 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: EaubeauHorn
Date: 2015-08-06 01:11
I doubt I'll get much response here, but I do have the question: how many here have perfect pitch, read by pitch instead of by fingering, and still manage to play both Bb and A clarinets with their respective parts? If so, how do you manage it?
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Author: kdk
Date: 2015-08-06 02:37
I don't have "perfect pitch" but have known people who did. One oboist I know played clarinet for awhile and couldn't stand seeing one note and hearing a different one. Another I knw years ago just put up with the difference. He played several instruments and I don't know what he eventually did, but he seemed to adapt when he was playing clarinet.
Perfect pitch is a sort of nebulous term in any event. There's nothing in the physical/acoustical world to identify the note produced by a string vibrating at 440 Hz/second as "A." In fact, it isn't in many places in the world (and many cities in the U.S.), as we've often discussed. So, when a person (you?) hears the absolute pitch "A" in your inner ear, what frequency do you actually hear? Any association between a sounding pitch and a name has to have been learned at some point.
One way to cope with it for someone with an established sense of absolute pitch is to associate each note on each clarinet with its actual pitch and think of each set of associations as a different language. When I see in print the words "Yes," "Si," "Oui," and "Da" I know it's an affirmation in each case - its meaning is the same, although each version is a different symbolic representation (spelling).
The suggestion was made in the thread about Eb/Bb clarinets to think of (moveable) clefs, simply moving the pitch names to different levels of the staff and reading the actual sounding pitches instead of transposing. French horn players do this as a matter of course, and moveable clefs were very much in use through the Baroque period, especially in choral music. It should work for clarinets.
Someone with perfect pitch may have a totally different perspective, but in the end pitch notation is a representation of relative positions in the operating scale and staff position doesn't need to be wedded to a specific pitch or frequency of sound.
I don't know if that's any help at all or even an answer to your question.
Karl
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Author: Chris P
Date: 2015-08-06 02:55
I know a singer and pianist with perfect pitch who took up clarinet much later on in life. As a singer she would prefer to transpose Baroque music down a semitone instead of singing at 415Hz if she was reading from a vocal part that's being played at Baroque pitch. So clarinet did prove to be a bit of a challenge with it sounding a whole tone or minor 3rd lower than the written music, but she has got used to it,
Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.
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Author: Tony F
Date: 2015-08-06 03:27
I don't have perfect pitch, but I sometimes have tinnitus for periods of a few days to a few weeks, and that gives me a perfect C reference.
Tony F.
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Author: Hank Lehrer
Date: 2015-08-06 05:16
Here is a sad but true story about a conductor I had in a very good concert band who claimed to have "perfect pitch."
I would always be in perfect tune to begin the rehearsal but as the temperature would rise in the room, so would the pitch. A couple of times though I readjusted my instrument with the tuner so I was bang on. So now, I am in tune with A=440 but not in-tune with the rest of the band since no one has adjusted.
The conductor said "you are flat..." Sure, I was flat with the rest of the band but if this individual really had perfect pitch, wouldn't the apparent rise in pitch by the entire ensemble be noticeable?
My thought was "do you want me to be in tune or sharp with everyone else?" I pride myself on playing well in tune (with the tuner) but evidently, that was not the correct in this situation. And the conductor did not, in fact, have perfect pitch but relative pitch of some sort.
HRL
PS I ended up moving on to another band at the end of the season. I'm happier.
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Author: EaubeauHorn
Date: 2015-08-06 05:20
I am a horn player and already read a movable clef. "Horn clef's" 2nd line G, I call middle C. So for clarinet, I read Bb clef (written C, I call Bb) but the problem is that an A clarinet is only a half step different from a Bb clarinet, and while I had little trouble switching between oboe and English horn, the fingerings were a whole fifth apart and not just a half step. Likely I won't ever reach the point of playing an A in an orchestra but I'm just curious how someone has adjusted to that and seeking comment from the horse's mouth.
