by Daniel Mason
“Hmmm … What else can I tell you, Doctor? Two pedals—a sustaining pedal and an una corda. The dampers will run to the second B key above the middle octave—that is pretty typical. Erard dampers are located below the strings and held there by a spring, which is unusual, most piano dampers rest on the strings from above. I’ll know when I look inside, but it should have cast-iron tension bars between the wrest-plank and the rim, this was pretty standard by 1840; it served to support the tension of stronger steel wires, which were used because of their louder sound.” He touched the design that stretched above the keyboard. “Look at the nameboard, it is mother-of-pearl.” He looked up to see a bemused look on Carroll’s face, and laughed. “Forgive me, I am getting carried away …”
“I am glad to see you are so pleased. I must confess, I was actually concerned that you might be angry.”
“Angry? Good Lord, what would I be angry about?”
“I don’t know, part of me has felt that the piano’s condition is my fault, that I put it at risk by bringing it here, and that would anger a lover of musical instruments. I don’t know if you remember, but I asked the War Office to give you an envelope, with instructions not to open it.” He paused. “You may open it now. It is nothing, just a description of how I transported the piano to Mae Lwin, but I did not want you to read it until you saw that it was safe.”
“Is that what the letter was about? I have been quite curious. I thought perhaps it was something about the dangers here, that you might not want my wife to read … but the Erard’s journey? Perhaps you are right, perhaps I should be angry. But I am a tuner. The only thing I care for more than pianos is repairing them. And regardless: it is here, and now that I am here as well …” He stopped and looked out of the window. “Well, I can’t think of any place more exciting and worthier of its music. Besides, the strings can stand up to incredible abuse, although perhaps not what this instrument has been through, and I certainly can’t say the same about mother-of-pearl decoration. What I would be worried about is the sun and humidity, which can cause it to go out of tune in days.” He paused. “Actually, Doctor, I do have one question. I have never spoken to you about this, and I couldn’t find any mention of it in your letters, but I don’t even know if you have played the piano yet, or what it has … accomplished.”
The Doctor put his hand on the Erard. “Ah, Mr. Drake. We haven’t spoken about this because I don’t have much to tell you. There was a celebration soon after I brought it here. An occasion notable for both sadness and rejoicing—you will read about it in my letter—the village insisted, and I obliged. They made me play for hours. Of course, only then did I realize how out of tune the piano already was. If any of the Shan felt so too, they were polite, although I think that the instrument is strange enough for them; tuning was the least of their concerns. But I have great aspirations for it. You should have seen the faces of the children who came to watch.”
“You didn’t play again.”
“Once or twice, but the piano was so flat—”
“Sharp probably if it was its first time in a humid country. It’s flat now, because of the dry season.”
“Terribly sharp then. And so I stopped playing. It was almost impossible for me to bear.”
“And yet, you thought you could tune it …” Edgar said, half to himself.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Drake?”
“Well, someone who knows enough about pianos to select an 1840 Erard would know that it would go out of tune, especially in the jungle, that it would need a professional tuner. Yet, still, you thought you could do this yourself.”
The Doctor was quiet. “That is what I told the army, but there are other reasons. I was overjoyed that they had granted my request, and I was afraid to ask for more. At times my enthusiasm outruns my abilities. I have seen a piano tuned before and I thought I would try alone first. I thought that, after surgery, it would be easy.”
“I will forgive you for saying that,” said Edgar, lightly. “But I can teach you something about tuning if you like.”
Carroll nodded. “Of course, but only for a little while. I should leave you alone. I have work to do. Besides, it has taken me a long time to become comfortable with observers in the surgery. I imagine it is even more difficult when it comes to treating sound.”
