Words and Music, Medical and Other

The sounds of the low female singing voice are in the air at the moment. Kathleen Ferriera turns 100 this year (or would have done if she had not died half a century ago) and her voice is being heard on FMR. Travelling to work today I switched on the radio. We were being treated to Janet Baker’s rendition of Elgar’s Sea Pictures. I came in at song number two. ‘Where Corals Lie’ was to come. This is a favourite B minor song of mine, and I featured it in the Keynotes B minor programme for this reason. The opening bare fifths in the strings, the mezzo voice and moderate speed are perfect for B minor, the colour beautifully evinced by Elgar (or the reverse, Elgar chose the key because of its hue). What a relief to me when it came to the song to find it that I could appreciate Baker, Barbarolli and B minor as pleasurably as usual. One side of me asked ‘why has it not shifted?’, but the other said ‘enjoy it!’ and I did and entered the hospital with jaunty step.

“Does it really matter that I cannot hear things in the original key most of the time?” I asked myself as I listened to FMR  in the car this afternoon. A Scarlatti piano sonata was getting its virtuosic treatment – apparently in E flat major.  I suspected that it would turn out to be D major  and indeed it was when back-announced. No matter – just as exciting. But then it was followed by Beethoven’s piano sonata in F sharp major. Now, I thought, this will be the test of this briefly encountered equanimity. F sharp major is an unusual key to write in; Beethoven will have thought this choice of key through. This is a two movement sonata. Beethoven’s other two movement sonatas are in the light bright key of G major and are really sonatinas. They are given to young pianists to play when they meet Beethoven’s great set of 32 piano sonatas. (The only other 2 movement sonata is the mighty Opus 111 which would Godzilla-like crush the G major ones into the ground if they ever encountered one another). So the F sharp major sonata is deeper than the other 2 short sonatas by virtue of its key. It is also greater than they are in its thematic material and how Beethoven uses it. So when, as I slowed down passing the Cape Town Convention Centre to the traffic lights at the bottom of the freeway, this sonata began its slow introductory chordal melody in diminished form in G major, I knew that it DID matter that I cannot hear things in the original key. This was watered down Beethoven. I turned it off.

Addendum:

Sitting at the piano and grounding the Beethoven F sharp major sonata in its key by feeling it under my fingers, I realised I’d made two errors in this post. Beethoven’s duo of small sonatas are not in the same key: the first is in G minor, but I think of it as in G major because of its light-spirited Rondo second movement. There is one other two movement piano sonata among Beethoven’s oeuvre – in F major. I have never had much sympathy with this one. It feels rather journeyman composer-like and the octaves in the first movement take us nowhere. Probably the fault of the key, too. Mental blank led to forgetfulness.

It’s about emotion. don’t you think? The feelings engendered by my change in tonality sense suggest that what makes keys so special is the emotion they bring. This morning while I was doing early morning things such as watering the lawn and emptying the dishwasher, the Fine Music Radio announcer said that he would be playing the Nocturne from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummernight’s Dream. This piece is one that for me epitomises what E major can bring. To me E major is the warmest of the keys – a radiant warmth, with a purring quality. I was all prepared to hear it in the disappointing facile key of F major, being the key one step above E major that my changing brain would bring it to me in. But, no, there was the all the warmth I remembered – I was hearing it in E major. I sat down and enjoyed the French horn solo and the ambient warmth Mendelssohn had written for me. Pleasure restored, joy experienced.

Why did I hear this in E major this time? I presume that the recording being played was marginally flat: the physics of this being that the frequency of the keynote was presumably below some tipping point in my central nervous system which determines whether I hear E or F major.

I recently had an experience where I tried to make use of this putative phenomenon. I am transferring the music on my gramophone records to digital format using a USB turntable and some software. I was putting together a Brahms CD and had a little extra space after transferring his 2nd Piano Concerto in B flat (or is it B?). A little piano music filler seemed appropriate – Julius Katchen playing Brahms’ Waltz in A flat, the most popular, was available on another record. A flat major is a serene, beautiful key, with a hint of strawberry mousse about it. Since I now hear this waltz in A major (my least favourite key) and not in A flat, I thought I’d change the pitch using the Audacity program. I slipped the frequency of the playback down until my brain said the music sounded in A flat, and saved. I burnt both the original and the lowered versions on to the CD.

When I played it back on the CD player later, I was surprised to hear my low frequency version in G major, the key below the A flat major I thought I’d engineered for myself. I seemed to have gone too far in lowering the pitch, yet when making the changes I was hearing the same digital sounds in A flat. Now it sounded very lifeless to me, deprived of its flow and colour low down in G major. Mr Katchen sounded as if he was playing it on the floor. So it is not only about physics and frequency and vibrations. Something else is happening. Could it be my mood (emotion again), or what I have recently listened to that may alter my vulnerable (nay wayward!) sense of pitch? I shall have to experiment some more.

