Klarinet Archive - Posting 000549.txt from 2000/08

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] Lelia's intuitions
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 10:56:26 -0400

Lelia wrote:

> ...sometimes when my digital keyboard and my clarinet are not in tune
> with each other, I hear the illusion that my clarinet is right and the
> piano is wrong, even though I know that digital piano *can't* go out
> of tune unless I deliberately raise or lower the programmable pitch.

[snip]

> I thought that maybe, since the treble end of the piano *really is*
> tuned sharp (to make it sound right with the bass end of the keyboard
> as per your comments, Tony),

..fortunately, what Lelia says is correct, despite my confused
reasoning:-(

> that might mean I *am* playing my clarinet high tones in tune, even
> though obviously I would have to learn to play them sharper to fit
> with the piano. I refuted that hypothesis with a simple experiment
> this morning. I recorded brief bits of piano accompaniments, along
> with some long chords to test and manipulate long tones and some
> scales for unison and parallel octave testing. When I added tha
> clarinet, as long as the two played notes close together in pitch,
> if/when I heard a discrepancy, I *did* automatically assume my
> clarinet was wrong, because I instinctively pulled (or tried to
> pull...) the clarinet intonation into synch with the piano, including
> when both clarinet and piano played high in the treble in unison or
> close harmony.
>
> I only heard the illusion that I was right and the piano was wrong
> when the piano and I went our separate ways with the clarinet playing
> significantly higher notes, especially when I played the clarinet in
> altissimo while the piano played around the *middle* of the keyboard
> or below. The illusion appeared when the clarinet and piano were the
> *farthest apart* from unison, in other words.
>
> This happened when the piano pitch was too low for "stretch" piano
> tuning to be a factor. It was a strong impression, because I even
> felt it in parallel octaves. An octave that's dissonant usually
> affects me like fingernails on a blackboard, but instead of
> immediately flinching away from the dissonance and correcting it, for
> a moment I would mentally "push" at the piano and want it to move its
> pitch down while I stubbornly resisted pulling my pitch up. I had to
> make a conscious decision to play sharper and the sharpened clarinet
> note then sounded wrong even though it was now in synch with the
> keyboard. It just sounded like now we were *both* sharp!

I really don't have any explanation for this, even after mulling it over
for a couple of days, but here are some random thoughts:

People who have pitch memory on a long timescale perhaps have a variety
of perfect pitch. (Perfect pitch could be thought of as *very* long
timescale pitch memory, couldn't it?) I find my own pitch memory to be
much shorter than I would like, so I'm not much use telling how much a
chorus has gone flat in an unaccompanied passage, for example.

We don't know much about perfect pitch, but sometimes its behaviour
seems very strange; as in the story of Benjamin Britten, who claimed
that his perfect pitch had changed over the years, and was now sharp (or
flat, I can't remember which).

I don't even know what that *means*, in my own experience. But
presumably everything started to sound flat (or sharp), to him.

Perhaps you have a shorter timescale perfect pitch ability; one that
you've learnt, but that delivers different results in different
situations, because it works in slightly different ways.

When I make myself dizzy, it seems to me that the room is both
stationary and moving at the same time, because different perceptual
modules are delivering inconsistent information.

So perhaps you have developed different modules for playing close to,
and distant from, the accompaniment.

I myself have to trust my relative pitch module, which is pretty much
all I have, and play always so that the relationship between clarinet
and accompaniment sounds right to me. I don't have the ability to hear
*both of them sharp*, like you, unless the pitch difference is really
quite large and occurs suddenly. You could probably fool me with a very
slow drift.

> Another possibility is that the discrepancy is altogether illusory,
> and that I'm *not* really playing flat. I haven't checked that one
> yet. I don't have one of those electronic needle tuner thingumabobs.
> It may be that both the piano and I are in tune when I think we're
> not, but that years of listening to soloists on CD and to my husband
> practicing the violin every day and playing chamber music on weekends
> have skewed my pitch perception. Maybe now a solo only sounds in tune
> for me when it's sharp relative to the accompaniment. Like most
> violinists with more experience playing solo and chamber music than
> orchestral music, my husband aggressively reaches for "brilliance"
> that makes him stand out above everybody else, especially at the top
> of a phrase. In practice, that means he plays as sharp as he has to
> in order to hold the high ground at all times. As a kid, playing the
> clarinet in band and orchestra, I learned to blend, blend, blend, but
> maybe "stretch" tuning is contagious and I'm starting to catch it, so
> that now when I actually do blend, I think I'm flat.

Perhaps you learnt what I was talking about in one of those ways.

Anyhow, it seems to me that the best you can actually *do* is to play so
that you and your Yamaha sound right together. If you can do that,
regardless of how this other intuition strikes, then you're doing as
well as you can, I'd say.

Of course, there is a further constraint: namely sometimes to play
particular *intervals* wide or narrow so as to make the relationship
right (flat thirds, for example); but I imagine you know about that, and
it certainly doesn't apply to octaves.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

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