tuning the bechstein.

A few months after restoring the Bechstein Clark stopped by to finish voicing. And to tune it No. 8056. The final act he did for me the final favor was to record in a way that tuning so that I could recreate it. And then handing me the pocket computer on which he recorded it (for which I admittedly paid him a pretty penny but in a few tunings the little contraption would pay for itself).

It seems like cheating in a way but I had the utmost respect for Clark (who indeed tuned by ear... a prerequisite for any technician I would let tune the Bechstein). For him it was more a method on which to tune certain pianos exactly the same way each and every time. Also now to allow someone like myself to tune it as he would in his absence.

Last November I went through the motions... now it is time to do it again.







I started by having J help weave the red felt strip through the two octaves of the temperament.

My helper here looking on...

Then I pulled out the small computer and scrolled through to find the recording Clark had made that was now priceless to me. Cherished.

The application is known as the Reyburn Cybertuner. I do not presume to understand exactly how it works or how it captures all the stretch of the octaves or the partial overtones of a hundred-and-forty-year-old grand piano. To use it though is painlessly simple. J would strike a note...

And then we would watch The Spinner...

... me nudging the tuning lever ever so slightly this way or that showing him until it lined up in the middle of the circle. Then move to the next note. Tap. Tap. On up the temperament we went.

Onward to the octaves above. And the octaves below until all eighty-five notes had been carefully set to Clark's meticulous tuning two years ago forever stored in silicon. Then the unisons... all one-hundred-seventy of them.

A beautiful thing a freshly-tuned piano...

all i needed to know.

A L L  I   N E E D E D   t o   K N O W   A B O U T   P L A Y I N G   t h e   P I A N O .

Like David Helfgott's father says to Sam Rosen in Shine ~

'No … music … teachers, Mr. Rosen.'

So then to impart everything I may have ever needed to know in fact about playing the piano that I just recently came to realize I have learned from watching the film Shine fifteen years ago or something and now a twenty-minute TED Talk the other week ...



> Boldness of attack!

> You must tame the piano or it'll get away from you; it's a monster - tame it ... or it'll swallow you whole!

> Liszt broke plenty of strings.

> The notes first; the interpretation comes on top of them.

> It's all a question of balance.

> Learn to play blindfolded.

> Your hands must form the unbreakable habit of playing the notes so that you can forget all about them, and let them come from here … the heart!

> You must play … as if there is no tomorrow.

> Play only one impulse for the entire phrase; stop thinking about every single note and start thinking about the long line from the beginning to the end.



Now ... now it is time to put that education into good practice.

no. 8056 [part two of three ... chance].

So this is still just a story some fifteen years or so in the making of the search a journey of sorts for the perfect piano. Part one is here. This then is the second of a three-part story of an age-old Bechstein.







part two. [chance]







‘About a year’ the guy said when I asked how long this shop had been in Portland.

I didn't catch his name. Corner of 11th and Alder downtown for now but they were relocating in a month or so across the Willamette. After our brief introduction I moved quick past the Estonias and Schimmels and others up front towards the back of the store with the brick wall. Back there was an L167 with the high-polish Madrona finish. Not a favourite but a similar piano that I sat down to twelve years ago or so in a small piano shop in Tacoma and what led me to this absolute fascination I have with the Bechstein piano. And here - finally - was a Bechstein dealer closer than a couple thousand miles south or east.

I played a few notes then moved on. And there one was ... a D280. The nine-foot concert grand. I had never seen one in person. Too bad I am still far too self-conscious with some suited salesman nice as he was sitting at his desk or mumbling a conversation into his phone to really play. To try to break a string or two (Liszt broke plenty of strings!). So I tinkered some on it is all. No true banging out the cadenza to Ferocity And Fragility or any of the other crazy things I have stored in my head. I moved over to the more reasonable seven-foot-seven-inch C234 slapped with a price tag of only $163,000 versus the $212,000 of the D280 and played a few phrases from the song I was working on at the moment. Took some photos with my iPhone. Grabbed all the sales brochures they had just for fun. Then wandered back to the salesman.

