Keyboard Phenomena

A saying came to me while I was listening to my tuning today, a classic from Krishnamurti, “one must be a light to oneself,” and I was not quite sure why this popped into my brain at the time.

Later I was finalizing the tuning and I had another realization: the piano merges into its fullest manifestation of in-tuneness when all the unavoidable compromises have been made, and in a sense a complex system is made wholly relaxed and comfortable within its own vibration, whatever that means. This becomes a search for something more.

A former student who has since graduated and moved on made an insightful observation one day, “this piano seems very settled with itself today.” Strangely I had not tuned that instrument in several days, and so it puzzled me how it could have been “settled.” Its state in that moment was undoubtedly however it was on account of any of the usual micro drifts that occur after a day or two.

But the word, settled, struck me as significant.

Reflecting on it, the connection dawns that in essence to be in tune is to be at ease with oneself. It’s almost so basic it’s stupid. But at the core, I’m trying to express something that I know is likely only going to be properly understood in a metaphysical way. Sometimes there is no rational explanation for how right some things feel when aligned on another level. For whatever reason, the student had captured something descriptive and intelligible of a mystery—there might have been a discernible sort of extra quality of stillness, a sorta laid-backness into itself rather than the threads and pieces all having just arrived or landed freshly and still getting to know each other in their multitudes of interactivity.

So, now with some sort of mild humor I’d like to start always thinking of my job as “putting pianos at ease with themselves” or “letting the instrument be a light unto itself.”

Admittedly, whether tuning or attunenent, may it be understood as the basic site of the deliberation of truth and harmony and beauty.

Indeed, sound itself is not best thought of in merely such simple terms as right or wrong, good or bad. The search is for something more. It must be. Otherwise why are we here? And where is the striving to human excellence? Sorry, but not sorry for the woo-woo. The intrinsic wondrousness of existence is to look out at all the varieties of things in this universe and see them staring back sentiently as the mirror image of us. Only then will a piano be tuned how I’d like it, for that is the key to all this chipotage being an act of self-discovery, not necessarily just in the personal sense but in the mystical ultimate dimension of the beyond: What are we and why do we hear anything in the ways we hear them?