The Stem

The rule for stems was simple: notes below the middle line of the staff had stems pointing up, and notes above the middle line had stems pointing down, and notes on the middle line could go either way depending on the direction of the surrounding stems, the goal being always to minimize the distance between the notehead and the beam or flag at the end of the stem, to keep the notation compact and legible, to prevent the stems from extending so far above or below the staff that they collided with the notation on adjacent staves.

The rule for stems was simple. Its application was not.

In a solo part — a single melodic line on a single staff — the rule was unambiguous and Abigail could follow it without thought, her hand automatically orienting the graver to cut the stem in the correct direction as she moved from note to note. But in a full score, where thirteen staves were stacked vertically on the page and the space between them was limited, the stems had to be managed not only for their own staff but in relation to the staves above and below, so that a stem pointing upward on the viola staff did not extend into the territory of the second violin staff above it, and a stem pointing downward on the cello staff did not intrude upon the bass staff below it. This required constant adjustment, constant awareness of the vertical relationships between the staves, and Abigail, as she worked her way through the second movement of the Barlow concerto, found herself making dozens of small decisions per page about stem direction, stem length, and the related question of beam angle — the slope of the thick line connecting the stems of beamed notes, which had to be adjusted to prevent the beam from extending too far above or below the staff.

These decisions were invisible to the performer. A violinist reading the part would see only the notes, the rhythms, the dynamics, the expressive markings that told her how to play. She would not see the stem decisions, the spacing calculations, the careful management of vertical space that allowed the page to present its information clearly and without confusion. This invisibility was, Abigail believed, the engraver's highest achievement — to solve the visual problems of the notation so completely that the performer did not know the problems had existed, to make the page appear natural, inevitable, as if the music had simply appeared on the paper in its ideal form, without human mediation.

She was working on the second movement's central section, a long passage for solo violin over pizzicato strings. The solo line was in the upper register — second, third, fourth ledger lines above the staff — and the ledger lines themselves, which Abigail cut freehand with the graver, created a visual density at the top of the solo violin staff that threatened to collide with the orchestral notation above it. She had to be careful. Each ledger line had to be long enough to be legible but short enough not to extend beyond the notehead it supported. The noteheads had to be precisely positioned on or between the ledger lines, and the stems — which, for notes above the staff, pointed downward — had to be long enough to reach the staff but not so long that they overlapped with the notation below.

It was painstaking work. The graver moved in increments measured in fractions of a millimeter, the hand controlled not by the large muscles of the arm but by the small muscles of the fingers, the tendons that ran along the back of the hand and connected to the joints that determined the angle and depth of the cut. Abigail could feel these tendons working as she engraved, could feel the specific fatigue that accumulated in them over the course of a long session, a tightness that began at the base of the fingers and spread upward into the wrist and forearm and that she managed with periodic stretching — extending the fingers flat on the bench surface and pressing down gently, a stretch she had learned from Joseph Loewe, who had learned it from Friedrich Hartwell, who had learned it from his own master in Leipzig, the transmission of craft knowledge extending backward through generations in an unbroken chain that Abigail valued not for its sentiment but for its utility, because the stretch worked, because it relieved the tightness and allowed her to continue cutting.

She was stretching her hand, her fingers flat on the bench, her eyes resting on the plate without focusing, when her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She ignored it. It buzzed again. She ignored it again. It buzzed a third time, and the pattern — three buzzes in quick succession, rather than the single buzz of a text message or the sustained vibration of a phone call — indicated something she did not immediately recognize, and she reached for her coat and pulled out the phone.

It was Eliot. Not a call but a text message, and then a second, and then a third, sent in the rapid sequence that she associated with urgency, with something that could not wait for the careful pacing of a phone conversation.

The first message read: Did you know about the Barlow concerto before you told me?

The second: I looked it up. His estate is having it engraved. By Hartwell and Loewe.

The third: You're engraving it.