"Find one you like?" he mused with a slight grin most likely just generally amused at the fact someone was toying on a two hundred thousand dollar instrument wearing canvas Toms shoes and a beatup Mountain Hardwear fleece hair all unkempt from a wool headband meant to ward off the bite of a proper cold northwest winter afternoon while outside the light faded from light blue to pink. It was New Year’s Eve day.

"Well no ... but I have an antique Bechstein and was interested in your experience with rebuilding - particularly with Bechstein pianos since you're the only dealer on the West Coast."

I don't know if this took him aback or if he took me any more seriously but for a bit then we talked back and forth while he showed me a late nineteenth-century Chickering or some other American make of a piano that they had rebuilt and shimmed the soundboard me only half-listening since if a piano is not German I am really not interested. I had mentioned mine would need to be shimmed and perhaps recrowned. But he said they had a direct line back to the Bechstein factory in Berlin which did interest me.

So he passed me the card of some guy named Lotof who turned out to be the shop's owner to whom I would shoot off an email with some photos of my 1875 Bechstein attached to get the conversation started. I told him I was undecided about refinishing that I actually quite like the one-hundred thirty-five year-old worn patina scratches and all but that I know it needs all new hammers installed and voiced and the action completely reworked with perhaps new strings and soundboard work but that I wanted to maintain as much of the original parts as possible.

And it struck me while there how I was reminded playing the new Bechsteins of the utter uniqueness of an instrument - mine - nearly a century-and-a-half old. Made from trees felled before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Utterly handbuilt and delivered on horse-drawn carriage weaving through littered cobblestone streets of some late-ninetheenth century European city. The engravings on the soundboard much more illustrious than the new pianos with inscriptions of how they were built for the majesty of emporers and kings (majestät des kaisers und königs in proper German) and inscribed with the address of the original factory on Johannis Strausse in Berlin.

And the timbre. The sound. How Bechstein's scale design back then just shortly before the overstrung scale became the norm had the tenor strings pass through the bass bridge giving that most important section of the piano one of the most sumptuous near-liquid but still powerful tenor voices imaginable. The action is a double-escapement type similar to the patented action from Sébastien Érard just a few years before the German Louis Renner designed his (and which has been used primarily in all fine pianos since). It was ahead of its time. There is not another like it. This piano here in the corner of my living room one day will be given new life and it will sound absolutely one-of-a-kind.

-----

There was a period then of silence. Maybe two years. It of course seemed much much longer.

A period I mean between pianos. The WG57 was long gone only memories now and the scratchy-sounding hiss of an audio cassette that tries its best to capture the sonority of the low bass strings. The crystalness of the treble. But cannot. Not even close.

I could not long live without a piano of course and so I began searching again this time with a bit of practicality I had lacked just a few years earlier but seemingly inherited with a bit more age no longer that impulsive twenty-year-old who must have a grand piano shoved in tiny living rooms decided whilst sitting on kitchen counters. So an upright it would be. But I still required a big sound and so I only set my gaze on the four-foot ones.

This time it didn’t take long. I was already sold on the Weber as an excellent and economical instrument with a powerful dynamic that nearly matched what I heard in my head. So a quick trip back to Helmer’s had me signing over a few more thousands of dollars for a new W121 polished ebony upright. Delivered to a rented house off a quiet gravel road a carpeted living room much more practical again than the cramped dusty wood-floors of my former days. Not long after dissolution in tow it moved out with me to a little duplex where I would play it loud up late Julian fast asleep in the room on the other side of the wall never waking. My finger slipping at one point and playing an F-sharp instead of an F and finding amongst a wash of fortissimo minor chords the B major. I remember it clearly scrawling the melody in a sketchbook lying open on the music desk the sforzandos and quadruple forte markings etched in ink dripping on the page I had written it so furiously. Thus was found the ending to an enormous concerto for piano and orchestra.

The Weber could barely contain the sound.

-----

Sergiy. Sergiy Skhabovskyy was his name.

