Archive for the ‘Pitch imperfect’ Category

Taking stock – Part 1

I discovered recently that an upward shift in pitch perception is a well-described change in people of my age: mid-50s and beyond. A change of as much as a tone can be expected. The article I read did not comment on changes in key perception but one would follow from the other. And what about a concomitant shift in any feeling of a key’s character following this alteration?

I thought that it would be as well to take stock of where I am in this continuous change that I am undergoing. More change is going to happen. Let us see how much has changed since this process began.

There are strong keys and weak keys; keys that have proved to be much more strongly anchored in my psyche/neurology than others. And in some cases my pitch-related perception of a key may vary by the type of piece written in that key. If the music is typical of that key according to my interpretation of a key’s character, it is less likely to shift consistently than in a piece where the key does not really matter. So here goes

C major: one of the most grounded keys; hardly shifts, but has done so as described in the post on Haydn.

C minor: although this strong key (Beethoven’s tragic key, after all), it has not proved strong in my case. It easily vacillates into C# major, losing some of its power to move me in the process. Beethoven’s ‘5 and a halvth’ is not the same as Beethoven’s 5th!

C sharp minor: very characteristic pieces in this key such as Rachmaninov’s Prelude and the Moonlight Sonata have not shifted. Presumably they will some day. Other less significant pieces in this key go to D minor, a key that does not have a character so very different from this one – sad with a strong undercurrent of angst.

D flat major: sadly this key of multiple mellifluous flats with its sensual texture of flowing melted chocolate, white or dark, has almost completely moved into D major whose 2 spiky sharps add impish pinpricks to the sense of loss that occurs when I listen to a favourite D flat major piece such as the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto or any of  the large number of Chopin piano works in the key.

D major: slow pieces in this key such as the slow movements of Mozart’s two largest works for clarinet (the Quintet and the Concerto) have pretty much all moved into E flat major. The quick music in this key is inconsistent, choosing either D or E flat in a pattern that I have not yet divined – if indeed there is a pattern. Beethoven’s symphonic bright D major movements such as in the 2nd symphony are still as full of D major gold as ever.

Testing St Valentine

In my previous post, I reported how St Valentine enabled my tonal sensibility to ‘fix’ A flat major during a live performance of the 2nd movement of Chopin’s 2nd Piano Concerto. I subsequently listened to two recordings, one on CD and the other streamed, and both ‘slipped’ up into A major during the exposition. I noted with the latter, that the A flat frequency in the recording was slightly sharp compared with our piano’s A flat.

This evening I took those two performances and listened to them again. This time they did not slip up but retained the roundness of the flat key; both recordings remain slightly ‘sharp’ against the piano benchmark. But I have divined the cause of the difference from my prior listening to these two recordings: this time I was really listening. Previously during the CD performance I was driving and my concentration wandered – when I returned to conscious listening, the key had ‘shifted’. For the streaming performance, I was at home and there were things that took my concentration away in similar fashion. So it may not have been St Valentine’s influence, merely focus that ‘held’ the music in A flat major.

Interestingly, the A flat minor agitated central section with its tremolo strings shifted at every listening, even in the concert hall romantic music hothouse. I think A flat minor, a rare key in classical music and thus not so ‘hard-wired’ in my neurology, is more prone to shift up than its major key equivalent, especially as the key it slips into,  A minor, is very hard wired and characteristic, as reflected in my Keynotes programme on the key. I think that, after testing St Valentine, I’d better research my limited repetoire of A flat minor pieces to see whether this is a consistent tonal trait. What would happen, for example, if the recording were not slightly sharp to concert pitch?

With thanks to St Valentine

Last night we went to a concert presented by the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra in Cape Town’s City Hall. It was a trial getting there owing to the residuum of the major traffic disruption that accompanies the opening of South Africa’s parliament. But after that we settled down for an evening of Romantic music – it was St Valentine’s day after all.

First on the bill was Cesar Franck’s Symphonic Variations with Yulianna Avdeeva as the pianist. F sharp minor is the key with a shift to F sharp major intermittently and a brilliant ending in the latter key. Since F sharp major is one of those complex keys with multiple sharps and because I am now ready for the effects of my new tonal perception, I was not surprised when the latter part of the work sounded as if the musicians were playing in G major, a semitone up. Gone was the pleasure of the black note feeling of F sharp major. From where we were seated, we could not see Avdeeva’s fingers. Perhaps my brain would have shifted my tonal perception back down a semitone if we had been able to see her fingers skating over the black notes in Franck’s skittish final variations.