“These, Doctor, are my instruments.” Edgar opened his bag and spread them across the bench. “I brought a basic set. This is a tuning hammer, these narrow-blade screwdrivers are for general use, this special thin screwdriver and a drop-screw regulator are for the action. Let’s see … What else? Key-easing pliers and a key spacer, bending pliers, two damper-bending irons, a spring-adjusting hook, parallel pliers, a special thin capstan-screw regulator used for Erards, for adjusting the hammer height. Also: leather-covered wedges for tuning, and coils of replacement piano wire of different gauges. There are other tools as well, these over here are specifically for voicing: a hammer iron, glue, and multiple extra voicing needles, as they frequently become bent.”
“Voicing? You keep using that word.”
“Sorry, voicing means treating a piano’s hammers so they produce a nice tone when they strike the strings. I am probably getting ahead of myself. You said you have seen a piano tuned?”
“Seen? Once or twice, briefly. But I have never had it explained to me.”
“Well, I’ll wager that you will learn quickly. There are three basic components to tuning. Typically, tuners begin with regulating, which means aligning the action so that the hammers are at even heights and strike the strings briskly and fall back smoothly so that a note can be played again. Usually that is the first step. I like to begin with a rough tuning, however. A piano usually must be tuned several times, as the act of tuning one string changes the dimensions of the soundboard so as to affect all other strings. There are ways to avoid this, tuning strings sharp, for example, but in my opinion, it is still impossible to predict the changes. Furthermore, the strings tend to settle, so it is better to leave the piano overnight before a second attempt. So I tune roughly, regulate, and then tune again—that is my technique, others do do it differently. After this comes voicing, the repair of the hammer felt itself. Erard experts are usually good voicers, if I might be so immodest; the combination of the leather and felt makes the hammers more difficult to work with. There are other smaller jobs as well. For example, I need to think about whether there is a way to waterproof the soundboard. Of course, all of this depends on what is wrong.”
“And do you have any notion what will need to be repaired? Or will you not know until you play?”
“Actually, I can probably guess now. I suppose it is not unlike thinking about a patient’s history before the examination. I can tell you, and then I can let you go.” He turned to the piano and looked at it closely.
“To begin with, there will be a problem with the soundboard, the belly. This is certain. Whether it has cracked yet I don’t know. It is very lucky it has been in Burma for only a year and thus has suffered only one year’s cycle of humidity. Fortunately, as long as the cracks are minor, they can easily be repaired, or ignored even—often it is only a cosmetic concern. Bigger cracks will be more of a problem.”
He tapped his fingers on the case. “The piano will be out of tune, of course. That goes without saying. The dry season will have resulted in the soundboard shrinking, loosening the strings and dropping the pitch. If substantial enough, I may have to raise the pitch as much as a full semitone and leave the piano for at least another twenty-four hours before fine-tuning further. Of course, the problem with doing this is that when the rain comes again, the board will expand, and the increased tension could cause terrible damage. This should have been expected, but the military didn’t seem to consider it. I will have to think about this problem; perhaps I will need to teach someone here to tune.” Suddenly he stopped. “My God, I forgot. In the note you sent me in Mandalay, you wrote the piano was shot. I can’t believe I didn’t think about this until now. It changes everything.
Please, may I see the damage?”
The Doctor walked to the side of the piano and raised the top case. A pungent odor rose from the piano. It was unfamiliar, curried and heavy. “Excuse the smell, Mr. Drake. Turmeric. One of the Shan men suggested I put it into the piano to protect it from termites. You probably don’t do that in London.” He laughed. “But it seems to have worked.”
The lid opened away from the window, so it was dark inside the piano, and Edgar saw the bullet hole immediately, an oval crack in the soundboard through which the floor could be seen. Carroll’s letter was right, the bullet had split all three strings of the fourth-octave A key, leaving them loose, twisting back toward the tuning and hitch pins like strands of uncombed hair. Shot through the belly, he thought, and briefly considered telling the Doctor the stories of the Reign of Terror. Instead he looked inside. There was a nick on the inside of the piano lid, in the trajectory of the bullet, but no exit hole; it probably did not have enough momentum to break through the lid. “Did you take the bullet out?” he asked, and to answer the question himself, he struck a key. There was a rattling on the soundboard. Many clients who called in London sought his services for “a terrible racket,” which turned out to be a coin or screw which had accidentally been dropped into a grand and sat rattling on the soundboard when it vibrated. He squinted into the piano, found the bullet, and picked it out. “A souvenir,” he said. “May I keep it?”
