In and Out of Tune Piano strings and the order of the universe
words: LAWRENCE WILSON
photos: LAURA GRENARD
One warm afternoon in 1985, I carried my mother's garden spade beneath a tree in our backyard, dug a hole, and buried two cassette tapes: AC/DC's Who Made Who and Back In Black.
While childhood offers the luxury of such eccentricity without the burden of justification, this I can contextualize: I was hiding my tapes from God. I was in second grade, at the height of my brief phase as a Christian zealot, and the reason why AC/DC had it so hard was a rumor I had picked up at school, that the band's puzzling, apparently playful acronym was actually tantamount to a satanic pledge of allegiance. If saying the f-word was enough to rouse the Holy Spirit, I reasoned, the wages of listening to a song titled “Hell's Bells” were sure to be swift and unmitigated. Though my understanding of church doctrine was suspect at best (obviously, an omnipotent being wouldn't be thrown too far off track by a square foot of dirt), I still marvel at that puerile confidence in a world propped up by one unconquerable truth: God ran the show, and if you wanted to know the particulars, He had been kind enough to compile them all in one accessible volume.
With adolescence, my faith began to wane, and by the time of my confirmation I had given up hope on such an easy explanation. But for fallen ideologues like myself, coming to terms with ambiguity is an uncomfortable process, and the allure of being handed some definites never fully recedes. That longing for a sense of clarity—an arrangement with some sort of purpose—is probably why I've long been interested in physics. Specifically, I enjoy keeping tabs on the search for a unified theory, the golden key that explains everything. I had to repeat algebra, though, and have made peace with the fact that I will never learn the subtleties of a particle accelerator.
But I also spent a year thinking I wanted to be a geologist, and here is something I did learn, or at least, this is what I heard: if you compare the frequency of a perfectly tuned piano string and the frequency emitted by two tectonic plates riding against one another, they turn out to be exactly the same. Initially, this struck me as clear proof of divine order. Not divine in a Christian kind of way, just the mark of something intentional. Somewhere, beneath the lid of a Steinway and hundreds of meters below the surface of the earth, things made sense.
What I didn't know then, however, is something that every piano tuner must understand and appreciate before their wrench touches a single tuning peg: there is no such thing as a perfectly tuned piano.
In the showroom of Piano Kraft, one of many small storefronts that stretch along Little Rock's Main Street, I watch Jim McGehee detune a piano. Outside, the new leaves of maples lining the sidewalk are crisping in the glare of an early summer heat wave. Behind the dark-tinted facade of Piano Kraft, though, the climate is a perfectly controlled seventy degrees and lacking the slightest whiff of Arkansas's suffusive humidity. All around me is burnished ebony. Grands and baby grands, black every one, stocky and polished like a showroom of freshly buffed Cadillacs. One price tag quotes well over $100,000.
McGehee's interest in piano tuning began as a child. He had always been fascinated with the piano, he says, “but when I found out that an interval [two separate notes played together] correctly tuned is actually out of tune, I just couldn't understand it.” When he graduated from high school, he was expected to join the family business, but instead matriculated into the University of North Texas to study the physics of music. After graduation, he enrolled in a one-year piano tuning course at nearby Grayson College. The next summer, he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he would hone his skills for the next 20 years. Before finally moving back to his home in Little Rock, McGehee had become one of the preeminent tuners in the country, even landing a job with the Royal Danish Orchestra.
Beneath the piano's lid, McGehee cranks the strings to a “pure” position and asks me to listen. He hits two keys that should be in harmony, but the noise they produce is more like the yowl of an amorous cat. On a bench beside us, however, an electric tuner's reading suggests that everything is in order, that perhaps something is wrong with my ears. This, he tells me, is the hallmark of what was once referred to as “perfect tuning.” If each string is individually tuned to its exact note, certain combinations, which should sound mellifluous, produce something wholly intolerable. Again, he disappears under the piano, and I see his wrench flying from one tuning peg to the next, tightening some and loosening others. Looking satisfied, he plays the same two keys. The tuner's red lights flash in disapproval, but to my ears, the notes ring in perfect harmony.
