Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Blackbird What I've heard is that people with perfect pitch usually don't enjoy music as much as other people because they can tell (and have to endure) when instruments and singers are not 100% in tune, which is most of the time.
Can you shed some light into that? |
I have perfect pitch and also have good relative pitch skills. In fact, one of the subjects I teach at the university is ear training and I always emphasize on the importance of developing good relative pitch skills. Many of my students ask me about that absolute pitch ability and I always tell them: It's a cool asset, sometimes you feel like an X-man or something like that, but it's almost useless musically speaking. OK, maybe you can figure out certain things faster than others, but what really counts is to learn to think of intervals, as Mr. Boplicity said. When I know I have a student (or more than one) with perfect pitch, I always play dictations with lots of enharmonical traps to them and I've seen more than one student very frustrated because one note from a dictation wasn't a D, as he/she was thinking, but a C double sharp, and everything is badly written after that note. They also ask me how to learn that. IMO, it can't be taught, but as a teacher I can help you develop that ability if you already have it. Don't know if you have absolute pitch? My test for that is: If you can sing a song
in the same key as recorded on a CD or tape by sheer memory, you can tell you have perfect pitch, so it's a matter of developing it. I tell them: Have you seen in the entertainment news that when a popular singer is interviewed and one of these stupid blondes who conduct the show ask them: "Sing a part of your recent hit
a capella for us", they never sing it in the key it was recorded? (I haven't seen the first who can do it, at least) They may be great singers, but they don't have absolute pitch and never will (nothing wrong with it, of course).
Anyway, I think it's false that people with perfect pitch don't enjoy music as much. I enjoy it as much as I can and performance faults don't annoy me more than to someone with good relative pitch skills. What seems complicated to me is playing a transpositional instrument (well, bass is, but to an octave, so notes are spelled the same as the real ones) having absolute pitch. Fortunately I don't play alto sax. It looks very tough to read and F# in a sheet music and hearing an A at the same time. I was afraid of that when I started practicing the solo pieces for my double bass diploma concert: DB solo pieces are written in
scordatura, which means that you should tune the bass a major second higher for making it sound brighter. So if a piece is in G major, it is written in G major for the DB, but it sounds in A major. The accompaniment piano part is written in A major. Fortunately, when my diploma concert took place the university hadn't bought an acoustic piano for the auditorium and there was a Yamaha Clavinova there instead. My master agreed that it wasn't a good idea to tune the DB one second higher having orchestral tuning strings installed, so it was just a matter of hitting the transposition key in the Clavinova. There's a guy now who is practicing his DB diploma concert and don't have solo tuning strings in his bass (and nobody has them here, plus they're very hard to find and expensive), but now there's an acoustic piano in the auditorium, so he's transcribing all the piano parts one major second lower. That's such a task. Again, I feel I was very fortunate. I think it would take me double the time to learn those pieces played in scordatura.