I found him one afternoon by chance. I was on a lunch break surfing around the interwebs when I decided to check out this site called Ebay. Had only heard of it but never used it. So I signed up. Then remembering my promise to myself that one day back sunny autumn in the Tacoma Helmer’s shop how someday I would own a Bechstein grand and with the world of browsing now at my fingertips no longer confined to just the dozen or so piano shops within a couple hundred miles of home I typed the name Bechstein into the search field.

And got a hit.

He lived half a world away. A city that was a blip on a map to which I could only point but knew nothing about. Kiev. Ukraine. He was a piano and customs dealer there and apparently had been trading pianos for years. Aged pianos that had found their way somehow or other from Europe east across once an Iron Curtain now gone just the Caucasus range into Russia and ultimately to him. His online storefront allowed him to sell pianos now to the western world - mostly the United States. Afterall he was selling mainly European brands many of them unheard of and unappreciated here across oceans. Brands that had been around since the dawn of the modern piano. Bösendorfer. Pleyel.  Grotrian. Steinweg. Blüthner.

Bechstein.

It seemed too good to be true. An 1875 six-foot-one Bechstein grand that I could actually afford. Though I had started the journey of finding this piano years before with those three chords on a mahogany five-foot-nine it was only just beginning.

I called Kathy later that evening from my tiny apartment. Explained to her in rapid excitement what I had found. The dilemma. Which was basically in order to afford this perhaps chance-of-a-lifetime I had to sell my perfectly acceptable Weber upright on which I had found the B major. That Weber meant something to me even if I knew it was not a Bechstein. And this was also a bit of risk this business of chance. A hundred-and-thirty-some-year-old piano online sight unseen halfway around the world from an eastern city in the Ukraine?

Seemed almost as ridiculous as convincing myself at twenty that I needed a grand piano.

I’d have to fly back to Missouri during the auction for a planned holiday visiting family. In fact it would close the morning I arrived dazed and sleep-deprived stumbling off a redeye flight from Seattle. My sister Kari picked me up at the airport and took me back to her little house parked at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac lined with giant cottonwoods. I followed her in and made my way to the tiny couch having explained the situation on the ride from the airport. How the auction was going to close. Kari didn’t have a computer so she drew me a map to the neighborhood library. ‘Take my car’ she said and went to crash herself. I laid on the couch frantically going over everything in my head. Couldn’t sleep. Not even close my eyese. It would be so easy to just fall asleep I remember thinking. I was so tired. Not have to get up drive her ridiculous monster of a car that nineteen-seventy-six solid steel red Chevy gifted from our grandmother to find a computer at the library hope one was available park myself on it waiting watching the seconds tick down to the end of the auction. I knew nothing of sniping. I thought I’d just wait until a few seconds before the auction ended before putting in my bid. Little did I know ...

But I had made up my mind.

Shrugging off sleep for later as I all too often tend to do I got myself up and grabbed her keys to follow her little map. Finding the library without trouble there was a computer in the middle of the main room where I sat down. Logged in. Five minutes or something. My mind was still racing. Four minutes. Should I? What if this thing was crap? It was all original. Would have to be restored. Thousands of dollars.

But it was a Bechstein.

Three minutes. One bid. So it was just going for the asking price. I’d have to put in a bid of at least fifty dollars more. Two minutes. The library suddenly seemed too warm and stuffy compared to the crisp outside. Could I do this? I’d miss the Weber. There was nothing wrong with it. But it wasn’t a Bechstein. It wasn’t a Bechstein. One minute. Time was flying. The seconds ticked down. I typed in my bid. Watched the clock on the wall as the second hand ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Waited. Held my breath and clicked ‘place bid.’

-----

‘Congratulations! You are winner!’ the email from Sergiy read in broken English.

Through a string of emails spanning the next couple of weeks I had printed out back then and found dusty in that box of music stuff he and I worked out the details of shipping a six-foot-one grand piano from the Ukraine to Seattle. Customs. Escrow. Inspection.

