Klarinet Archive - Posting 000368.txt from 2003/08

From: ormondtoby@-----.net (Ormondtoby Montoya)
Subj: RE: [kl] key of C ear training
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 17:26:47 -0400

To Wendy: we haven't begun to talk about temperament either, which
adds more 'shades of gray' to the question "What is the pitch of A?"
There is no absolute answer.

Being able to identify when two pitches (or intervals) are not identical
is an important skill. If your point is merely that this ability is a
'plus', I"m sure we all agree. But if you mean that a particular
frequency is always 'correct' for a particular named note and every
other frequency is always 'incorrect", then you are mistaken.

To Paul: here's a simple demonstration in order to give you a physical
'feel' for what some of us are talking about. Ask someone to play a
note for you, on whatever instrument is available, without telling you
what the note is. Then you try to play a note exactly one octave
higher.

Probably you'll need to "bend" your note up and down as you search for
the octave. Perhaps you'll find it by using your embouchure, or
perhaps by adjusting your barrel, or perhaps even by asking the other
person to move up or down to match you. But the point is that you'll
*feel* yourself searching for the octave interval without knowing what a
tuner would say about the note that your friend is playing. Even if
your friend is playing somewhere between your tuner's concept of (say) G
and G#, hopefully you'll be able to find one octave higher and you'll
have that sudden "AHA! THERE IT IS!" feeling without knowing anything
about your friend's note except what your 'guts' tell you.

This can be the beginning of what is normally called 'ear training'.
Then you can move on to otheriteravls. As you do so, you will
unavoidably begin to intellectualize about names; but in the beginning,
you couldn't care less about the 'key' in which you are practicing. In
fact, usually it's the opposite situation. Usually you begin with all
the intervals in a chromatic scale (all 12 semitones without reference
to a "key"), and later you begin to think about relationships between
subsets of the semitones. For example, in the beginning you learn to
identify both 'major' and 'minor' seconds. Later on, you learn which
'seconds' are major in a particular key, and which are minor, and why
these distinctions have names.

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