Jealous much?

The Performance Library Manual reading this week was difficult for me to get through. Although I think the topics covered could be very useful in practice, I had a hard time concentrating on what side of music to tape to which piece of paper. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent many hours taping music together and thinking about page turns. The tricks the author shared were ones I’ve employed. So, yes, it’s helpful information, but it is information I’ve been lucky enough to have shared with me by a music teacher. Even as I was reading it though, it made me appreciate what a good reference text the manual is.

The other reading from This is your brain on music was much easier to read. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve enjoyed this book immensely. I think I was also confused last week that we were only go to read the introduction and first chapter of the book, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it in this week’s assignment.

I was surprised to read that musicians get more ear worms than non-musicians (Levitin, 2006, p. 155). I sometimes wake up with songs running through my head. They are usually about 30 seconds long, and it varies whether or not it was a song that I have recently listened to or not. To start my undergraduate career, I moved from Kentucky to New York. I flew, so I also shipped a bunch of stuff to myself. Stupidly, I put my entire c.d. collection in a box, and guess which box was lost? Well, it was a major blow to me, as the music I listened to was very much a part of my identity, as Levitin also discussed. I remember a week in September or October where I woke up with the song “Sleep on the Left Side” by the band Cornershop playing in my head. Instead of being annoyed, I loved it. The c.d. was one of my favorites, and I had definitely been very sad about that particular loss. It was comforting to know that even if the physical item was gone, it was still ingrained in my mind.

Absolute Pitch or perfect pitch is very interesting to me. As a musician, I do wish that I had it, but I think ear training can bring you a long, long way. It certainly did for me. One of my many music teachers who did not have perfect pitch told me a story about doing a performance with another musician. The other musician, a violinist, had perfect pitch. Well, they arrived at the private home they were performing at, and my teacher, a pianist sits down to warm up. The piano, they had been told, was tuned. And, in fact it was, except that it was about a quarter step lower than the standard tuning for a piano. (So, the A key that would normally be 440A was halfway between G-sharp and A natural). For my teacher, this was not a problem for two reasons. First, he wasn’t forming the pitch as a pianist, just hitting the right key. Second, though he could tell it was off from the standard tuning, all the keys were in tune with each other, so it made sense to his ear. His co-performer, however, could not deal. Although the violinist could have (and perhaps did) tuned his instrument to the tuning of the piano, he was so upset that what would normally be an A on his violin was really a quarterstep lower, that he couldn’t play in tune. His idea of what a note was related to an exact pitch, whereas my teacher’s idea of what a note was related to the other pitches.

And though I don’t have perfect pitch, I can generate an A440 out of thin air fairly consistently. How do I know? Well, I’ve tested myself and occasionally shown off in front of friends. And why this particular pitch? It’s the pitch that I’ve been tuning to since I was 9 and first began playing the violin. I have sat through many elementary, middle, high school, college and other orchestra rehearsals all begun with the same A440 tone. I’m glad that I can, it makes me feel that I am a musician and not just someone saying that I play an instrument.