It arrived here in a wooden crate a month and a half later. Cleared customs at the airport and was heaved into a truck. Driven south to that little duplex of mine brought in through the front door and set up in the far corner of yet another cramped way-too-small-for-a-grand-piano living room.

But it was real. Part of me couldn’t believe it.

The first order of business was to find a technician to come and look it over. Make sure it was okay. I found the slip from Emmanuel Piano Service dated the seventh of November oh-five. Didn’t charge me anything and scribbled in the lines of the invoice how it needed a full set of new hammers and backchecks. Several tunings to bring it back up to A435 - he wasn’t recommending tuning it to the modern standard of A440 (where the A above middle C - A4 - beats at four hundred forty cycles a second). And two treble strings were broken and needed to be tied off.

As he gathered his tools putting them back in a worn old leather satchel he stood up straight and I remember him looking at me and asking me how much I paid for it. I told him. He paused for a second as if to think that over I don’t know before telling me it was worth four times that - smiling - and showing himself out the door.

-----

It took a few moments for the realization to sink in after I saw the screen flash that I had won the auction. I remember just leaning back in the chair and sitting there. Time passed. Eventually getting up again and grabbing Kari’s keys to make my way back to her car back to that little house of hers under cottonwoods losing its big yellow leaves the end of that Missouri September.

‘So?’ I remember her asking as I came through her front door exhausted not just from the redeye but the whole ordeal it seemed. In my typical sense I non-chalantly explained how I now owned a Bechstein. Then crashed back on her dusty couch.

Turns out I could have just as easily lost. Not knowing how Ebay worked at the time and with someone already having placed a bid and me only placing mine fifty dollars higher ... if that someone had put in a max bid just a penny more than me he would have won. A penny. I didn’t realize this until months later. I hadn’t really known what I was doing afterall.

But it was meant to be. Or something like that I told myself. Just meant to be. The whole thing.

Sitting up late on kitchen counters in crowded apartments over casseroles scrawling notes adding and subtracting. Deciding out of the blue nowhere even to really put one that I needed to have a grand piano. Traveling north and south between Seattle and Portland looking in every piano shop finding a five-seven Weber and being told to check out the six-foot. Despite my reservations of what difference five inches might make shrugging my shoulders but regardless following his advice and heading south. Instead of just finding it and leaving deciding to walk around the rest of the shop finally in the last corner spotting a five-nine mahogany piano which on the fallboard read plainly and simply: ‘C. Bechstein.’ Sitting down at it. Reaching out to touch the keys. Playing three chords. Dying inside the sound of it absolutely unbearable. Sitting down one afternoon during lunch to check out Ebay and remind myself of my need for a Bechstein. And searching. And finding. Staving off sleep after a cross-country redeye to follow a scribbled map to a library to find a computer to place a bid not knowing what I was doing. The other guy not having placed a bid higher than mine.

Winning.

All of it. The search was over but the journey was not.

-----

No. 8056 - the eight-thousand-fifty-sixth piano Carl Bechstein crafted in his factory on Johannis Strasse in Berlin - as I have come to call my piano - needed attention. The invoice from Emmanuel Pianos proved it. It was old. Worn. Tired. I would sit up nights silence filling the room under the pale light of a single lamp wondering whose hands had played it? What music had they played? Its journey across mountains and oceans. After it all one hundred thirty-five years it found its way to me. And it needed to be restored.

It would be some time before I would find myself wandering into that Bechstein dealer in Portland some freezing New Year’s Eve day wearing canvas Toms and a beatup Mountain Hardware fleece hair all unkempt from a wool headband to ask a kind man about restoring it.

But I had gotten a sense of its depth of tone. Its character. Its sound. And I knew it was all there waiting ... just waiting to be unleashed.






to be continued ...

no. 8056 [part one of three ... imperfection].

So I've been sort of blogging since June maybe July randomly here and there the story of an old piano of mine off to be restored a bit.

