Walter, I very much agree with what you said!! You and I have had a similar experience.My own teacher was just like yours. She helped her students play beautifully, way beyond their level. But they could not reproduce that success without her. I suffered because of this. She simply told me how to play the pieces--and she made them sound beautiful--but without her I was useless. It made graduate school hard for me.Walter, my friend seems to be thinking your same thoughts. This is why he wants to get out of music...It hurts me to advise him to get out--he's really very, very good and has come quite far. But he is so intelligent I know he would do well if he chose another occupation. It might be easier on him in the long run to be in an occupation where he doesn't always feel like he's working at a disadvantage. I can see it in him that this disadvantage frustrates him. I think he's looking for someone to give him permission to quit.
Chord progressions are easiest identified at cadences, but if you don't understand how they are progressing before that, you will have a lot of mud, and then a cadence. A composer wasn't just writing feelings, he was writing feelings in melody, harmony, and rhythm, and if you can't understand how he used those elements, you are missing out on something essential.
Here I don't agree. How the music is composed in "technical" view is not that important for the musician. I know some very educated people, who can explain into the last detail, how a piece is composed, what is the "meaning" of the music from their point of view. But when they play, nothing of all the theoretic stuff will be audible. So they have to explain in words what they want to show, before they play.
It's nice to know all this theory stuff, but you can play as well without knowing it. There is something called "intuition" - if you have it, you will bring out the music perfectly, otherwise all theory doesn't help.
Theoretical "stuff" is audible to those that understand it! But a performer who understands the construction of a piece doesn't have to play in order to "show" it. That knowledge can lead to inspiration. I think people who are trained, also, take for granted the knowledge that they have gained, and don't even realize that they are applying it. For instance, let's say you have a piano player who has good facility and a decent feeling for music, but has never played or experienced deeply music from Baroque times, like a Bach suite. He may or may not realize that a single melodic line contains hints of multiple lines, and overlapping harmonies. If he doesn't, being given the knowledge of this, showing the important pitches, which pitches ornament, and which are fundamental, will add a huge amount to his appreciation and his performance. We who have played that music from early age take it for granted, and don't realize we are applying hard-earned knowledge, and then say knowledge doesn't add to a performance! There are a hundred examples like that.My point is only that intuition, ie feelings, is not end-all-be-all. Knowledge of construction, theory, voice-leading, rhythm, harmony, relations between melodic strains, etc etc, lends an enormous amount of appreciation and refinement to performances, even if some of those things can be felt intuitively.I disagree, and I think this represents the anti-intellectual view of music: that no knowledge can help to improve, that all success is based on feelings alone, therefore nothing can ever be defined. But after studying so many scores throughout my life by Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Wagner, Tchaikovksy, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, an endless list, I absolutely refuse to believe they wrote by intuition, and didn't know what they were doing. And if they were writing with specific ideas in mind, not just feelings, but feelings welded to ideas, why shouldn't we learn those ideas? And why wouldn't those ideas help us?Again, I think that we have great players that don't seem adept at theoretical things, but they were still taught to these people, and now taken for granted as true.Walter Ramsey
So my question is this------is there anyone here who has a terrible ear for pitch who has NOT felt hindered by it??
being able to play the piano with my cock.
I was just using humorous facetiae to draw attention to my serious point - no, hang on a minute - that's no better. It really does annoy me that so many people are put off their rightful musical enjoyment through unnecessary feelings of inadequacy.
I like your perspective Ted, and I've always felt the academic world isn't always concerned with what's practical - what someone is actually going to USE. A small example, everybody has to learn trigonometry in highschool, but the vast majority of student only learn it to forget it because they will never use it in their daily life. So far I've met one person who uses trigonometry, he's a geologist working for an oil company, it's used to calculate angle drilling.
By its nature, schooling has a one size fits all approach. That's not a problem in itself, but we don't really have to take an arbitrary rule seriously if we don't need it. I don't think anyone's come in with exactly WHAT we need interval recognition for
Back to the topic: the equal temperment tuning system isn't even natural to the ear, it's an artificial compromise to give access to remote tonalities. Octaves are precise, 5ths are close enough, everything else is out of whack.
People who are learning performance do need to learn these rules, which over time have become arbitrary, but meant a lot to the people using them. In Debussy obviously we don't need to learn about parallel fifths, but in adding ornaments in Bach we do. They will disrupt the sound quality of his music, and sometimes, depending on which note you begin the ornament on, or the Nachschlaeger, you can create disruptive parallel fifths, I say disruptive because that was a rule that meant a lot to Bach.
