Friday, January 15, 2010

Easley Blackwood on Having Perfect Pitch

I started piano when I was 4 years old and had perfect pitch immediately. I remember thinking all through my early teens that since I was able to recognize every note as it went by, that I must be hearing everything. I remember one day in Boulanger's class, this must have been about 1955 or 1956, she stopped a student at one point and said, "What key are you in?" The student was perplexed and couldn't be sure. And she said, "What kind of a chord are you playing right here? Just what is that succession of chords that you just played?" The student replied, "Well, I just played a German VI followed by a I, VI, IV." She said, "You see, you do know what key you're in." Then I thought, hey, that's interesting. That fellow identified what key he was in not by knowing all the notes he heard, but by a chord progression. I suddenly realized, wait a minute, I'm hearing all the notes, but I'm not hearing the chord progressions.
This is from a interview with Easley Blackwood ("easily" one of the greatest intellects ever to mess around with music) talking with Bruce Duffee at Classical Connect, a nifty music-related site filled with thousands of excerpts of recorded performances (you can use the site as a pot-luck browsing radio using a feature they call "serendipity" if you don't mind having a piece end suddenly and morph into a new one), interviews with composers and performers, and some interesting forums.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Blackwood said, "But when you get into the subtleties of abstract music, nobody really knows what it means." I'm not sure that this is a fair or logical statement. There is musical meaning which fumbling words even by the cleverest musicologists cannot translate -- into words. But certainly, do we not know what "it" means, in purely musical terms? I would venture to say I know what "it" means when I hear it, but simply can't put "it" into adequate words, and I would wager you do too? Perhaps Blackwood's having been in academia's wordy environment flavors his comment. What do you think?

Elaine Fine said...

I have had moments when practicing particularly abstract music where I have been able to see some kind of clear narrative--some kind of "rightness," and then, when returning to the piece a few minutes later, I have forgotten exactly what seemed so clear a few minutes before.

I think that playing abstract music requires a great deal of creativity on the part of the musicians who are playing. It is part of the beauty of the experience, for the composers of abstract music as well as for those people performing it and studying it. Perhaps through the abstract we can find a way to, for a brief second, know what "it" is. Perhaps not.

I think that Blackwood is very bold to say that he, a person who can hear everything, doesn't have the "answer" to what the meaning of a piece of abstract music actually is, or how to extract or interact with its subtleties.

Gosh. It is difficult enough, once you have been around the musical block a few hundred times, to figure out how to understand a piece of Mozart. The more you know, the farther away real understanding of "it" seems to get.

Anonymous said...

Do you mean to say the more you "know" a piece the less you "understand" a piece? Forgive me, but I do not understand your last paragraph.

Elaine Fine said...

Yes. It is the same way that I can think I "know" a person extremely well without truly "understanding" that person.

Anonymous said...

Knowing apparently not being a synonym for understanding in your reply, I am at a loss to follow your argument. So much so that I went to a dictionary to dig into whatever subtleties that I might be missing about two rather well used words, and come up with a blank. I simply do not understand your distinction or know what you mean by it.

Anonymous said...

Dear Ms. Fine: My wife explained this seeming confusion of mine, as "women know that they understand, while men understand that they know." So I figure it's a chromsone thing.

Elaine Fine said...

Please thank your wife for making such an eloquent distinction!