It may have been interesting. Probably not. But this goes back way before that long before I found No. 8056 then and is all of it some fifteen years or so in the making of the search a journey of sorts for the perfect piano. Maybe someone coming across this can relate. Of finding that one instrument on which to bear it all. I of course think pianists are a passionate lot and that the piano is one of mankind’s greatest inventions but obviously there are all instruments and perhaps many musicians for which this kind of passion applies.

But this is the story of an age-old Bechstein.






part one. [imperfection]

There really is no better sound in this world than a just-tuned piano other than perhaps none at all as in complete silence found only high up in the mountains on glaciers far removed from everything watching clouds scrape over ice without making a sound. Without the cancellations of duplexed and triplexed strings beating out of sync the piano gains a devouring volume. Nearly too much for this little living room in which I find myself this afternoon. It has a certain power to it that it does not have at any other time and a perfection in its imperfections. Made especially clear through the routine and drudgery of tuning where only one string at a time is tweaked and where it is easy to get quite used to the rather insipid sound that creates. But then - once having finished all the keys - then the task begins of tuning the unisons - over two hundred of them in all – and the sound begins to take shape. Builds on itself the physics of it all beautiful.

After far too much time spent on keyboards in Logic samples stored as binary codes in this whirring Mac beside me the inexplicable acoustic power of a hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old German grand piano strings copper wound by now-antiquated machines and hammers voiced by delicate hands nearly a century-and-a-half ago the soundwaves upon soundwaves multiplying on top of each other until nearly exploding is an absolutely phenomenal sensation to behold.

-----

Fifteen years ago now I think. I could not explain at the time why without a place to put it living on maple-lined quiet streets in tiny upstairs apartments up creaky flights of stairs making pennies an hour all of twenty years old completely out of nowhere I talked myself into the idea that I must have a grand piano. Absurd it was. And so after scrawling calculations on scraps of paper and more scraps of paper adding up and subtracting from and figuring out how to stretch every last dime maybe going without food so that I could sit at a grand piano and bang away annoying all within earshot I began The Search.

This entailed Friday nights raining and dark autumn in full swing driving from Tacoma to Seattle and all points in between even the Bösendorfer dealer in Portland visiting every piano dealer I could find. Some were gracious and took me seriously. Others told me to quiet down me hammering big fat chords that there were lessons going on in the back and what is this twenty-year-old doing looking at the grand pianos anyhow surely we could interest him in a more reasonable upright there that one in the far corner?

And then one afternoon I found myself wandering into the Helmer's Music in Tacoma. I had just about nailed my search down to a five-foot-seven Weber I came across at the Helmer’s in Federal Way. ‘Check out the six-footer down in Tacoma before you decide’ the guy up there told me and sent me on my way south.

And so I wandered the store from one far corner to the other of course because I had to maybe there was something else afterall at last finding the six-foot Weber stashed amongst a handful of other Asian grands and having a go on it. Hard to compare but I wasn’t sold on the few additional inches which of course would mean a few additional thousands of dollars.

Wrapping up I finished circling the store and there in the back corner a mahogany 5'9" piano impeccably beautiful and so I snuck up to it for a closer look. Hmm ... ‘C. Bechstein’ it said on the fallboard. Never heard of it. ‘Pianoforte-Fabrick von C. Bechstein Berlin’ graced the soundboard. German. I was drawn to it. And so I took a seat at the bench and held my breath. Played exactly three chords. And that was it. I was done for. I must have a Bechstein grand before I die I told myself in an instant before exhaling still sitting at the bench running my fingers across the keys.

The Search was over.

Too bad for me scraping pennies together to pony up for just the Korean-made Weber that this particular German Bechstein had a pricetag of ninety-three thousand. Dollars.

But it didn’t matter. I would own one someday.

-----

‘Weber WG57 5’7” ebony 6 mos sacrifice $8k obo’ the newspaper clipping read I found tucked in a box heaping full of music stuff from years past. Sacrifice. The word broke my heart.

