had been established by convention in the nineteenth century and that had not changed since, because orchestral scoring, like so many things in the world of classical music, had found its form and was content to remain in it. Flutes at the top, then oboes, clarinets, bassoons. Horns, trumpets, timpani. Then strings: first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, basses. And above all of these, on its own staff at the very top of the page with a bracket connecting it to the orchestra below, the solo violin part.

Thirteen staves per system. Two systems per page, if the music was dense. Three, if it was spare.

She had spent the previous evening studying the manuscript, sitting at the kitchen table with a magnifying glass and a pencil, turning each page slowly, trying to construct from Peter Barlow's deteriorating handwriting a coherent picture of the work. It was not easy. The first movement was the most legible — the handwriting firmer, the notation more conventional, the orchestration clear enough that Abigail could hear it in her mind as she read, the solo violin entering after a twelve-measure orchestral introduction with a long lyrical melody in G minor that climbed steadily upward through two octaves before settling on a high D that was held, with a diminuendo, over a sustained chord in the strings. The passage was beautiful in the way that competently written tonal music is always beautiful — it fulfilled its promises, resolved its tensions, gave the ear what the ear expected and was grateful for.

The second movement was harder. The handwriting had begun to deteriorate, the notes growing larger and less precise, and the orchestration was more complex — extended techniques in the strings, harmonics, col legno passages, divisi writing that required Abigail to distinguish between notes that were assigned to the same stand and notes that were split between stands, a distinction that the manuscript did not always make clear. There were also passages where the solo violin was required to play above the staff, on ledger lines — small horizontal lines added above or below the five-line staff to accommodate notes that exceeded the normal range — and these ledger lines, in Barlow's increasingly unsteady hand, were nearly illegible, the lines blurring into each other, the noteheads dissolving into smudges that could be read as one pitch or another depending on how charitably one interpreted the angle of the stem or the position of the accidental.

Abigail did not interpret charitably. She interpreted accurately, or she did not interpret at all. Where the manuscript was ambiguous she made a note on a separate sheet — a question mark, a measure number, a brief description of the problem — and moved on. She would need to consult other sources. She would need to compare Barlow's handwriting in this manuscript with his handwriting in other published scores, to establish his habits, his idiosyncrasies, the personal shorthand that every composer develops over a career of notating music and that becomes, to the practiced reader, as legible as printed text.

The third movement she had barely been able to read at all. The pages were stained — coffee, she thought, or tea, and in one corner something darker that she did not want to identify — and the handwriting had become almost frantic, the notes crowded together, the dynamic markings scrawled in a hand that was no longer writing but scratching, clawing the music onto the page before something gave out. The last few pages were the worst. She could make out the general shape of the music — a fast movement, a kind of moto perpetuo for the solo violin over an increasingly agitated orchestral accompaniment — but the specific notes, the exact pitches and rhythms, were in many places beyond her ability to decipher without more study, more time, more context.

She had put the manuscript away at eleven o'clock and gone to bed and lain awake thinking not about the music but about the dedication.

For E.V.

Eliot Voss. Her son. Who had studied with Peter Barlow at Juilliard from 2016 to 2019, during the years of his master's degree, years that Abigail remembered as the best of Eliot's life — the years when he had been writing music, performing it, living inside it the way she had never been able to live inside it during her own time at Curtis, with a totality of immersion that she recognized as the thing she herself had lacked, the thing that separated the maker from the maker's assistant. Eliot had been a maker. His student compositions had been performed and praised. His professors had spoken of him with the careful understatement that, in academic circles, substituted for enthusiasm. Peter Barlow himself had written, in a recommendation letter that Abigail had found among Eliot's papers after the breakdown, that Eliot possessed "a musical mind of uncommon depth and an ear for the inner life of harmony that I have encountered perhaps three times in my teaching career."

Three times. Peter Barlow had taught at Juilliard for twenty-five years. Hundreds of students had passed through his studio. And three times he had encountered what Eliot had.

