by Serguey Shinder
It was a hall with a low stage at one end and a house upright piano against the back wall, and the piano was the reason the evening was a struggle, although it took us until the interval to work that out.
We tuned the way we always tuned. Clip-on tuners, everybody green, thirty seconds, done. The keyboard player, told there was a piano, had left his own at home. From the first song the sound was subtly awful. Not wrong notes. Sour. Sustained chords had a shimmer in them, the kind that makes you want to stop and check something, and I spent most of the first set glancing at my tuner between numbers like a man taking his own pulse.
The tuner said I was in tune all night. It was telling the truth.
In the break somebody held a tuner near the piano and played an A. It was flat, comfortably a third of a semitone flat, in the settled and even way of an instrument that has not been visited by a tuner in some years but is otherwise perfectly serviceable. Every one of us had been correct against a reference the piano had never agreed to.
The maddening part is that the fix was available from the first bar. Four of us could move. The piano could not. We had each checked ourselves against an authority that was not in the room, and not one of us did the thing a musician is actually there to do, which is listen to what is happening around us and adjust.
I have been in that room at work more often than I would like to count. The service was correct according to the specification. The timestamps were correct according to the standard. The integration was built exactly to the document, and the thing at the other end had been drifting away from that document for four years, and being right did not help anybody. There is usually one component in a system that cannot move, and the useful question is not who is correct. It is who is immovable.
The other half of it is about noticing. All of us heard it. From the first song every person on that stage knew something was off, and every one of us responded by verifying our own part rather than saying so out loud. It is a very comfortable failure. Checking your own instrument feels diligent, it costs nothing socially, and four people doing it at the same time is how a whole band spends forty minutes sounding bad while each member privately confirms it is not their fault.
In any room with a house instrument in it, the first question now, before anything is plugged in, is what that thing is tuned to. Everything else in the room is negotiable. That one is not.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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