I guess I only had it for six months that five-foot-seven polished ebony Weber grand for which I had spent all those months looking. The advert was dated November seventh nineteen-ninety-nine and the paperwork stuffed in a once nice but now ragged Weber sales folder from April of the same year. No doubt the worst financial decision I had ever made buying on a complete impulse sitting on kitchen counters in my sisters’ old second-floor apartment above Thomas Street on Capitol Hill over hot chocolates and potato casseroles and Nantucket Nectars I ended up keeping a mere six months before having to sell it losing several thousand dollars in the process several thousand dollars this twenty-two-year-old really did not have to lose.

But no regrets.

I look back and remember certain moments on it as if they were yesterday. An evening alone a theme raging in my head going over to it crammed into a corner of a living room barely bigger than the piano old worn hardwood floors sitting down and banging it out everything exploding in that moment the theme to what will become the fortissimo opening to a second concerto for piano and orchestra. The enormous B-flat minor chord as loud as I could hammer it on that five-seven. A switch to the D chord even more enormous. The fat copper bass strings were thunderous their sound rebounding off the plaster to fill the small space with an immense wall of sound unbearable. The sound was big but yet not big enough. I always wanted it to be bigger as big as what I heard in my head and the Weber could not suffice.

That’s not why I sold it though six months after all the work I put into searching for it months and months almost as long as I ended up owning it. But I had to in order to get to No. 8056. I just didn’t know it at the time. It was all a progression of sorts.

And the cost was worth it. The memories continued to pile on top of each other.

Putting together a film of short recordings for my older sister on eight-millimeter videotape me playing various snippets pulled from reams of comb-bound sketch books I had made and improvising the rest as I fumbled with them leafing though the pages scrawled with ink. The chord change from D-flat to E-flat minor huge an ending to a concerto yet to be written for now years and years all still in my head. An idea in F-sharp minor furious uncontained. Another in E-flat. I asked for the audio cassette recording a few months ago I had mailed to her years and years back but have yet to dust off an old cassette deck stashed somewhere in order to listen to it again and reminisce. Maybe pull some ideas from. Work them out develop them some more. A theme just an idea still to the second movement of another concerto for piano and orchestra sketched out on the keys of that Weber. In those six short months I even moved it from that first tiny apartment it called home to another tiny apartment from where it would leave me to move onto other hands other notes waiting to be played. Every now and then I think about it and wonder where it is? Who is playing it and what are they playing?

But no piano I have ever owned or played has escaped me. I seem to have memories of them all.

A grand piano in the middle of the wide-open orchestra rehearsal room at the neighborhood college back in flat muddy Missouri close enough that I would walk to crisp autumn nights crunching leaves over the campus lawn finding the piano through the window sitting there alone cracking the door open wandering over to it sitting down and playing interrupted at some point by a security guard not amused with my ramblings. Must have seen the light or heard the racket and came looking. I never returned. A Steinway D my sister Kathy the one to whom I gave the low-fi recording made on the Weber years before that had talked the janitor into letting her know where the D was stashed on the stage of her college’s auditorium. So one night we snuck in and pulled it out from its little climate-controlled vault out onto the stage her disappearing quietly to go sit somewhere up high in the mezzanine alone while I banged away on it at one point a student maybe in charge of watching out for hooligans like us maybe just passing through the halls walked up beside me on the middle of the stage and without missing a note of whatever I was fumbling to play I remember looking up and muttering ‘hey’ and he maybe assuming I had permission or maybe not wanting to bother me just playing the piano nodded and left us be. A Kawai grand in the sanctuary of a Mormon church in a proper Midwest town the secretary kind enough to let me in and play for maybe half an hour Kathy sitting quietly in a pew nearby. A crap old Wurlitzer spinet I was renting from Sherman Clay in a crap old apartment in Tukwila one night alone watching the movie Shine for the first time halfway through getting up stumbling over to it in the dark clicking on the dim piano light and throwing down the beginning motif to a first concerto for piano and orchestra influenced heavily in that very instant that single moment in the dark by the raging piano of Sergei Rachmaninov. A broken-down upright stuffed in a practice room at a small college in North Tacoma a farewell performance of sorts to a now lost love. The WG57. In time but before No. 8056 another ebony polished Weber this time an upright W121.