Abigail thought about this as she ruled the staff lines on the new plate. Each pass of the rastrum produced five lines, and a full-score page required thirteen staves, which meant thirteen passes, and between each pass she had to lift the rastrum, reposition it at the exact distance dictated by the house style manual — three millimeters between staves within a system, five millimeters between systems — and draw it across the plate again with the same continuous pressure, the same steady speed, the same absence of hesitation that the tool demanded and that she had trained herself to provide.

The training had taken years. Not the physical skill — that she had acquired relatively quickly, within the first year of her apprenticeship — but the mental discipline, the ability to suppress the hand's natural tendency to waver, to tremble, to respond to the body's rhythms of breath and pulse and muscle fatigue. The hand wanted to be alive. The rastrum wanted it dead — or not dead, exactly, but mechanical, consistent, repeatable, as reliable as the machine that the hand was pretending to be. This was the paradox at the center of hand engraving: the value of the hand was that it was not a machine, but the discipline of the hand was that it must behave like one, and the beauty of the result — the warm, human quality that collectors and performers valued in a hand-engraved score — emerged not from the hand's freedom but from its bondage, from the tension between the organic instrument and the mechanical standard it was held to.

Abigail knew this tension. She had lived inside it for thirty-one years. She sometimes thought it was the only thing she truly understood.

She finished the staff lines and set the rastrum back in its velvet-lined slot in the tool case. The plate now bore thirteen groups of five parallel lines, each group as straight and uniform as the last, the copper gleaming between them like water between the planks of a dock. She would let the plate rest until tomorrow. The wax ground needed time to settle into the grooves, to fill the microscopic irregularities left by the rastrum's passage, and Abigail had learned through experience that a plate ruled in the morning and engraved in the afternoon would sometimes show a faint roughness in the staff lines that did not appear when the plate was allowed to cure overnight.

She turned back to the viola part, which was due on Friday. The work was straightforward — the remaining measures of the second movement, mostly sustained tones and simple rhythmic patterns that the composer had written as accompaniment to a more active first violin part — and Abigail cut them with the efficient automaticity that long experience permits, her hands executing the familiar motions while her mind occupied itself with the question of Peter Barlow.

She had met him once. It was at a reception following a concert at the Kimmel Center, one of the few concerts she attended each year, always alone, always sitting in the upper balcony where the tickets were cheap and where the sound, contrary to what most people believed, was actually better than on the main floor, because the upper reaches of a concert hall received the blended sound of the entire ensemble rather than the direct, unbalanced sound that reached the front rows. She had gone to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra perform Barlow's Second Symphony, a piece she knew well because she had engraved the parts herself, six years earlier, working from a manuscript that had been far more legible than the one now sitting on her kitchen table. After the concert she had been invited — by Margaret, who maintained relationships with the composers whose work the firm engraved — to a reception in the green room, and there she had met Barlow.

He was a tall man, thin, with the long hands of a pianist and a face that was, she thought, exactly the face of someone who had spent his life listening — attentive, patient, slightly abstracted, as if the visible world were a translation of something else that he was always trying to hear through it. He had shaken her hand and said, "You're the one who engraved the symphony," and she had said yes, and he had said, "It was beautiful work," and she had said thank you, and that had been the whole of their conversation, but she remembered it — she remembered everything — and she remembered specifically the way he had looked at her when he said "beautiful work," as if he were not paying a compliment but stating a fact, the same way he might have said "it's raining" or "the concert is over," and she had understood from this that he meant it, that he had actually looked at the engraving and seen what she had put into it, and this understanding had stayed with her for six years like a stone in her pocket, something she could reach for and close her hand around when she needed evidence that the work mattered.

Eliot had never spoken about Barlow. Not to Abigail, at least. During the Juilliard years, Eliot had spoken about his studies in general terms — the classes he was taking, the pieces he was writing, the concerts he attended — but he had not spoken about his teachers by name, or about the specific relationships that a composition student forms with a mentor, the intense, intimate exchange of ideas and techniques and aesthetic convictions that is, in some ways, the real education, more important than any lecture or seminar. Abigail had respected this privacy. She had not asked. She had not pressed. This was her way with Eliot, had been her way since he was a teenager and she had recognized that the thing growing in him — the musical intelligence, the need to compose — was his own and could not be tended by her, only left alone to develop in whatever direction it chose.