Yeah, now what do you want to tell me? When I studied music in the late 70ies, I learned of course these primitive rules, and I got high marks in Tonsatz (don't know what's that in english). A teacher said once, that from my Tonsatz housework one would recognize, that I have very good ears... (he didn't know) A professor for singing said, from how I accompany singers, one would recognize that I am singing myself (I never did) So, do you really want to say, I am an unmusical person and I should better taken another profession than music? You seem very proud of your theoretical knowledge to me. That's fully okay. But don't judge and critizise others only because they don't have the same theoretical/intellectual sight on music as you obviously have.
People who are learning performance do need to learn these rules, which over time have become arbitrary, but meant a lot to the people using them. In Debussy obviously we don't need to learn about parallel fifths, but in adding ornaments in Bach we do. They will disrupt the sound quality of his music, and sometimes, depending on which note you begin the ornament on, or the Nachschlaeger, you can create disruptive parallel fifths, I say disruptive because that was a rule that meant a lot to Bach.Why do we need interval recognition? Because every interval has its own meaning, and they are tempered by relevance to each other. Take the Devil's interval, the augmented fourth. If you didn't know what that was, and where it was, and why, you would just be missing out on a major expressive function of music over the course of oh, 500 years? Or if you couldn't identify intervals, you will never understand the exotic scales that make up an important part of the music of Bartok.Of course this all depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to achieve bliss in ignorance, you don['t need to learn this. If you want to achieve a comprehensive, life-dedicated knowledge and experience of music, get started right away!
Neither is the sound of an angle drill, but we get used to it.
He himself says he's frustrated because it takes him forever to arrive at an artistic interpretation, and he often needs help from a teacher or pianist friend. Doesn't this tell you that his ear is hindering his playing? I think that music could be a smaller part of his life than it is, and he'd be happy.
Oh, there may have been a misunderstanding because I used the word "you." Ich habe nicht "Du" oder "Sie" gemeint, aber "man."Walter Ramsey
This discussion is interesting to me because it perfectly illustrates a phenomenon I have observed in musical threads on forums over the last seven years. Generally, what happens is that posters cluster around two poles of a duality, frequently undeclared and sometimes quite mysteriously removed from the prosaic facts of the topic. Here, the dualities are discipline and freedom, the universal and the personal, objective truth and subjective truth - as these things manifest themselves in the world of piano playing and the creation of piano music. Fortunately, by and large we are, hopefully, somewhat more mature than those on certain other forums, and the interaction probably will not degenerate into the mere psychological game stage of headmaster versus naughty boy. The truth might be that we are all in pursuit of a magical, syncretic state, an ideal reconciliation of discipline and freedom. As Walter says, virtually no knowledge is useless, and without some universally agreed discipline, the communicative function of art will break down. However, the spectacle of so many learned musicians, impeccably trained and ordered, and yet somehow lacking a spark of creativity or life, is equally unsatisfactory. Perhaps, therefore, the debate, if debate it is, may be better couched - not in terms of deciding between discipline and freedom, for we need them both desperately - but more in terms of what personal knowledge, which personal methods, which personal life courses are most likely to lead to the critical balance.Of course, that is much more difficult, decidedly unspectacular, and to many people no doubt less immediately satisfying than a flat-out confrontation between the headmaster and the naughty boy.
Oh, that IS a problem afterall! That's odd though, that he can play excellently and musically, but can't figure it out himself? There's something here I'm not understanding...
That's strange...What confuses me is that your friend knows his theory, and seems to pay attention to the meaning of the music, and plays artistically... But can't figure out the interpretation himself?Because he can execute it when shown how to play it, makes me think his ear is fine. That he can hear the nuances of an interpretation and reproduce them. Or at least imagine it when told.It's sounding more like a mind problem to me, that he somehow can't apply the knowledge...?
I do not think a correlation exists either way between the vulgar, bawdy or scatological and the intellectual. I possess a simplistically puerile sense of humour, often remaining po-faced at the cleverest repartee, even if I do understand it, while almost always laughing at a fart or a joke about the lavatory. I cannot explain why this should be so.
Yes you're right. Perhaps he thinks his pitch is the problem when really it isn't. I mean, how would he know what benefits a sense of pitch offers if he doesn't have it? He must imagine it as the single key to everything he can't do well. As far as not arriving at the interpretation himself....how can we account for that?? Of course, who really can arrive at good interpretations themselves. I have heard many recitals of facutly members who no longer have teachers, and let me tell you, they could have used a second set of ears!
I have a dyslexic uncle who was a lawyer and quit. He was a great lawyer--but his dyslexia made all the writing so incredibly hard for him and it took him WAY too long to do it. He just got worn out trying to work around his deficiency and so he quit. This guy seems worn out and frustrated, too...
Topic: Bad ear; great pianist; any thoughts? 