My mother’s tiny woodgrain Kimball spinet and Beethoven and my first piano sonata in D-flat.

At the top of the scrap of notebook paper folded and torn I found in that same box as the newspaper clipping I had written ‘penny toss!’ Scribbled in columns beneath were numbers dollar amounts of rents and bills and such. I guess after all the math all the addition and subtraction and crossing out and refiguring I was leaving it all - the decision to buy not any piano but a grand piano ten thousand some dollars - leaving it all to chance. To chance by flipping a coin. Whichever side - I can’t recall - that I decided would seal the deal and make the Weber mine even for those short six months had apparently landed right side up.

But definitely not by chance.

-----

The moving slip from A and J reads December eighth nineteen-ninety-nine. It too is folded and worn. I saved all these scraps of paper. I’m nostalgic I guess. It escapes me though at this point who it was that bought it from me. But I remember the two guys coming in. Taking off the one leg on the front left corner and lowering my piano for only such a short time already someone else’s down gently then from that awkward position heaving it up onto its long side to remove the other two legs. Lifting it with a collective grunt from there up onto the cart then out the front door. Down the stairs. Into the back of their truck. And gone.

But that was just the beginning.

Because of these scraps of paper mostly the one with the columns of rents and bills and such and the note to toss a penny I went searching without knowing or without reason or even an understanding then to find a five-foot-nine beautiful but more than just beautiful piano that stirred something in me the instant I played it a perfect combination of the airwaves around me from the copper and steel strings the spruce soundboard all handmade in Berlin by a piano maker named Carl Bechstein of which before that moment I had never heard.

It would be many more years until I would find mine.

to be continued ...

fertig.

'You've got yourself a Bechstein,' Clark exclaimed as we wrapped up the voicing.

I had made the trip to Portland to check out all the work he had put into my piano over the last what nearly six months since two burly dudes had wheeled it out my front door down the stairs and into their truck as we followed them north to their next pickup us on our way to work.

It was cold out. Not as cold as nearly a year ago when I first went through the doors of Michelle's wearing my canvas Toms and a beatup Mountain Hardware fleece. I remember the light. Purple. Pale. I liked it cold then. And I liked it cold now. Was supposed to dip into the twenties.

But this time was different. I wasn't here to find out what their deal was. I was here to find out how my piano sounded with new hammers, a couple tied-off bass strings and a completely reworked action and damper system. I had only spoken to Clark over the phone so this was the first time meeting him. He appeared from the backroom and we shook hands then he whisked back there me in tow.

And there it was.

I had seen it a couple of months ago. Looked sort of lonely sitting in the middle of a big room lined with old grands on their sides and uprights in various states of disrepair. He asked if I wanted to take notes as he recited to me all the work he had done. When he came up for air he sort of motioned for me to sit and said it would probably be best if I played.

I hadn't touched it in half a year. I rattled off some big chords up and down then a theme I have been working on for 'Singularity.' Nothing much. It was hard for me to get into it with Clark eyeing me from behind and another technician over in the far corner tinkering on an upright taking this key out putting that key back in all under the harsh buzz of the fluorescents. But I tried to ease into the moment of playing my piano for the first time in months as best I could knowing it was important. Had to get a feel of the sound of it despite knowing this was not my living room and I was far from ease.

Instantly though I knew it was too bright in the treble. Clark nodded and switched me places after pulling out his voicing tools. He carefully went to work on the D two octaves above middle C three ... four times shuffling the action in and out between each. On the fourth there it was - I heard it instantly. The softening I was looking for. I nodded instantly and we caught a gaze that told me he heard it too. Then he quickly went to work on the couple of octaves above that before sliding the action back in to have me play it again.

I could tell a difference and we agreed we shouldn't do any more until it had a chance to settle back in its home. Didn't want to get to a point that couldn't be undone.

And that was that.

