One composition/theory teacher at McGill, had perfect (absolute) pitch, as well as a photographic memory and the aural equivalent (tape-recorder memory), and who demonstrated these skill many times. (He once memorized a piano part for performance with orchestra an entire Ligeti score in the 20 minutes it took to drive him fom the Halifax airport to the down-town concert hall. In class he transcribed from one listening an entire Varese score, just to prove a point of discussion.)
He often performed with ensembles that tuned at pitches above or below a=440hz (often with organs - in Montreal - that are hard to shift and include many tracker instruments tuned to baroque pitch levels and tuning systems). I asked him how he managed this with perfect pitch. He answered that he did not know, but his pitch sense adjusted automatically (subconsciously) to whatever level and tuning system was in use. Gordon J Callon School of Music Acadia University Wolfville Nova Scotia Canada B4P 2R6 http://ace.acadiau.ca/score/site-map.htm -----Original Message----- From: Howard Posner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed 2/28/2007 2:03 PM To: LuteNet list Subject: [LUTE] Re: perfect pitch in a meantone sound world? On Wednesday, Feb 28, 2007, at 09:28 America/Los_Angeles, Ed Durbrow wrote: > Perfect pitch is a form of memory. Some percentage of people are born > with a capacity for extraordinary memory. Why would it have been > different then? I think Dan asked the question because people with absolute pitch these days normally learn a fixed pitch standard. They hear 440 Hz and recognize it as A. He's interested in what happens when someone with pitch memory is exposed to several different pitch standards. How would that person identify 440 Hz? A? B flat? I know some people with absolute pitch who have problems playing at A=415, because they hear everything a half tone flat. I remember a poster on rec.music.early some years ago describing how his own absolute pitch standard changed when he started working with non-440 pitches. It can apparently be a real hurdle. HP To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html --