I can play Bb clef on viola, and viola (alto) clef on clarinet, and violin parts on a Bb instrument, and read Eb parts on a euphonium, etc....because the process is knowing the fingering for the (concert) pitches on the instruments and then applying the concert pitch the printed note in the clef is referring to, to that instrument. So nothing is read by fingering, and all are read by pitch. Piece of cake for most applications, and I really do not know how people can do the mental gymnastics of transposing each note when just reading a different clef is so simple once you know what pitches the notes on the clef represent. I've never met anyone with pitch recognition (my preferred label because "perfect" has nothing to do with it) who does not read music this way, similar to how people are reading the words on this page, hearing the sound of the word in their head. (At least that is how I read words on a page.)
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Author: maxopf
Date: 2015-08-06 05:51
I have either perfect pitch or very good relative pitch (I've never been sure exactly which, but I can name notes that I hear, and I know what a note will sound like when given the note name.) I learned to play in written pitch, not concert pitch, though. So I'm aware that an open G sounds concert F on Bb clarinet and concert E on A clarinet and expect those pitches to come out when I play an open G, but switching back and forth doesn't bother me because I still read G and play the fingering associated with that note no matter what clarinet I'm playing. If that makes any sense...
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Author: clarinetguy ★2017
Date: 2015-08-06 07:06
I can't comment about A clarinets because I haven't played one in years, and I don't have perfect pitch. Still, after having played clarinet for such a long time, I've developed a kind of B-flat clarinet pitch memory. Each pitch seems to have its own unique timbre, and I can usually identify them when I hear them.
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Author: ned
Date: 2015-08-06 07:23
Try singing or humming a note, and then,try to hit the desired note on the piano.
and/or
Have someone strike a note on the piano whilst you are in an adjacent room, and attempt to name that note (blindfold test)
You may be surprised.
Piano is the better benchmark rather that the clarinet, for these exercises.
You will need to do this a number of times in a row, at different times of the day, rather than all at the one time (obviously) to rule out the coincidence factor.
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Author: ned
Date: 2015-08-06 08:52
''Jack Morris had the perfect pitch.''
...anything to add to this please? Ohhh...now I get it! American gag eh? One would have to know something about sport in the first instance, and American baseball in the second instance.
I'm afraid it fell flat with this particular Aussie until Wikipedia threw this up...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Morris
Try this one... there are no perfect pitches... http://www.theage.com.au/sport/cricket/centurion-curator-says-first-test-pitch-will-be-ok-20140209-32avj
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Author: Dibbs
Date: 2015-08-06 13:32
Hank Lehrer wrote:
> So now, I am in tune with A=440 but not in-tune with the rest of the band > since no one has adjusted.
Why did you do that? Don't you want it to sound good?
>
> .. I pride myself on playing well in tune (with
> the tuner) but evidently, that was not the correct in this
> situation.
In what situation would it be preferable to be in tune with the tuner rather than everyone else? Music is meant to be listened to not measured.
>
> PS I ended up moving on to another band at the end of the
> season. I'm happier.
I think the first band will be happier too.
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Author: clarinetguy ★2017
Date: 2015-08-06 17:21
David, I remember Jack Morris very well. When he was in the prime of his career, he had quite a perfect pitch, his split finger fastball (which he learned from pitching coach Roger Craig).
Post Edited (2015-08-06 17:21)
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Author: kdk
Date: 2015-08-06 19:16
Silversorcerer wrote:
> I think it is the reason that the strings tune to
> the oboe and not some arbitrary electronic device that is stuck
> at some quantum atomic frequency.
>
Except that most orchestras specify what pitch (in Hz - anywhere from 440 to 443 in the U.S.) the oboe is to play when the orchestra tunes. I've known very few oboists over the past 20-30 years who didn't have a tuner on their music stands to check that they were playing the specified pitch (no matter how much they've had to contort their embouchures to produce it).
Karl
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Author: JonTheReeds
Date: 2015-08-06 22:00
I thought we tuned to the oboe because it's a pure, stable and piercing sound
--------------------------------------
The older I get, the better I was
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Author: kdk
Date: 2015-08-07 00:27
Silversorcerer wrote:
> First try to establish some logical reason for tuning an
> ensemble of wooden weather influenced instruments to a pitch
> standard device that is in the electronic universe of weather
> immunity,
Which instruments do you mean? There are a number of metal temperature (but not so much humidity) influenced instruments in many ensembles that, as a matter of fact, tend to be the strongest voices in the ensemble. Then there are the wooden instruments whose pitch is rather more influenced by the properties of their strings, which are made of a number of combinations of metal, gut and synthetic materials.