She had left it alone. She had left him alone. And now he was silent, and she did not know whether the leaving-alone had been the right thing or the wrong thing, whether the space she had given him had been the soil he needed or the void he had fallen into, and this not-knowing was the thing she carried with her every day, to the workshop and back, the weight she could not set down because to set it down would be to decide, and she was not ready to decide.

George Parrish appeared at the edge of her bench. "The Barlow," he said.

Abigail looked up.

"Margaret told me. The concerto. She says it's in rough shape."

"It is."

"You taking it?"

"Yes."

George nodded. He had known Peter Barlow too, in the way that everyone in the small world of classical music publishing knew everyone else — not well, not personally, but as a presence, a name attached to a body of work that they had all handled at one time or another. George had engraved the cello part for Barlow's First String Quartet. David Koss had done the piano reduction of the opera. Helen Sung had worked on a set of songs for voice and piano that Barlow had written for his wife, a mezzo-soprano who had died several years before him and whose absence, people said, had been the beginning of whatever had ended in January.

"Let me know if you need a second set of eyes on the manuscript," George said.

"I will."

He returned to his bench. Abigail returned to the viola part. The conversation had lasted forty seconds and had communicated everything that needed to be communicated, which was that the work was known, that it was serious, that Abigail was not alone in it even though she would do it alone, and that George was available if she needed him and would not be offended if she did not.

This was how things worked in the workshop. This was how things had always worked, since before Abigail arrived, since the days when Friedrich Hartwell and Joseph Loewe sat at adjacent benches and communicated through their tools and their silence and the occasional brief exchange of words that carried, in their brevity, the full weight of a shared vocation. The workshop was a place where language was used sparingly because the work itself was a language — the precise, codified, universally legible language of music notation — and to add more words on top of it was felt to be, not exactly wasteful, but redundant, like narrating a photograph.

Abigail finished the viola part at four o'clock on Thursday, a day ahead of schedule. She cleaned the plate, pulled a proof on the small hand press at the back of the workshop — a miniature version of the flatbed press downstairs, used for checking work before it went to Marcus for the final printing — and examined the proof under the magnifying glass clamped to her bench. The proof was clean. The notes were correctly placed, the stems were straight, the beams were parallel, the dynamics were legible, the slurs followed the phrases with the natural, breathing curve that distinguished a hand-drawn slur from a computer-generated one. She marked the proof as approved, clipped it to the job sheet, and set the plate aside for Marcus.

Then she pulled the new plate toward her — the full-sheet with the freshly ruled staves — and opened Peter Barlow's manuscript to the first page of the full score.

The first measure was a rest. The entire orchestra rested for one measure of four-four time, and the silence was notated in the standard way: a whole rest hanging below the fourth line of each staff, a small black rectangle that signified not the absence of music but the presence of counted time, of structured silence, of the orchestra sitting with their instruments raised and their bows poised and their breath held, waiting for the downbeat of the second measure, which would bring, according to the manuscript, a low tremolo in the cellos and basses, a sustained B-flat in the bassoons, and above it all, entering alone and unaccompanied on the third beat, the solo violin.

Abigail looked at the solo violin's entrance. Barlow had written it in his earlier, steadier hand — this was the first movement, still legible, still controlled — and the notes were clear: a B-flat above the staff, on the second ledger line, approached by a leap of a minor ninth from the A-natural that preceded it, a leap that would require the violinist to shift from first position to seventh in the space of a single beat, a physical demand that was also an expressive demand, because the distance traveled by the left hand on the fingerboard would be felt by the audience as a kind of reaching, an extension beyond the normal range, and this reaching, this extension, was, Abigail understood, the point.

The ledger line. The note that exceeded the staff. The small additional line that said: the music goes further than the structure allows for, and we must make room.