As McGehee describes it, the 88 keys on a piano are a puzzle, the pieces of which don't fit. “The piano tuner's talent,” he tells me, “is taking this puzzle and fudging it, making it look like it fits.” The reason for all this subterfuge, he explains, involves a fundamental flaw found in all stringed instruments. What we interpret as sound are waves passing though the air, and each musical note possesses a specific wave pattern, with a height and length all its own. When the string of a piano vibrates, though, not just one but hundreds of waves are sent traveling through the air. One hears the initial wave—or the note—but the various other waves, which correspond to that first one, give the sound depth and texture. The result is a symphony of subtle tones (in music-speak, “overtones”) which blend together in a balanced whole.
Unfortunately, in the real world, there's a problem, and it lies with us, the players. We have to physically touch these strings to make them give us music. On a guitar it's your finger, on a violin, the bow, and on a piano it is that aptly termed mechanism, the hammer. When a string is touched, one small section of it necessarily cannot be vibrating: the point of contact. The effect is slight—maybe a few overtones fall out of harmony with the rest. But even if just one number is tweaked a bit in a lengthy math equation, the end result comes out wrong, or in this case, out of tune.
Luckily, there's an out. What McGehee refers to as “fudging” is actually something called equal temperment, a very delicate process of bending certain notes on a piano, tuning some a little high and bringing others slightly flat. With a good ear and years of practice, one can correct the piano's intrinsic failings and produce an instrument with equally intoned (albeit slightly flawed) scales.
There was a time when the suggestion of such an approach was practically unmentionable. In the hills of southern Italy, around 500 B.C., Pythagoras, in his quest for mathematical proof of an orderly universe, proportioned out musical strings and discovered simple rules that seemed to govern their actions. The imprint of the gods, he thought, or as others would later think, God. But even in those ancient hills, there were rumblings of dissent. As it became apparent that some of his calculations didn't quite add up, Pythagoras began drowning the more curious of his followers, effectively silencing any who would seek to spread the bad news.
A millennium later, the subject was still taboo. For most, musical proportions had become a non-issue, and a cross word concerning an off note was something akin to blasphemy. Still, musicians began holding clandestine meetings to discuss alternate methods of tuning, ones that sacrificed any sense of pure order for those that, while slightly imperfect, at least proved tolerable to listeners. By the early 19th century, the purists gave up, or maybe wised up. Increasingly unfettered by the rules of theologians, masters like Mozart, Bach, and Hayden began composing equal-tempered pieces of literally unheard-of beauty, and nowadays only a handful of overly curious musicians (and piano tuners) are even aware of an untempered alternative.
If I had been hoping for some profound synergy between musical notes and tectonic plates, the truth about piano strings seemed to do little more than further discredit my effort to make tidy sense of the world. I later asked McGehee if he saw any deeper meaning behind piano tuning. “Are you kidding?” he responded. “You only have to look as far as relationships between people. Men and women. It's all there.”
I guess he's right: You bend a little here and compromise some over there, looking for some semblance of harmony. But even in my relationships, I notice that I'm always dwelling a little heavily on the flaws, and missing the ambiguous charm of the whole. My philosophy has been more like that of Pythagoras: if it doesn't fit, tie it to a rock and shove it into the lake.
The world is a much stranger and unpredictable place than I would have it be. An absolute order just doesn't work, and I'm starting to see that maybe we're better for it. If there is indeed a perfect balance out there, one has to tweak the knobs a little to get there, to find the right key. There is a peculiar beauty to that, to muddling through things without the benefit of a clear, uniform set of rules. Perhaps it is in the midst of that tinkering, messy and flawed, that we might catch a glimpse of the truly divine.
After my family moved, I returned to our old house only once, and I didn't even think about digging up the tapes. I had bought them again two years later anyway. But now I wish I could take them back. They would be physical evidence that I was making some headway, that I'm no longer as obstinate as all that. Even without AC/DC, though, I do have an old piano that was left by a roommate who moved to California. It's shabby, nowhere on par with the least of those on Jim's showroom floor, and its tuning is probably a decade overdue. Recently, though, I discovered that I can play “Chopsticks” in its entirety, without hitting one foul note.
Lawrence Wilson wrote this story for our never-released summer issue. He played with the Lazy Fair and the Insides that summer, too. Now, he's a writer living in Lake Wobegon.
