Steve Freides <[email protected]> wrote:

   It's interesting for me, as someone with perfect pitch, to be an
   amateur horn player.  I actually take it as a point of pride that I've
   learned to let myself play out of tune - my tendency is to try to fix
   everything, but if you do that, your playing never acquires any ease.
   I need to fix my intonation by trying to address the technique
   problems that are causing the intonation problems.

Perfect pitch is a very mixed blessing.  On anecdotal evidence, I
believe that when one ages, one's perfect pitch gradually goes flat.  An
excellent aged scholar and musician of my acquaintance complained many
years ago that his perfect pitch was now based about a semitone low.  He
found this very annoying.

[Myself, I don't have absolute pitch, but I may have absolute volume.  A
colleague once remarked that I might be the loudest horn player he had
ever heard, at least among those with only two legs.  But at other times
members of my section have called me the horn player who could play the
softest.  If you can't play softly enough so the conductor cannot hear
you, he can always ask you to play softer.  Playing softly without
losing expression and focus is a skill that seems not often taught in
this modern age.]
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