All these instruments are moving up or down in pitch according to different relationships with temperature and humidity. Intonation chaos. What could you use to provide a standard? Ensembles - bands less than orchestras in my experience - tend to solve the problem by *trying* to set a standard everyone can at least start with and that, when things get too wild and woolly, they can try to return to by re-tuning. There's no instrument on the stage once things have gotten started that can supply a reliable standard pitch and each instrument has diverged from the starting pitch at a different rate and quite possibly in opposite directions.
Tuners are reliable and, as you say, don't care how hot or humid it is or how much sawing the string players have had to do.
But I can't explain the need in the 21st century (or probably earlier ones) for DST. All I know about High Noon is that it was a movie.
Karl
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Author: rmk54
Date: 2015-08-07 03:32
My thought was "do you want me to be in tune or sharp with everyone else?" I pride myself on playing well in tune (with the tuner) but evidently, that was not the correct in this situation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A colleague of mine once asked Tony Gigliotti how it was the Philadelphia Orch. wind section played so well in tune. His answer was: "We all play out of tune together".
Apparently not your philosophy...
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Author: kdk
Date: 2015-08-07 04:41
Silversorcerer wrote:
> All of the brass and woodwind instruments suffer the same
> problem with temperature.
I will agree with most of what you say in this post if we're talking about bands. I almost never use a tuner to tune the student bands I conduct mostly for the reasons you lay out. I almost never check the oboe pitch against a tuner unless the other players are having obvious trouble matching it.
But in my performing experience brass, woodwinds and strings don't change during a playing session at the same rate or necessarily to the same degree. The instruments, after all, are not at that point reacting to changes in the room temperature but to changes in the instruments themselves as they warm (or don't) from being played.
> Make sure they are in tune with each
> other and that part is done and done as perfectly as Jack
> Morris.
For a few minutes.
> Then you tune all the strings to the woodwinds. The
> strings have a greater flexibility in tuning range that will
> still deliver perfect intonation.
Here's where we differ.
Many string players I know and play with will argue that their instruments resonate best only within a very narrow range.
> There is a bit of limit with
> tension, but it is well within the variability of several
> degrees of temperature.
>
You'd have to take this up with the string players, starting with the concertmaster. But, again, we're not really dealing with changes in the hall temperature. Clearly (I think) wind instruments - wood or metal - will warm up more from their starting temperature than a string instrument will. No one blows into his violin to play it.
> So the first thing that you make sure is that the woodwind
> instrument you tune to is in tune with itself, and you don't
> worry what pitch that is. It's not important what the pitch is,
> whatever it is will give a better overall result than imposing
> a standard pitch. Then you tune the strings to that instrument.
Not to beat a dead horse, but the string players, not some indefinite "you," are the ones who will need to tune to "that instrument." But they are the ones who won't tune to a sharp oboe or a flat one (or to any other instrument) - they'll just ignore it and tune their strings to the A they came in with - probably at or pretty close to 440 Hz in the U.S..
> I've been to quite a few symphony performances. I take opera
> glasses with me. I have never seen an electronic tuner on the
> stage. Maybe the oboist took care of that back stage if they
> did it at all, but that would completely defeat the entire
> reason for tuning to the oboe in the first place.
I've *played* in more than a few symphony performances - generally behind the flutes and oboes. You wouldn't see the tuner (unless you have X-ray opera glasses) because it's on the oboist's music stand. Watch for a little after the tuning is finished - the oboist will move it out of the way so it doesn't block his music.
I'm not saying every oboist does this, although I have (only) sometimes even seen Richard Woodhams in the Philadelphia Orchestra put a tuner away. Before Korgs became cheap and tiny, oboists used to go to considerable effort to make sure their reeds played at their orchestra's tuning pitch (reeds can be tuned by a skilled player) before they showed up at the hall. Sometimes there would be pitched battles between the concertmaster and the principal oboist over whether or not the oboe A was right.