As he worked on tying off the action so as to keep it from getting damaged on its ride back north we chatted a bit about his upcoming trip to Alaska to do some tuning for someone's Bechstein. How we both had it on our lists of places to visit. How the scale of the mountains would be hard to comprehend. At some point Katie had slipped out to go visit a friend who lived nearby. I asked Clark a bit about his background as he told me some about my piano.

He had never worked on a piano this old. It was caught in the middle of the years where the piano took its biggest (and more or less last) transformation ... when the modern Renner action was developed along with a full plate and overstrung scale design. Mine has hints of them all and as he pointed out was way ahead of its time. He told me how frankly he was surprised that it turned out as beautifully as it did and how he wasn't sure it would when he decided to undertake this little project I presented him. I asked him how often it was that it didn't turn out?

Before answering he seemed anxious to tell me how he had agreed to take the restoration on despite the uncertainty because I had been into 'tone and touch' from the start and nothing else. I don't care and didn't about the cosmetics of the beast ... just wanted it to sound its potential that I could always hear from the first time I sat down to play it after uncrating it on a dock in Seattle and hauling it south to heave it into my cramped living room. And for which Clark gave me credit - admitting to me even he couldn't necessarily hear it when he first started working on it. But because what was important to me was what was important to him he liked the project from the beginning.

And then he told me it's happened less and less as he's gained more and more years of experience - the not turning out in the end thing. But that this instrument was one-of-a-kind and worth the risk. And sure I knew in the back of my mind he was selling me on the work he had done and thereby his expertise and potential future service should I need him to come to Seattle (which I very well may) but I didn't get the sense that was why he was telling me all he was telling me. He had an honesty in him that I picked up immediately and was only reassured for feeling the more we went back and forth.

He seemed surprised at what I all knew about this instrument that more or less controls my life the bit about the way the upper treble hammers needing to be in the exact spot when they hit the very very short strings in that section because the strings are divided into sevenths and the hammers hit on the first node a seventh its length from the tuning pins to avoid unbearable overtones. I got a raised eyebrow and a quirky smile for that. 'How do you know so much?' he asked me wryly. Short of a good answer I quickly replied that I sort of like pianos and left it at that.

The action tied off and secured back in the belly - the fallboard closed and music desk reinserted - I could tell Clark was anxious to be off to his next appointment for which he was no doubt already late. And I felt better. I arranged over a quick phone call to Lotof no doubt enjoying his Sunday off away from the shop to include a follow-up appointment back here at home in the spring. Give my piano some time to settle. Break in. Play it a bit. Then have Clark make the trip up here to do the final voicing and adjust anything that may get out of whack over the next few months.

And that then really was that. It was getting dark out despite not yet even being five o'clock. Before I could leave though there was one last thing I wanted to do. No one was there except Kim sitting politely at his desk mulling over some paperwork. As we wrapped up the payment I said I was going to wander around quick to play one of the new polished and shiny Bechsteins to compare to mine. He pointed to the back and suggested I try out the nine-foot D on the stage.

I wandered over to it. Set down the box of the original hammers from my 1875 Bechstein Clark had handed to me on a metal folding chair off to the side and sat down on the bench. There was definitely an air about this thing. A solidness and power to it that impressed me. I played the pianissimo theme of 'Singularity' up to its explosive section where it hits the F major. Had to restrain myself. Maybe he was on the phone or something and I was too reserved to really pound on a two-hundred thousand dollar piano that wasn't mine. It did sound amazing.

But not like No. 8056.

It didn't have the same history. The same story. The same character of sound. Built from trees felled pre-industrialization by hands now long gone - it was too new. And so I found the old Blüthner nearby that was here last time when I was talking to Lotof about having my Bechstein restored. I played the same theme. Didn't catch the price but I'm sure it was expensive. It had been completely restored afterall. But mine sounded better than it, too.

Satisfied then - I got up. Zipped up the collar on my old fleece. A delivery kid had come in while I had been playing the Blüthner and was talking to Kim about another late night. As I passed them I waved and thanked him and he smiled back. With the of the box of old hammers tucked under my arm I pulled open the door and headed out down Stark as the streetlights flickered on and my breath froze in the November northwest air.