She picked up the lozenge graver and began to cut the first measure. The whole rests were simple — a rectangular punch struck into the copper at the correct position below the fourth line of each staff — but they required alignment, each rest centered horizontally within the measure and positioned vertically at the precise depth that tradition and the house style manual prescribed. She worked down the page, staff by staff, punching the rests into the copper with the small mallet that she kept on a leather pad beside the plate holder, the sound of each strike a muffled tap that was absorbed by the building's brick walls and wooden floors and did not carry beyond the room.

Thirteen rests. One measure. The beginning of the piece.

She moved to the second measure. The cellos and basses required a tremolo notation — slashes through the stems of the half notes that indicated rapid repetition of the note, a technique that was standard in orchestral writing and that Abigail could engrave in her sleep, each slash a tiny diagonal cut across the stem at a forty-five-degree angle, the number of slashes indicating the speed of the tremolo: three slashes for thirty-second notes, two for sixteenths, one for eighths.

Barlow had written three slashes. The tremolo would be fast, agitated, a pulse beneath the sustained tone of the bassoons that would create the bed of sound over which the solo violin would enter. Abigail cut the tremolo notation and moved to the bassoon staves, where the sustained B-flat was written as a whole note with a tie leading into the next measure, and she cut the note and the tie and the dynamic marking — pianissimo, two small italic p's that she engraved freehand because the punch set did not include dynamic markings, a deliberate choice by Friedrich Hartwell, who had believed that dynamics, being expressive indications rather than structural elements, should carry the slight variability of the engraver's hand, a philosophy that Abigail endorsed and that she had never articulated to anyone because it did not require articulation, only execution.

She reached the solo violin staff. The third beat of the second measure. The A-natural followed by the leap to B-flat on the second ledger line. She cut the A-natural first — a quarter note on the first space of the staff, stem up, with a natural sign to distinguish it from the A-flat implied by the key signature — and then she paused.

The ledger line would need to be drawn by hand. The rastrum ruled only the five lines of the staff. Anything above or below — the small horizontal lines that extended the staff's range upward or downward to accommodate notes that exceeded it — was drawn individually, by hand, with the ruling pen, a steel-nibbed instrument that held ink in a reservoir between its two flexible blades and that deposited a line of controlled width when drawn across the copper with the straightedge.

But Abigail was not drawing with ink. She was cutting copper. The ledger lines would need to be cut with the graver, freehand, each one a miniature staff line that had to match the weight and consistency of the ruled staves below it. This was one of the most difficult tasks in hand engraving — the freehand cutting of a short, straight, uniformly weighted line — because the hand, freed from the constraint of the straightedge, wanted to curve, wanted to waver, wanted to express its own organic nature rather than the mechanical perfection that the line demanded.

She cut the first ledger line. It crossed through the notehead of the B-flat — a small horizontal stroke, no wider than the notehead itself, extending a fraction beyond it on each side. The line was straight. The weight was correct. She moved on.

The solo violin's melody unfolded across the next several measures, climbing higher, the ledger lines multiplying as the pitch ascended — two ledger lines, then three, then four — and Abigail cut each one with the same care, the same controlled freehand precision, feeling in her wrist and fingers the particular tension of cutting a line that had no guide, that depended entirely on the steadiness of her hand and the depth of her training.

She worked until five o'clock. She had completed only two measures of the full score — thirty-two beats of music, spread across thirteen staves, each staff containing its own notation, its own rhythms, its own particular demands on the engraver's skill. At this rate the first movement alone would take weeks. The entire concerto would take months.

She covered the plate and cleaned her tools and left the workshop. The March air was cold against her face as she walked to her car, and she thought about the solo violin's entrance, the leap to the B-flat on the ledger line, and she thought about Eliot, who had once been capable of leaps like that — not on the violin, which he did not play, but on the page, in his compositions, where he had written music that reached beyond the expected range with a fearlessness that Abigail, who had spent her life within the staff, within the lines, within the given structure, had recognized as something she did not possess and could not teach and could only, with the tools she had, make visible.

She drove home. She ate dinner. She did not call Eliot. She sat at the kitchen table with the manuscript and her magnifying glass and began again the slow work of deciphering what the dead man had written for her living son, and the house around her was silent, and the pages turned under her hands, and the music, unheard, accumulated in the space between them.