>
> The double reed instrument is used instead of a single reed
> because it is more difficult to bend the pitch on a double
> reed, so it plays a more dependable fixed pitch.
Oboists since the use of tuners became commonplace bend their pitch all over the place, which is why I don't like the whole approach and wish they'd go back to setting their reeds up in advance. An electronic note would, for me, be preferable. I don't know which world-class orchestra's concerts you attend, but all orchestras don't play at that level. Woodhams doesn't bend his pitch audibly, either, and when he uses a tuner I'm sure it's only to confirm his pitch rather than to guide it, but the oboists I play with, some quite good players but not at Woodhams's level, work differently.
All of this is not *merely* tradition, and I'm not enough of a string player to argue with those who are highly skilled who feel their instruments' tuning flexibility has finite limits within rather narrow tolerances.The bottom line is that they outnumber us and so they call the tune.
Karl
Post Edited (2015-08-07 06:06)
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Author: Hank Lehrer
Date: 2015-08-07 04:55
Hi All,
It seems that those who commented on my post missed the first sentence: "Here is a sad but true story about a conductor I had in a very good concert band who claimed to have "perfect pitch."
rmk54, my philosophy is to do what the conductor wants. When the conductor said "you are flat..." was he referencing the ensemble or his perfect pitch. Of course I tuned to the rest of the ensemble.
Dibbs, it is surprising that you would make such a haughty comment at the end of your post without knowing anything about me, my playing, the ensemble, the conductor, or why I left the band at the end of the season.
HRL
Post Edited (2015-08-07 05:32)
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Author: Wes
Date: 2015-08-07 08:45
Good oboes, such as Loree, are tuned at the factory to ring best at a pitch standard, such as A440. If the oboist has a stable responsive reed, they will sound at that pitch. The oboist has a tuner on his stand to assure that the reed has not changed and perhaps to answer potential critics, but they do not necessarily expect to adjust the pitch if the oboe and the reed are working ok. Results could be different if the oboist does not use a stable reed, in which case the pitch could vary a lot and the player will try to control it while watching the tuner.
Contrary to common comments, the string players are often well in tune at the pitch standard in serious orchestras. They call for an A sometimes, but often don't change anything, just wanting some reassurance of the general tuning.
While the clarinet, flute, and brass are very affected by temperature levels, the oboe is less so affected. This is possibly because the oboe bore is so small that it gets full of warm air immediately upon blowing. It is the temperature of the air within the instrument that controls pitch, after all, not the instrument body temperature. These are observations from playing the oboe for decades.
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Author: JonTheReeds
Date: 2015-08-07 14:49
My experience of strings, from playing a violin as a youngster and from talking to string players, is that violins don't have to be in tune to play in tune. But, as with clarinets, it helps if they start off more or less in tune. To me, as a rank amateur, the point of tuning seems partly psychological (wake up guys, we're about to play a concert!), and partly so everyone starts from the same place. And if we need a reference tone, why not A=440? Sure, we all adapt as the concert goes on and instruments warm up etc. But at least we can start more or less in tune.
--------------------------------------
The older I get, the better I was
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Author: kdk
Date: 2015-08-07 16:54
Silversorcerer wrote:
> The pitch 440 was selected because 439 is a prime number.
Why was being next above a prime number important?
Karl
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Author: Dibbs
Date: 2015-08-07 17:38
kdk wrote:
> Silversorcerer wrote:
>
> > The pitch 440 was selected because 439 is a prime number.
>
> Why was being next above a prime number important?
>
> Karl
The original standard was a French one based on an organ pipe that played 435Hz at, I think, 15 degrees C. That translated to 439 at a more comfortable 20 degrees C.
The BBC wanted to broadcast the standard note so that everyone had a reliable reference. At the time they had electronics that could produce an accurate frequency of 1000Hz. They could add electronics to multiply and divide this frequency as required to produce different frequencies but, being a prime number, 439 was impractical for them. (1000 * 11) / 25 = 440.
That's what I heard anyway. I do remember the BBC broadcasting A440 on the TV late at night after the programs finished so maybe there's some truth in it.
