Relative pitch, more on
I thought this was too good to leave buried in the forum:
EMoon wrote:
. . . Relative pitch–I’m still struggling with it, but about a week ago actually *heard* a fifth as a fifth, listening to music on the radio.
My musical moment of terror came last week, when our choir director, giving another alto and me a lesson (he gives a free lesson once a year to choir members who want it; this is the first time I’ve had the nerve), calmly announced that I was not a second alto (a self-definition that no other choir director has ever questioned) but a mezzo-soprano. This after coaching that elicited from my mouth a sound I didn’t recognize as my own voice.
Very scary. I didn’t know what the definition of a mezzo was so came home and looked it up on the internet. Very, very scary. Low altos form a nice sort of continuo, well hidden in the rest of the choir except as they create color, but higher voices stick out. It’s true, he bullied all of the altos into singing soprano in one movement of a horrid French requiem, even though it made us go up to an F# far higher than any of us thought possible. And it’s true, I actually produced that note. However, that was a fluke, and I was prepared to let it stay a fluke, and dive like a whale back to my natural range. What I thought was my natural range.
David, it appears, is determined to haul me up into the drafty attic of my head voice, which he assures me exists. I remember, as an adolescent, warbling away up there with my totally untrained voice, but mostly I played the piano and (please no one hit me) accordion. By ear, because I’m a pitiful reader, something else David is determined to push me out of. (It does not help that I can never remember, when the accidental is the natural, which way to move…because I can’t calculate fast enough if the note that’s being natural is a sharp or a flat, and thus whether the natural is up or down.) Not singing the note until I’ve heard my neighbor sing it is not an option in this choir. . . .
Well, it seems to me you should be absolutely stinking with pleasure and pride. I also figured that if you’d written that much here, surely you’d have written about it even more on your own blog, so I went looking.
http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/188205.html#cutid1 *
. . . And how absolutely brilliant of and for you. I admit I wish I had ANY voice (worth developing) but you go with what you’ve got . . . When I first wrote an answer to this on the forum and then thought wait a minute I should post this, I said, let us know when you start composing. . . . And here in your own blog you mention writing music. Is it out there anywhere???
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My sense of relative pitch is still very young and trembly and anxious. I was about to say erratic, but actually it’s not erratic, it’s just . . . young and trembly. Give me a moment and I’ll tell you what a sounded interval is, which sounds like a joke: give me a moment and I’ll push that bicycle pedal around again. You don’t have a moment, you have to sing/play the next note, you don’t have a moment, the bicycle will fall over. I suppose I’m at the training-wheels/stabilisers stage of relative pitch: what I’ve been thinking (partly as a result of reading EMoon writing about regaining some of the voice she’d had when she was younger) is that, young and trembly as it is, my new ear would have got me through the oral (or aural) exams in college that I bombed. I’ve told you this story: I screwed my grade-point average to take two semesters of harmony, silly twit.** And I worked at learning to recognise intervals but . . . no. Hopeless. It was like trying to learn Mandarin with the Rosetta stone. So this unlooked-for development in my middle age is pretty exciting—and perhaps like EMoon’s discovery of her voice, part of the pleasure is in that reconnection with something that you did when you were young and gave up for whatever reason . . . in my case because it was hopeless. So the moral to this story is . . . it’s not hopeless.***
However, at the moment, there is no way in San Jose that I could sight read and sing the notes as I read them–never mind my ability to hit notes (which does improve with practise). † I absolutely can’t make my sight-reading function that fast. Yet. I assume this will (also) improve with practise. At the moment I’m chiefly using it for hums while hurtling, which I can then hum over and over and over till I’ve got what I really want. And then I can come home and jot it down on music paper–and try a few chords on the piano–before I forget again. Or start a new hum.
But it’s a start. And it’s a start I didn’t think I’d ever have.
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* And for anyone who hasn’t followed our EMoon away from Days in the Life’s forum here’s her home page:
** I also took a semester of introduction to opera. And piano lessons. And voice lessons. This is not the place for a rant about our educational system, but I should have taken music courses, because I wanted to learn something about music. I also realise that some kind of assessment has to be made to get people off their duffs and over to their desks, pianos, etc, and working, but I should not have felt I had to stop taking music because it was messing up my grades.
*** Whatever you’re doing, if you want to keep doing it, do it.
† The awful truth is that I long to join a choir. My voice sucks, but when I’m in practise I can carry a tune, and there’s some not-very-demanding choir out there that would have me.
One of the things People Introduced to the Author most often say^ is, you have to be so self disciplined to do what you do. Well . . . no. Yes, but no. And I’m sure it varies: maybe some writers are very self-disciplined. In my case it’s more a question of coming down with whatever it is, like a virus, which is Peter’s famous line about the speed at which I turned into a gardener: I obviously had the disease in my blood, ready to wake into scary green life on exposure. It doesn’t feel like being disciplined. It feels like doing something or it’ll eat me alive—because whatever it is has woken in my blood, and is stronger than I am. I write because it’ll eat me alive if I don’t. Most of the stuff I do is like that^^, barring taking out the garbage, writing huge cheques to builders and so on.^^^
But most of it also has at some point somewhere some mooring line with the rest of the world. I earn my living, writing stories. You can’t ring bells alone. Other people see your garden.^^^^ I’ve had the conversation with Oisin several times now when I come in with something I’ve written and he says, hmm, this will be difficult for anyone but a really top professional, and my reaction is always no, no, I’ll change it, I’d much rather hope to get it performed some day.
I need to have to sing, if you follow me. I want to be able to sing enough to sing some of my own stuff, but I need a boot up the backside to get me going. I’m manifestly not self-disciplined enough just to do it.
But I think if I was out another evening a week Peter would divorce me. Or maybe just forget who I was. You get more forgetful as you get older. One evening I’d show up for supper—after choir practise, say—and Peter would say, who are you? And I’d say I’m Robin, your wife. And he’d say, Robin? I used to know someone named Robin. Haven’t seen her in years. I keep meaning to try and track her down. We have two more story anthologies to get out. . . . ^^^^^
^ with, Where do you get your ideas? and, Have you ever written a real book?
^^ there are mornings when it’s sheeting that I’d be very happy to stay indoors reading a good book if the hellhounds wouldn’t eat me alive.
^^^ Yes, I am very lucky. I know.
^^^^And say, good heavens, is that a weed?
^^^^^ Or possibly three
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