Perfect pitch?

Now I know some of you saw today's title and said to yourselves "No need for a question mark. The perfect pitch is a fast ball on the inside edge of the plate which when about four feet from the batter falls as though it's dropped off a table leaving the sucker swinging at air.  That's the perfect pitch!"  That group can go back to pondering "Manny being Manny' and wondering whether the Yankees are going to miss the playoffs this year (they are).  The rest of you should read on.

Any musician with the least bit of training under his belt if you play him the note C will be able to sing the note of F or A or most other notes in the diatonic scale.  I say 'most' because playing C and asking him to sing F# is somewhat more testing.  For some reason the tritone - or The Devil in Music - is a rather more problematic interval.  That interval covering three whole tones is fundamental to dissonance in Western music. There is a rather good summary of the tritone in Wikipedia.  The ability for pitching one note after hearing another may be learned and enhanced with practice.  This is called relative pitch.  Perfect pitch is something of a quite different order.  It is an innate ability possessed by a small minority of the population to be able to sing or name the pitch of any note without reference to any other note.  We know that Mozart had this facility and it has been suggested, but with much less evidence, that Beethoven, Mendelssohn and other composers had it also.  People sometimes talk of it as being something inherent in musical genius but that just isn't so.  Neither is it without its drawbacks.  Those with perfect pitch often have trouble transposing music at sight.  If you give them a piece of music written in C major but ask them to sing it in, say, D major they will experience an uncomfortable disconnect between what they are seeing on the page and what they are vocally producing.  Similarly an audience member with perfect pitch who attends a concert where the orchestra tunes to a pitch other than the standard Concert Pitch (A=440Hz) may have a less than joyous experience.  So, should you run into a singer who has perfect pitch don't gush about how lucky they are; remember there is a down-side as well.

What raised this topic in my mind was a splendid Radiolab podcast which included a fascinating interview with Diana Deutsch, a professor specialising in the psychology of music who talks about perfect pitch among the speakers of tonal languages such as Mandarin and Vietnamese.  That podcast may be found here . I found it most intriguing.

I read this week that one of contemporary music's brightest young talents, Nick Muhly aged 27, has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to write an opera and has chosen for his theme a true story which concerns an Internet romance/friendship between two teenage boys which ends with one of them stabbing the other to death.  Will its subject make it controversial? Meh.  Perhaps.  My first two thoughts were 'topical' and 'a perfect subject for opera - love, passion and death'!  I shall be very interested to see how it all pans out.  There is no date yet scheduled for the first performance.  Muhny was interviewed recently by The Advocate.  He seems to be an intelligent, articulate and interesting guy.

And if Muhny at a mere twenty-seven years of age seems somewhat young to be writing an opera then  how about composer Red Bennett who at 18 years of age has already written his first opera which just had a successful premier run in San Francisco?  The SF Chronicle described the work thus: 'It is a witty adventure story about a girl named O'stella (played by Bola Origunwa,10) who is kidnapped, forcing her brother (played by Yomi Origunwa, 10) to rely upon the eccentric people of a small fictional town for help'.  Am I in a small minority in thinking so or is opera truly experiencing a genuine resurgence in interest of late?

No more than about four times each year I go to a local movie house.  Sometimes I want to see an indie movie and other times a blockbuster.  I have been twice this Summer already and both experiences have been excellent.  First up was Dark Knight the new Batman movie starring Heath Ledger.  Creepy but first-rate.  Then last week Elizabeth and I sought refuge from a 100 degree day in the air-conditioned Lloyd Center Mall movie house watching Wall-E an animated movie from Pixar.  Brilliant!  G-rated but dark and different.  Two thumbs waaaay up.  If you're looking for a way to spend a hot afternoon I strongly recommend that you take your own children or your favourite neice and see it.  You won't be disappointed.  Every review I have read of this movie uses the word 'masterpiece' to describe it and I ain't disagreeing.

And finally for this week, the incomparable Victor Borge.  There are Danish sub-titles for those of you who don't speak English.

Next week's post should be back on schedule, appearing here on Monday as usual.  Have a fine time until then!