Post Edited (2015-08-07 17:48)
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Author: BartHx
Date: 2015-08-07 21:03
I had a rather long and enjoyable career as a high school teacher. However, at one point between permanent teaching jobs, the band director at a nearby high school walked out and did not come back. I was asked to sub while they found someone else (I was actually a science teacher). On the first day, when the jazz band came in, I asked them to tune and was told, in no uncertain terms, "we are a jazz band so we don't need to tune". I doubt many of them continued playing for long after high school.
I used to know a trombone player with perfect pitch (yes, if you played a note, she could name it). She drove a Model A Ford and identified her shift points by pitch. She never missed a shift. Her sister also had perfect pitch and had no trouble driving the car after being reminded what the shift pitches were.
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Author: annev
Date: 2015-11-13 19:57
I've been reading this thread with interest because I have a question about group intonation. Sometimes I find myself in a group where the winds are playing sharp, the violins are playing flat and the upright basses are beautifully in tune. I seem to be sensitive to pitch, because I can hear that of the three groups, the basses are the ones who are "on" (I discreetly verified this one night with a tuner). As a clarinet player, do I follow the winds or the basses? (I often try to follow the winds because otherwise I sound flat with respect to the section, but by the end of the evening I'm just exhausted...) Thanks for your thoughts.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-11-13 20:06
"In tune" only applies to what is going on around you. If everyone else is "sharp" and you are the only one playing "A=440," then you are "out of tune."
In the situation you describe (a nightmare to be sure) your ONLY choice is to play with the section or the prevailing other sound at the time (if you are the SOLO voice, play in tune with the accompaniment). If you choose to play "in tune" with the basses and not your "sharp" section, then not only is the wind section "sharp," but it is also "out of tune" with itself.
..............Paul Aviles
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2015-11-14 00:28
I'm an amateur, but fwiw, I have relative pitch, not absolute pitch, and I'm grateful for that. I'll accept almost anything as concert A, but relative to that A, I know if something's out of tune and it drives me bonkers. If I had absolute pitch -- aaaaggghhhhh! Permanently bonkers!
However, I suspect most of us who have relative pitch constantly train ourselves, and we can train ourselves to hear a scale all out of whack. A decade or so ago, when I bought my Yamaha Clavinova electronic piano, I tried out all the various combinations of harpsichord, piano and organ settings and practiced obsessionally for several weeks without playing my wind instruments at all. I retained a vague memory that when I first started playing the Clavinova, the upper end sounded sharp, but by the time I started playing clarinets and saxophones again, I'd forgotten about that early reaction, and the winds sounded flat, flat, flat. At first I thought, okay, I've lost my lip. Shame on me.
But then I started wondering about that piano and I remembered that at first, the treble sounded sharp to me, even though concert A tested out as bang-on 440. So I got out a chart and started testing the other notes one at a time. Yup -- excessively stretch-tuned by the factory. (Stretch-tuning means the higher the notes, the sharper they go.) The treble was way sharper than the bass. Fortunately, one of the nice things about a Clavinova is that the owner can re-tune it. I reeled that treble back in, leaving it *slightly* stretched (customary today), and whaddya know, my saxophones and clarinets sounded normal again.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: John Morton
Date: 2015-11-14 21:39
More anecdotes on this topic:
My brother had what he calls "absolute pitch" from a very early age. When he was a little kid and piano student our father (an electrical engineer) liked to test him in various ways, sometimes with an audio oscillator. But more interesting to me was this parlor trick: you could play all the notes in one octave simultaneously, leaving one out, and my brother could name the missing one right away.
That sort of thing expands the scope of this mysterious talent. My brother is always aware of pitches in the environment, e.g the gearshift pitches, birdcalls, 60 hz. electrical hum, etc. He became a recordist and sound engineer, and I've always envied his ability to spot the frequency of feedback ring and notch it out. In semi-retirement he is teaching a course in ear training, which emphasizes interval recognition. For example, he plays a triad: is it major, minor, augmented or diminished? I can puzzle out the answers to those exercises, but my brother just knows them without thinking.
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Author: annev
Date: 2015-11-14 23:56
Thank you for your thoughts, Paul. I've always been a team player (no pun intended!) and just want the music to be as lovely as possible.
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