Next on the bill was Chopin’s 2nd Piano Concerto, in F minor- Avdeeva allowing herself to perform two works in tandem! I was ready for the wonderful four flats, the full round gorgeous key of related A flat major to sound in the non-descript key of A major, one of my least favourite keys. Usually after the permutations and perturbations of the development section of sonata form (as in the Chopin 1st movement), the return of the main themes in the recapitulation is associated with the upward shift I have come to expect. Miraculously and gloriously this did not happen this time. And more wonderful to relate, neither did the A flat major slow movement shift. Its A flat minor (7 flats) restless middle section did go to A minor (no flats or sharps), but, again miraculously, the return of the beautiful main theme was solidly and beautifully in A flat major. The finale did not shift either, allowing the horn to call in F major, not F sharp major, to herald an exciting end to the concerto. Avdeeva was induced to give us an encore (she had played beautifully, a real treat). She chose Chopin’s Valse Brilliante in A flat, and in A flat it was!

So why these differing experiences? What was happening? It cannot be a pitch or frequency phenomenon as the orchestra did not re-tune to a lower pitch and piano certainly did not! It was not an act of will on my part. I cannot will keys not to change – I have tried.

This morning I put on a CD of the Chopin 2nd movement and before long I heard the sound of E dominant 7th which told me that A flat major had shifted up to A. So what was special about last night? Let’s give thanks to St Valentine and be content.

Brain Games

Walking back from the shops today, I found myself listening internally to the slow movement of Mahler’s 1st Symphony. It’s a funeral march but that is not significant, I trust. My pace was not funereal, neither were my thoughts. My internal music player was skipping around a bit as I tuned in an out between thoughts and the visual stimuli in the quiet streets of Claremont. I tuned in again to find myself coming towards the end of the ‘Frere Jacques’-like D minor theme that the composer uses for his ironic sylvan cortege. Except that, as I tuned in, my internal eye saw it in C# minor and my hands ‘felt’ the shape of a C# minor piano chord. My brain had very kindly compensated for my new pitch imperfect and moved my poly-aesthetic concept of the music down a semitone!

This has happened a couple of times recently. I had had a CD of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony on in the bedroom. When, a couple of days later, I looked at the CD case some of the music started in my head: the final F major Peasant’s Hymn in the appropriate simple bucolic key, but, without ‘my’ conscious permission, my brain showed me the music in E major, a semitone below. I felt the 4 sharps of E as I internally sang the one flat of F.

My brain is ‘hearing’ a semitone lower when my internal media player starts in what it thinks is the correct key. It (the brain – in truth, parts of it) then gathers the apparatus of the new key that I have built up neurally over many years and presents it to my conscious mind.

Chopin’s preludes

On a recent long-haul flight, I experimented on myself. The in-flight entertainment system had all Chopin’s Piano Preludes in sequence. These are arranged in major/minor key pairs going from C major through the sharp keys, adding a sharp at a time. Then he shifts to the most complex flat keys and sequentially removing a flat at a time, ending with a tirade in D minor, the minor key with one flat. How would I hear them now? And in sequence?

From C major to A major, the Preludes all sounded in the correct key. When I arrived at the very busy F sharp minor (on the score it looks as if Chopin flicked his pen at the manuscript producing dozens of dots in each bar!), a sharpening of the pitch began. The sonorous E major Prelude was more like light weight F major in timbre but not quite. The brief C sharp minor Prelude definitely ended in D minor to my ears. The next in the sequence was in B major, but by now things had shifted completely and from this one – now sounding in C major through the next 4 preludes (including the famous D flat major Raindrop Prelude with its drumming C sharp minor central section which for me had all the dialectical character of C minor), we were a semitone up. As we descended’ through the flat keys (if the Prelude sequence is conceived as a great arch), there was a section of ‘sharpish, not yet truly sounding in the flat keys’ until the true C minor of that most famous of Preludes appeared. As the heavy chords began, there I was back ‘in key’, there I stayed through to the resonant deep satisfying D’s of the final D minor Prelude.

Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto

The second movement of this concerto is one of the most profound pieces in E major ever written. Beethoven shifts from the key of the concerto, C minor, a flat key, to the 4 sharps of E major to say what he wants to say.  And once there, he says things slowly and gravely but very beautifully. So when, soon after I realised  that my sense of tonality was shifting, I listened to the movement and heard it start in the key of profound emotion and then apparently shift  to the unencumbered key of F major, this was a shock. A day later I listened to it again after some exercise and it did not shift at all. This was one of the formative moments on this journey. I realised then that this brain alteration I am undergoing  was not simply one of frequency adjustment; a simple mathematical equation. My physiological state appeared to alter it. There was some comfort in this. Hence these postings – examining the nature of this more complex change in an existential way in itself provides some meaning.

I was reminded of these initial experiences when I tuned into the concerto towards the end of the second movement this week. I heard it in naive F major. A disappointment. I remember hearing somewhere that the last note for the violins in this movement is G sharp. This note (an enharmonic A flat that sounds the same as G sharp) appears as the second note on the oboe theme at the start of the C minor finale — a tonal connection between the 2 distant keys designed by Beethoven. So I was surprised when the finale started in a solid C minor. If it were simply that the performance that I was listening to was recorded below the frequency tipping point of my altered sensory apparatus, I should have heard this in C sharp minor i.e. a semitone higher, and i should have heard the oboe A flat as an A. I suspect that the reason for this apparent anomaly is that C minor, the key of Beethoven’s 5th and other mighty works, is so deeply imprinted in my apperception, that it will take more than a minor frequency adjustment (nice pun there!) or lack of exercise to shift it consistently.