Abigail looked at the phone. The screen was small and bright in the green-shaded light of the workshop, the words displayed in the san-serif font that she found, as an engraver, aesthetically unsatisfying — the letters too uniform, too perfect, lacking the small variations that gave hand-set type its warmth and legibility. She read the three messages again and she noted, with the same attention she brought to a proof sheet, the progression they represented: a question, a statement, an accusation. The rhetorical structure of someone who had already answered his own question and was asking it not for information but for confirmation.

She typed: Yes. I'm engraving it.

The response came in seconds: Why didn't you tell me?

She typed: I wasn't sure what to tell you. I'm still reading the manuscript.

A pause. A long pause, longer than the intervals between the first three messages, and Abigail watched the screen for the typing indicator — the three small dots that would tell her Eliot was composing a response — and the dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again, and she understood that he was writing and deleting and rewriting, and the uncertainty of this process was, to her, more revealing than the messages themselves, because it meant he cared about what he said, cared about the words, cared about the conversation in a way that he had not cared about their recent conversations, which had been conducted in the careful, low-energy register that she had come to associate with his plateau, with the flat emotional terrain he had inhabited since the breakdown.

The response came: Is it any good?

Abigail looked at the question. She looked at it the way she looked at a difficult passage in a manuscript — holding it at a distance, considering it from multiple angles, trying to determine not just what it said but what it meant, what it was really asking. Is it any good could mean: is the music well-written. It could mean: is the engraving going well. It could mean: is there anything in it worth paying attention to. It could mean: does it matter.

She typed: It's extraordinary.

She had not planned to say this. Like the remark to Margaret about Barlow calling her work beautiful, the word emerged without permission, bypassing the filters of caution and calibration that she normally applied to her communications with Eliot. Extraordinary. It was not a word she used. She was not a person who made large claims. She described things as good, as correct, as clean, as acceptable — the modest vocabulary of a craftsperson who measured quality by the absence of error rather than the presence of excellence. But the word had come out, and it was true, and she did not retract it.

Eliot did not respond for twenty minutes.

Abigail put the phone back in her coat pocket and returned to the plate. She picked up the graver and positioned it at the place where she had left off — the solo violin line in the upper register, the ledger lines, the downward stems — and she began to cut, and as she cut she thought about the conversation, about what Eliot had asked and what she had answered and about the twenty-minute silence that was either a withdrawal or a processing, either Eliot retreating from the subject or Eliot absorbing it, and she did not know which it was and she could not ask because asking would be pressing and pressing was the one thing she had promised herself she would not do.

The phone buzzed once more. She finished the note she was cutting — she never interrupted a cut, never stopped the graver midstroke, because a stopped graver left a mark, a small gouge in the copper that could not be fully burnished out — and then she reached for the phone.

Can I see it?

Three words. Abigail read them and reread them and held the phone in her stained hand — the hand that had been cutting copper all morning, the fingertips slightly abraded from contact with the metal, the palm carrying the impression of the graver's handle — and she felt something move in her chest, not a physical sensation but a displacement, the way a note displaces silence, the way a cut displaces copper, and the displacement was this: for the first time in three years, Eliot had asked for something.

Not food, not conversation, not the careful maintenance of the relationship that Abigail had been providing like a utility, steady and unvaried, the lights left on in a house whose occupant might or might not be home. He had asked to see something. He had asked to see the music.

She typed: Of course. Come to the workshop whenever you like.

She put the phone away. She returned to the plate. The solo violin line continued upward, the notes climbing through the ledger lines toward a high harmonic — an ethereal tone produced by the lightest touch of the finger on the string, notated as a diamond-shaped notehead on the fourth ledger line above the staff — and Abigail cut the diamond notehead with the particular care that the unusual shape required, the four straight sides meeting at precise angles, the overall shape oriented with its long axis vertical, distinguishing it from a regular notehead, which was oriented with its long axis tilted slightly to the right.

