legends · 4 min read ·
Tuning the Upright
A piano tuner finds a note in the walls of a house that the piano itself cannot play.
Tuning is mostly listening to two notes disagree. You strike a fork, A at 440, you play the string beside it, and you hear the beat between them, a slow wow-wow-wow, and you turn the pin until the beat slows and stops. A tuner's whole life is the removal of beats. We spend forty years making things agree.
I was sent to a house in Kettle Row by a woman who had found my card in a church hall. She said the piano was her late husband's and that she didn't play but couldn't bear it going out of tune. That is a common reason. I booked it for a Tuesday afternoon, three hours.
The instrument was a German upright in a front room full of well-kept brown furniture, a good one from the thirties, with candle sconces and a cracked soundboard that had been repaired by someone who knew what they were doing. I took the front off. I laid out my tools. Mrs. Aubrey made tea and went into the kitchen and shut the door.
I began with the temperament, the middle octave, where the rest is built. The notes were stable. The piano was in better shape than the room suggested. A dozen strings out by a few cents. A bass string dull from dust.
It was at the top of the middle octave that I found the note.
An F sharp. I struck it. It was in tune with its neighbours, correctly, perfectly, but when I let it ring there was a beat in it. A slow wow. I listened, and checked the unison, three strings to a note, and each was true. But the beat was there. The note was disagreeing with something that was not the piano.
I got up and walked the room, with the fork in my ear, the way you do with a mistuned harmonic. The sound was strongest by the window, in a corner behind the curtain, where nothing was. I put the fork against the wall. It rang louder against the plaster, a thick drone. There was a note in the wall.
I told Mrs. Aubrey. She said, "Is it the radiator?" I said no, and she said, "That's what my husband said it was."
I went back to the piano. And as I played, deliberately, one note at a time, I found a second one. A B flat in the treble that carried a beat. A C in the bass. Each of them, on being struck, set up a hum from a different part of the room. A picture frame. The brass fire irons. A glass on the sideboard. I had the horrible sense of a tuning of the whole room, a chord that was not mine, laid under the house like a foundation.
I ran the rest of the scale. Eleven notes were answered. There was one that wasn't. Somewhere in the key of the house a single note was missing, and in that gap I could feel the others leaning towards it, as a congregation leans towards a missing hymn.
Mrs. Aubrey came in, because I had stopped playing. She stood in the doorway with the teapot.
"Is something wrong?"
"Mrs. Aubrey, did your husband tune the house?"
She said nothing for a time. Then: "He used to say that the piano had to be right or the walls wouldn't hold."
"What did he mean?"
"I don't know. He was a bit of a crank about it." She looked at the piano. "He said he had put it all right, except one. He said that if the last one was ever struck, you'd know. He called it the key."
I do not like to say what I did next. I am a professional. I am trained not to touch what I am not asked to touch. But the note was missing from the scale and I could feel the house bending around the gap, and I thought that if I could find the string that had been left out I could set it. It's what I do. I ran my finger along the bass. Every string was present. I counted them. Then, in the low end of the keyboard, the last note on the left, A zero, the lowest A, I pressed down and heard nothing.
The key went down. The hammer moved, I saw it move. But the string did not sound. Instead there was a long, slow pressure in my ears, as when a lift drops. The room had changed. In the corner behind the curtain, the plaster was ringing.
Mrs. Aubrey said, very quietly, "Oh, my dear. You've struck it."
I have not been paid for that job. I took the tools and left, and nothing in the house followed me out. But I find now that whenever I tune, in any room, with any instrument, I listen for the beat. And in every piano, under the strings, under the room, there is a single note the instrument is not sounding. It is always the same. It is A, the lowest A, and it is getting louder.