E flat and E majors – what’s the difference?

Turning on the radio in the middle of Haydn’s Drumroll Symphony first movement and hearing it in neighbouring E major rather than its E flat major key set me thinking about why I hear the two keys differently. Why did Haydn’s major key Allegro sound different? A series of adjectives may explain it. E flat – smooth, round, tubular. E – bright, sharp, bouncy. The same fast music, different ‘feel’s. But for me the two keys converge in ‘feel’ in slow music – rich, thick, solid. Mysterious! – to use another adjective.

Searching for a link to the Drumroll Symphony for this post, I lighted on the recording by Minkowski (above). Listening to it, I found it to be in a very definite E flat major. All the character and the feeling I know for the key were there. Why?, I wondered. Going to our piano, I found that the key note was pitched on the quarter tone between D and E flat; in other words ‘flat’ to current concert pitch (our piano is ‘in tune’, unlike the one I grew up with which had been ‘put out’ by travelling from the UK to Southern Rhodesia in the late 1950s). Going back to the video, I saw that it is a ‘period instrument’ performance, presumably with the orchestra tuned to the lower concert pitch employed by musicians in Haydn’s time until early in the 20th century. Clearly my ears have reverted to an earlier musical era!

Trying another recording of the Drumroll first movement on the internet, it was definitely ‘sharper’ than Minkowski’s – it sounded in E flat, but only just. The muddiness I experienced in listening to the Drumroll’s second movement appeared here, too.

How many Hertz would  it take to ‘switch’ me into hearing this music in E major? I’ll have to experiment further.

C# or D flat?

The slow second movement of Haydn’s Symphony number 103 (Drumroll) is a set of variations alternating C minor and C major. My sense of C minor has remained more stable than some other keys (because of Beethoven’s 5th?). But today this movement started in a clear C sharp minor - up my sensory single semitone. I could tell it was really in C minor because of the sound of the open violin G strings in the theme, but I was hearing C sharp minor.

The first variation is in C major. Would it shift? Indeed it did, but was I hearing C sharp major or D-flat major? In terms of sound frequency, they are the same so they should be indistinguishable in auditory terms.

I have a very clear sense of D flat major – sweet and smooth like condensed milk, even with some of its colour (probably the nearest I get to synaesthesia). Like milk chocolate. I have had little specific feeling C sharp major (music in the key is rare) – until now. This music was a muddy version of D flat major – a new character has been added to my soundscape courtesy of my odd hearing. It is not really welcome.

Flipping Chopin

My daughter is teaching herself to play Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor. The middle section is in F sharp minor. She was practising this section when I came in from a pleasant walk below Table Mountain. Not surprising to me was the G minor picture of her fingers on the piano keys that saw in my head. The music soundedin this key. I decided to experiment: I lookedover her shoulder at her fingers. Yes, Top note C sharp as I knew it must be – and as i looked the music I heard seamlessly changed to F sharp minor. No transposition; merely a change of sense. I looked away and within two seconds I was hearing G minor again.

When Ursula arrived at the A minor recap, it was in the ‘right’ key. I’ll talk to that paradox in another post.

The F of Destiny

Washing up after a mammoth birthday lunch for my daughter today (27 family members), I streamed some Verdi from ClassicsOnline. Some Traviata – the Prelude to Act 1 shifted in F major. I am used to the missing the warmth of E major – well, the green and yellow melancholy smiling at grief which is my way of compensating for such minor losses does have a Traviata feel to it, so one is in tune with Verdi there. Later came the three loud Fs at the start of the overture to The Force of Destiny. Fs? They are Es. Hearing this and knowing that my brain has played a semitone trick made me realise that this tendency to shift goes back further than I have thought. When compiling the Keynotes programmes back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I had intended to include this overture in the F minor programme because those three chords to me had the finality of unassuaged destiny that F minor can convey to the listener. It was by chance that I checked this up in a score in the library and found I had been hearing it wrongly. The overture is in E minor. I put this down to the ‘slightly shop-soiled’ pitch (rather than ‘perfect pitch’ using a clothing metaphor) I knew to be my lot. But really I should have known that this was not how it used to be with single notes like that. My difficulty with pitch occurred between the semitones (e.g. Baroque music played in the older lower tuning), and in the midst of complex musical passages where I would lose my way during the modulations. But I was not aware of this shift of more clearly defined tones until after the second broadcast of the Keynotes programmes on FMR in 2009.

Oddly, a few minutes later I switched to a Dvorak compilation and the Slavonic Dance in E minor was.

I ought to rush around with a tuner to see why, but the washing up and a certain apathy mean that I have not yet taken a scientific approach to my perceptual waverings.

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