Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

By the time Grandfather had finished with his tinkering, the instrument was two pianos in a single case, coupled together by a lever, one tuned an octave above the other, for four-hand music for those without a partner, once again increasing one’s fictitious reach. The evolution of the instrument had followed the revolutions of the arms industry in the border fortifications, for Priam’s theory was that if you couldn’t have a battleship or a locomotive, you could have a piano and make your women play it. Grandmother Eriphyle had perused it in the half-hour before retiring, but as she refused to allow him to smoke while she played, he refused to attend her concerts. And so it sat for a year or so in complete desuetude, and while Grandfather never played a note, he carefully polished it, purchasing by mail order from Breslau a cushioned, inclined stool in black walnut, a telescopic lamp in bronze, and an automatic music desk to store the sheets. From Dresden he procured an obsidian finger-guard and pocket hand exerciser, as well as a correspondence course on how to play, to which he devoted the remainder of his life. He progressed rapidly in his music-reading ability, specializing in pieces which were impossible to play with two hands alone. But when he reached a certain level of proficiency, he noted that as hard as he struck the keys, there remained a certain dynamic inflexibility, and when he tried to sneak from one key to the next with the same finger, the notes disappeared abruptly like a stone in mud. When he smote the keyboard with a balled fist, the sound was delightfully smooth, but without vitality, and the damping pedal only increased the ghostliness of the tone. He found that he could string the chords together only with a kind of pointless ornamentation of each phrase. Arabesques, which he loved in wallpaper and dressing gowns for reasons he did not wish to explore, he loathed in melody. He had the curious unpleasant feeling that something was acting as an unnatural check upon his tone. And so he wrote straightaway to Württemberg for a steam-activated, hydraulic booster mechanism, a large and beautifully crafted copper dome called the wohltemperer , which connected the keyboard to the coal furnace, and when properly stoked by a servant, filled the house to the turrets with the organlike resonance of a hearty baritone voice. Thereafter, the same firm supplied him with a gearbox, designed from a secret alloy which allowed him to tighten the strings equally and test the tension of even the iron frame. And in a specialist magazine he came across a third pedal, the spiccato , for forty Louis d’or. “Low as a bassoon yet high as a flute,” it advertised, which allowed him to pass from major to minor without modulation, and disguised his weak left hand, which tended to lope after his right like a wounded deer. Then, successively, from the same company he added a fourth pedal, a chordata , which somehow strew a silk curtain upon the strings, and a year later a fifth offering arrived unsolicited by express post, a pedal d’expression , which sustained any chord and virtually redefined the notion of forever. Finally, a sixth pedal for Janissary music was attached, the only accessory manufactured in his homeland, which added an accompaniment of triangle and drum at random intervals. He christened this endlessly modified attroupement the “Archicemblelomachord,” and its renown gathered many prominent people and distinguished visitors to Semper Vero, including suitors for his daughter, as well as famous composer/virtuosos, who on their way to concert tours of Russia made a point to stop by and try out their repertoires of Kalkbrenner, Hummel, Herz, and Moscheles. (Mozart was then considered too old-fashioned, his piano music mere sketches for quartets, while Beethoven’s sonatas were ignored as monstrous abortions of German idealism.) These guests often admitted the instrument was superior to the piano, but they did not wish to learn their art over, much less rely upon a klaviergeschichte which was by now virtually impossible to transport.

Over the years Priam refined his own tremulous tone, which he called vibrando . In the evenings he played for his wife what he called “keyboard conversations,” and she occasionally accompanied these rondos with a half-hearted tambourine. His favorite program consisted of several new pieces, such as “To a Dying Poet,” “Easy Sonata Spanish Dances Manqué,” Lefeburewely’s “Monastery Bells,” and his favorite of all, the fantasia effusio , “Battle Fog,” commissioned especially to incorporate all his modifications, and to this day the only piece ever played upon it not written for other instruments. So it was that this clavicytherium consisting of three keyboards (fretted and unfretted) and six codimentary pedals, driven by a steam turbine large enough to power a small factory, passed on to my father’s hands in the first years of our blind century.

Felix was in his thirties before he felt comfortable with the prerogatives of heirs and began his own modifications, according to preferences he himself only vaguely understood. His childhood memory of musical soirees consisted of excruciatingly boring evenings on hard chairs without conversation, the crossing and uncrossing of legs, suppressed coughing, stale sweets, unventilated rooms, a grossly extended family which expressed itself by brief programmatic bursts of applause, and an audience applauding itself for enduring a trial for all concerned — the tyranny of the human.

He felt that things had gone too far in the direction of taste and touch, too far toward emulating the overrated human voice, which was not there in the first place. Somewhere in that instrument lay delicious secrets which had nothing to do with singing, but rather the Assyrian ratios of wood against metal. It cried out to be shorn of its language props, its symphonic rhetoric, and above all the endless technical compromise to improve trumpetish compositions.

There came a day when Ainoha declared her own disinterest, one too many whiskeys being set down upon the instrument, each leaving a pale white ring, and a small army of locals was hired to move the relic to Father’s den. During the move, an inadvertent brush on the keyboard suggested to Felix that it sounded better when played upon men’s backs, and when finally set down in the library, he ordered it placed upon two worn tractor tires.

The acoustics were muffled by the rubber base as well as the room’s books. Disconnected from the steam turbine, as well as its social function, the gothic lettering across the instrument’s brow was changed to serrified Roman capitals. Its tone was confused, as if unsure of its place in the history of technology. Yet if there was little it allowed, there was nothing it violated, either. When he played, say, the bravura “Capriccio for the Departure of His Dead Brother,” it was no longer music from another better world, but music which did not require a world. And now alone with his instrument, he began a movement toward a feeling he could not name, although he knew it was away from originality and personal expression, while still extremely novel and highly private. First he replaced the French action, which was always a trifle sloppy, with the tinny but more lifelike American castings. Then he replaced the English cabinetry, which had begun to split and check, with pine salvaged from the lining of trenches during the early Balkan Wars, which thus weathered, warped, gassed, and blasted by every inhuman invention, was incapable of further mischief, insuring an even resonance throughout the sharply changing seasons. He also installed a curved maple bottom to disperse the harmonics, and along the trebles added a fourth silent string to pick up any lost vibrations. And finally he replaced the all-leather hammers with those of rabbit skin, a single capercailzie sewn in the tuft.