“Of course,” said the Doctor. “Is the damage serious?”
Edgar dropped the bullet into his pocket and peered back inside. “Actually not too bad. I will have to replace the strings, and I need to take another look at the soundboard, but I think it will be all right.”
“Perhaps you should start. I don’t want to keep you any longer.”
“I probably should. I hope I haven’t bored you.”
“No, not in the slightest, Mr. Drake. It has been a pleasure—most educational. I can see I have chosen my help well.” He extended his hand. “Good luck with the patient. Shout if you need anything.” He turned and walked from the room, closing the door behind him. The force sent a tremor through the floor. There was a faint chime of the stirring of strings.
Edgar walked back around to the bench. He didn’t sit; he always told his apprentices that pianos were best tuned if the tuner was standing.
Now to begin, he thought. He hit the middle-octave C key. Too low. He tried one octave below, and then C in the other octaves. Same problem: both almost a full semitone off. The treble notes were even worse. He played the first movement of the English Suites. Without the key with broken strings. He was always self-conscious about his skill as a pianist, but he loved the cool ivory of the keyboard, the swing and sway of playing a melody. He realized it had been months now since he had played and he stopped after several measures; the piano was so miserably out of tune that it was painful for him to listen. He could see why the Doctor had not wanted to play it.
His first tasks would be what he liked to call “structural repairs.” On the Erard this meant mending the broken strings and the soundboard. He walked around the piano, to the hinges of the lid, removed the hinge pins and put them in his pocket. He pulled on the lid, sliding it along the top of the piano until it was balanced on the edge of the case. He bent at his knees, lifted it, and set it gingerly against one of the walls. With the lid out of the way, there was enough light to work inside the piano body.
It was difficult to see all the damage to the soundboard from above, so he climbed beneath the piano and inspected its belly. The entry wound was more visible. A crack ran with the grain, but only for several inches. This is good, he thought. Although the hole would remain, he could easily repair the crack with “shimming,” which meant inserting filler wood into the holes. He only hoped the crack wouldn’t affect the piano’s sound. Although some tuners claimed that shimming was necessary to reestablish tension in the board, he believed that for the most part the repair was superficial, for clients who were disconcerted by long cracks in the inside of their pianos. So he hadn’t anticipated shimming—it seemed superfluous given the setting—and he hadn’t brought a planer to smooth out the board. But the beauty of the Erard caused him to reconsider.
There was another problem. Shimming was usually accomplished with spruce, but Edgar hadn’t brought any, and he didn’t know if spruce grew in the area. He looked about the room, and his eyes settled on the bamboo walls. I would be the first to use bamboo to mend a piano, he thought with some pride, And it is so resonant that perhaps it will make a sound more beautiful than spruce. Besides, he had seen the Burmese peeling strips off the bamboo, which meant that the wood could probably be shaped with a penknife and he wouldn’t need a planer. It wasn’t without risks; using two different types of wood meant that they might respond to the humidity differently and the crack would reopen. But he welcomed the opportunity to innovate, and decided to try.
First he had to file the hole, which took nearly an hour. He worked slowly; the cracks could run and damage the entire soundboard. When he had finished, he rose and sawed a piece of bamboo from the wall. This he carved and coated with glue, and worked into the hole. The broken strings allowed him to reach it from above, and he smoothed it. It took a long time—the blade was small—and while he worked, he realized that he could have gone to ask Carroll for help, for a planer or another larger knife, perhaps for other wood. But something discouraged him. He liked the idea that he could take the very wall of the fort, a product of war, and transform it into the mechanics of sound.