The harmonic. The high, pure tone that existed at the edge of the violin's range. The note that was barely there — produced not by pressing the string to the fingerboard but by touching it, lightly, at the exact point where the string's vibration divided into halves or thirds or quarters, and the resulting sound was not the fundamental pitch of the string but one of its overtones, a ghost note, a whisper from the physics of the vibrating string, and the engraver's job was to make this whisper visible on the page, to notate it so that the performer knew to touch rather than press, to produce a sound that was the opposite of the fortissimo masses of the orchestral tutti — small, fragile, almost inaudible, but carrying within it the mathematical structure of the harmonic series, the natural law that determined not only the pitch of the harmonic but the entire system of tonal music, the relationships between notes that made harmony possible.

Abigail thought about harmonics as she engraved. She thought about the way they existed above the fundamental, above the staff, in the ledger-line territory where the notation became sparse and the noteheads became diamonds and the music approached silence. She thought about the analogy — if it was an analogy, if she was the kind of person who thought in analogies, which she was not, or had not been — between the harmonic and something else, something about Eliot, something about the way the essential things in a person could be hidden above the normal range, could exist as overtones rather than fundamentals, present but inaudible unless you knew where to listen, where to touch the string.

She finished the harmonic notation and moved to the pizzicato indication in the string parts — the abbreviation pizz. followed by the direction arco when the performers were to resume bowing. The pizzicato notes were written as normal noteheads but printed with a different quality — slightly smaller, slightly lighter, a visual cue that supplemented the verbal indication and that helped the performer's eye distinguish the plucked passages from the bowed ones. This visual differentiation was not specified in the house style manual. It was one of Abigail's own practices, a refinement she had developed over years of engraving string parts and observing how performers read them, and it was the kind of small innovation that would never be noticed by anyone who did not engrave music but that contributed, in its modest way, to the clarity and usability of the printed page.

She worked through the afternoon. At four o'clock George Parrish came to her bench and stood beside it in the way that meant he wanted to speak, and Abigail set down her graver and looked up.

"Eliot called the front desk," George said. "Margaret spoke to him. He's coming tomorrow."

"Tomorrow."

"Saturday. Margaret said she'd open the workshop for him. He wants to see the manuscript."

Abigail nodded. She had not expected this — not the visit itself, which she had invited, but the speed of it, the fact that Eliot had not waited, had not deliberated, had not retreated into the silence that usually followed any expression of interest. He had called the office. He had made an arrangement. He was coming.

She did not know what this meant. She did not let herself speculate about what it meant, because speculation was interpretation and interpretation was not her job. Her job was to prepare — to have the manuscript ready, to have the proofs ready, to have the plates available for Eliot to see if he wanted to see them, to create the conditions for whatever was going to happen and then to step back and let it happen, the way she stepped back from a completed plate and let Marcus print it, trusting the process, trusting the ink and the paper and the pressure of the roller to produce the result.

She finished the day's work. She covered the plate. She cleaned her tools. She put on her coat and descended the stairs and walked to her car in the early evening light, the March air carrying the first suggestion of spring — a softness, a warmth at the edges, a smell of wet earth from the park two blocks away — and she drove home and made dinner and did not call Eliot because there was nothing to say that the morning would not say better, and she sat at the kitchen table with the manuscript and read the second movement's central section, where Barlow had written, in the margin beside the solo violin's high harmonic:

E — touch, don't press. You know this. You always knew this. The lightest thing is the truest thing. I'm writing this for you because you taught it to me and I don't think you remember that you know it.

Abigail copied the annotation into her notebook. She closed the manuscript. She turned off the light. She sat in the dark kitchen, at the table where Eliot had eaten his childhood dinners and done his homework and written his first compositions, and she held the notebook in her lap, and she thought about touch, and about pressing, and about the difference between them, and about what it would mean, tomorrow, to show her son the music that a dead man had written for him, and she did not know whether she was about to do the right thing or the wrong thing, but she knew she was going to do it, because Eliot had asked, and because asking was the first note of something, the entrance of the solo voice after the long orchestral silence, and she would not — could not — refuse to play her part.

The stems pointed up and down according to their rules. The notes sat on the staff in their appointed places. The ledger lines extended the range where the range needed extending, and the harmonics glimmered at the top of the page like stars seen through a window, and Abigail sat in the dark and waited for morning.