Every cloud has a silver lining and I suppose I ought to have realised that a change in hearing that shifts the sense of pitch may on occasion lead to enhanced sensibility. This happened this week at a concert given by the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra. We were treated to a choral treat: Brahms’ German Requiem with a massive choir in the excellent acoustic of the Cape Town City Hall. (The acoustic is excellent unless you are seated under the gallery, where muddy and muted are two apt adjectives for the aural experience of orchestral music.) We were in the gallery. I don’t know the Requiem well. One cannot avoid knowing “How lovely is thy dwelling place’, and the opening chorus is reasonably familiar. The rest I could identify as Brahms if tested and would have a stab at it being the Requiem as the Alto Rhapsody is the only other choral Brahms that I know. This was a wonderfully sonorous and poised performance, and as it settled into its quiet exit in the last movement (the programme told me about the work being in the shape of an arch), I was ready to enjoy heavenly harmonies. And come they did, in a glorious F sharp or G flat major. How perspicacious of Brahms to choose either of those twin infinite keys to bring this work of  ‘solace in sorrow’ to an end. As the final chords in the woodwind faded away the conductor stood immobile in the ensuing silence, just what those two keys would have demanded. They continued in one’s consciousness, connecting one with the eternal.

Today, two days later, I thought I’d re-live part of Thursday’s experience and listen to our recording (Rattle and Berlin Phil live on EMI). The music mixed with the mundane in our family life and indeed I stopped in the middle to bake some biscuits (thus is the infinite reduced by the quotidian).  I read the CD leaflet and learned that the work begins and ends in F major. The flats and sharps of F sharp major or G flat major that I had heard two evenings before were aural delusions, a neurological remix. But I can still feel what I felt in the City Hall. Our CD moved to the final movement. And in our family room the final movement today was in an unexceptional F major. In the middle of the track, I had experienced some tonal ambiguity and we nearly landed in the 6 sharp or flat keys, but as the movement faded once more and Sir Simon conducted the woodwind chords, he, I and the Berlin Phil knew that Brahms wrote in F major and we were playing it and hearing it in the original key. I don’t know what Brahms thought; I don’t know what Sir Simon thought; but I felt cheated. In this case, bring on the delusions….

This may sound dramatic. How can one lose a musical key? What door cannot be opened if one has lost this kind of key? Interesting metaphor!

My daughter was teaching herself to play Schubert’s wonderful Impromptu in G flat major. This rippling piece of contemplation with its brief but fully resolving shifts into the minor is one of the pieces I used to illustrate the link of the mirror keys of F sharp major and G flat major in the Keynotes programmes. The two keys sound exactly the same as they are based on the same note, G flat and F sharp being the same. in the Keynotes programme I link them to the infinite and the eternal.

It sounded as if my daughter had decided to simplify the piece by playing it in G major – exchanging 6 flats for 1 sharp.  I was hearing it in G major, a semitone higher. She was playing it in the written key. So I seem to have lost that piece’s emotional content. G major to me is light and bright, and this Impromptu cannot work for me in G major.

This evening I listened to some Haydn I had not heard before. The second movement of his keyboard trio number 26. Key F sharp minor. It was in G major (I thought). Very pleasant Haydn, relaxed but not deep. Unusual to choose G major for a second movement in a work in F sharp minor, but Haydn was an innovator. But then the music moved to the finale. In G minor! It could not be G minor in a Haydn Trio in F sharp minor, of course, but that was how I heard it and envisioned the notes of this minuet-rhythm music in a minor key. With that, I realised that I had been cheated of hearing the slow movement as Haydn had intended it. The only way I am going to hear it in F sharp major, the written key, is to digitally manipulate it.

I have subsequently done an experiment on myself: I sat at the piano and played the Schubert myself. With my fingers on the black keys as demanded by Schubert I heard it in G flat major. I closed my eyes and it was still in G flat as I played. Presumably the sense of where my hands were, told my brain to hear G flat as G flat.

Another nuance has appeared as she tries it out again. It sounded in G major before supper. When she went back to it after supper, it was in G flat. So – sated, I hear it differently!

Perhaps I should listen to the Haydn after a meal.

So perhaps I haven’t lost a key: it is intermittently missing…..

I have never had perfect pitch – the ability to name a note or a chord by its musical name on hearing it played. I have been able to name a key or a note most of the time but cannot always follow rapid modulations and cannot tell where a note is if it falls between the classic semitones on the piano. I grew up with a piano that was not in pitch with the rest of the world (a quartertone flat), having been moved from Britain to southern Rhodesia across the ocean. I then learnt the clarinet which does not play the note one sees. I am also not Chinese. Mandarin Chinese being pitch-related enables young Chinese to be pitch perfect in a large proportion of cases. So that I have had pretty good (but not perfect) pitch, I consider to be a boon.

This facility certainly underpinned the nature of the Keynotes programmes on Fine Music Radio. The ‘sound’ of a key influenced most if not all the composers I included, and often determined my emotional response to a piece or a section of  a piece. ‘Keys have character’.

But now things are changing. Since I first compiled those programmes in 2006, the ‘sound of music’ is not what it was. I am losing pitch. The tendency has been for keys to sound a semitone higher than they really are. E major sounds like F major, for example, and, in so doing, it loses the character I have always known it to have. It’s like losing a friend.

I intend to chronicle aspects of this change here. Sometimes it’ll be how I feel, and sometimes what I experience, and perhaps I’ll also take a scientific approach. At what frequency does a specific key ‘switch’ in my brain?