When he had finished shimming, he set to work on the broken strings. He removed and coiled them, and dropped them into his pocket. Another souvenir. In his bag he found string of the correct gauge and unwound it, running it from the tuning pin to the hitch pin and back. He attached the third string to its own hitch pin, and then ran it alongside its companions. When he cut it, he left a length the width of his hand, which would measure three turns around the tuning pin. The strings were bright and silver next to the dullness of their neighbors, and he tuned them sharp, for they would settle.
When the strings and pins were finished he walked back to the front of the piano. To raise the pitch of the entire piano, he began at the center of the keyboard and moved outward, striking keys and tightening strings, now working quickly. It still took nearly an hour.
It was early afternoon when he began the task of regulating. The piano’s action is a complex mechanism, he would explain to clients, communicating between key and hammer, and thus the pianist and sound. Now he removed the nameboard to reach the action. He evened the hammers’ heights, eased sluggish jack centers, and adjusted the setting of the let-off, where the jack kicks out from beneath the hammer. Between regulating, he took breaks, easing keys, adjusting the shift of the una corda pedal. When he finally rose, dusty and tired, the piano was in workable order. He had been lucky that there were no major repairs, such as a cracked pin block. He knew he didn’t have the tools to carry out such a repair. He had little idea how much time had passed, and realized only as he was leaving that the sun was sinking quickly over the forest.
It was dark when he met the Doctor in his office. A half-eaten plate of rice and vegetables was resting on the desk. The Doctor was seated before a stack of papers, reading.
“Good evening.”
The Doctor looked up. “Well, Mr. Drake, you are finished at last. The cook thought I should send for you, but I told him that you wouldn’t want to be disturbed. He complained when I told him to wait until you had finished, but fortunately he is a music lover himself, and I was able to convince him that the sooner you finished, the sooner he would be able to hear the piano.” He smiled. “Please, sit.”
“Excuse me for not washing,” said Edgar, sitting on a small teak stool. “I’m starving. I thought that I would bathe straightaway after dinner and then go to bed. I want to get up as early as possible tomorrow. But I wanted to ask you something.” He shifted forward on the stool, as if to speak in confidence. “I
mentioned this before—I do not know if the soundboard will be able to survive another rainy season. Not everyone would agree with this, but I think that we should try to waterproof it. In Rangoon and Mandalay, I saw a variety of wooden instruments which must suffer from the same problems. Do you know who might know about this?”
“Certainly. There is a Burmese lute player who used to play for King Thibaw, who has a Shan wife in Mae Lwin. With the fall of the court, he returned here to farm. Sometimes he plays when I have visitors. I will find him for you tomorrow.”
“Thank you. It will be easy to paint the bottom of the soundboard; the top is harder, as one has to go beneath the strings, but there is space on the side so I should be able to run a cloth coated with the stuff, and paint it that way. I think that will do something to protect against the humidity, although it is far from perfect … Oh, I have another question: when I work tomorrow, I will need something to heat the voicing iron, a little stove or something. Can you find that as well?”
“Certainly—much easier. I can ask Nok Lek to bring a Shan-style brazier to the room. They can get quite hot. But it is small. What is the tool like?”
“Small as well. I couldn’t bring much here.”
“Excellent then,” said the Doctor. “I am very pleased so far, Mr. Drake. Tell me, when do you expect to be done?”
“Oh, it can be played by tomorrow night. But I should probably stay longer. I generally make a follow-up visit two weeks after the first tuning.”
“Take as long as you want. You are not in a hurry to return to Mandalay?”
“No, no hurry at all.” He hesitated. “You mean to say that I must return to Mandalay once the piano is tuned?”
The Doctor smiled. “We are running rather serious risks by allowing a civilian to come here, Mr. Drake.” He saw the tuner look down at his hands. “I think you are beginning to discover some of the reasons why I have lived here so long.”
