Hello all,
Paul Hindemith wrote in his book, _Elementary Training for Musicians_, that perfect pitch was merely a matter of memory. In his teaching, he repeatedly found that anyone could acquire perfect pitch, if only they would pay attention in the right way.
Now, I found this idea electrifying, since I, at twenty-something years old, knew that I had never possessed anything like perfect pitch, and attributed to the possibility of winning such a marvellous power, the combination of all the mystique of the Holy Grail and the imagined joy of winning the perfect love of my life! Thus, at Hindemith's recommendation, I started carrying around a tuning fork, and listening to it many times a day. Fifty times a day: BING! There's an A 440! And, lo and behold, I can now produce an A, anytime, anyplace, with great, but alas, not absolute reliability. I'm sometimes off a little bit, especially if I haven't tested myself in a few weeks. Naturally, now that I have some formal ear training, I can use my remembered A to find any other tone from my knowledge of interval recognition.
Perhaps there are others here who have experience of David Burge's course on perfect pitch? I bought the course some time ago, and found some value in it. He would seem to marshal some academic research that validates his claim that one can acquire perfect pitch with appropriate training. I swear that my accuracy has improved in what I must confess to be my half-hearted efforts at following his course. Having called my efforts half-hearted, I should add that I find his tapes hard to use because he goes on endlessly in flabby, self-indulgent banter. He could have presented the essential material in a quarter of the time he takes! But the course is certainly not a waste of time.
The essence of Burge's argument is this: each tone arouses a different sensation in our experience This is very much like our perception of color, and for the same reason: that we are endowed by our nature with a sensory apparatus that can grasp these different wavelengths of physics, in the spectrums of both sound and color. This formulation makes sense to me, but it's something else again to try to put a name to our experience of all these different tones, in all their different octaves or registers, and in all their different timbres, as they arrive at our ears produced by so many different instruments. I think the problem of tone perception is vastly harder than color perception!
This difference in the complexity of perceiving sound and light is also compounded by the normal childhood experience of parents and teachers who always pointed out colors to us, but almost never drew our attention to the different tones. Imagine growing up in a world where nobody ever drew your attention to red, blue, and yellow. You would arrive in adulthood with an ability, a physical apparatus, to discriminate different colors, but with no vocabulary to name these differences. If nobody ever told you that something is "yellow," how on earth would you ever begin to discuss that sensation with someone else? It is not the whole story to say, with the Medievals, that "nomen est numen" (that "to name is to know"), but how on earth can you say you truly know something if you can't even begin to say what it is?
Well, I think that there is an epistemelogical dimension to why most of us are can't name the tones we hear. In other words, there is a branch of knowledge that deals with how we know something to be true or false, or real or unreal, and here, with respect to this matter of how we know one tone to be an A and another to be an F-sharp, I suspect that we are like people who are "blind" to colors in the same way as the example I just gave above. When we were children, nobody ever drew our attention to the aspects of reality that give rise to the idea of middle C, or A or E-flat, and now our musical imagination, our inner ear is almost a vestigial organ, entirely untested by any requirement to put a name to these particular sensations.
Does anybody else have an experience like the following story? Some time ago, I sat down at a friend's house and started to play the B minor Scherzo of Chopin, and found myself totally collapsing in a complete mental meltdown. I had to stop playing. I was in a state of total confusion, and it had nothing to do with a memory lapse. I knew exactly where I was in the piece, knew precisely where I was trying to go, but something was horribly wrong! It was like the colors of the world were slightly off, as if somebody had flipped a switch that caused the reds to be substituted for greens. What was going on?
My friend explained that she'd gotten a great price on this old piano of hers, but there was just a little problem.... The the tuning block had some little challenges... and so the piano tuner had been forced to tune the instrument... a whole tone flat! The piece I was playing zipped along so fast that I had learned to play it only by virtue of having slowly acquired it in habit patterns, propelled by a certain inertia of muscle memory, and I couldn't really think about what I was doing in the light of the awful, wrenching confusion of a piano so far off correct pitch.
So here I am, without absolute pitch, the ability to name the tones I hear, but endowed absolutely with the ability to remember music in the actual key in which in is written. What's going on here?
Is this clear? Does anybody else go through this? As I say, I don't have absolute pitch, and yet I remember pieces of music, and hear them playing themselves out in my inner ear, as if listening to a recording, in the right key. I can think of a piece I know well, hear it in my mind, go to the piano, and test that memory at the keyboard, and, more often than not, find that my memory is in synch with the actual key in which the piece was written. I can produce an A on command. I can find the pitch of any sound by comparing my remembered A with with the sound in question, but I can't stand with my back to the piano, and tell you with any confidence, and without deliberation, what any given tone is. Does this happen to anybody else in this way?
My fantasy is that I will eventually arrive at a point where I can listen to anything, either out there in the world, or to the stream of music that runs constantly through the inner ear of my musical imagination, and be able to hear it with such clarity that I can see the tones unfolding before me on a page of manuscript paper. I would then be able to write down this stream of music as it passes by. This is why I want to acquire truly perfect pitch!
Is there anyone here who knows of David Burge's work? Used it yourself? Or Hindemith's argument?
Is there anyone here who has acquired perfect pitch as the mindful and conscious act of discovery of an adult (or teenager), as opposed to the mere recognition of a faculty you realized you had, like the day in early childhood you realized you knew the difference between red, blue, and yellow, with no possibility of confusing the different tones?
How about anybody here who has the experience of someone like Alicia de la Rocha, who says had unfailing perfect pitch in her youth, and then found it untrustworthy in her later years? (I've read in a book on music and the brain, that the inner ear's cochlea shrinks a bit as we age, and this has the unfortunate effect of distorting our perception of sound, in much the same way that a fun-house mirror distorts the waves of light reaching our eyes.
Sorry for the long, chatty post. Enough for now.
Best regards,
Eric Nolte
Topic: Perfect Pitch and relative Pitch