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roachboy · 12-21-2004, 06:34 AM

i have long wondered whether the idea of perfect pitch as something built into one's wiring from birth is more an ideological than descriptive proposition. having this ability would be one way of marking members of the hardwired cultural aristocracy that 19th century aesthetics understood to be the proper producers of Art. these would be the folk who engaged in Creativity in the 19th century sense: you know, the Genius who worked in direct communication with some god somewhere, delivering unto us examples of platonic Forms that we can later go experience in a Museum....or a Concert Hall....which in a sense is not surprising, given that so much of this same aesthetic ideology was about excluding the processes particular to making things from consideration, replacing them with systems of classification and conceptions of the Great Tradition and how it reproduces itself.

i am not sure what the functionality of the notion of perfect pitch is, either---if folk above are linking it to having taken solfege, then it should be obvious that the naming function--the ability to identify particular pitches on the piano---is a function of training.

nor am i sure what level of cognition would be most operative in the ability to identify pitch. i would imagine that you would see how good somone';s pitch recognition was by listening to how they interact with other players in an open-form space. i would imagine that these interactions would be far more indicative than would be the matter of whether you have assimilated the particular tasks associated with solfege, which is itself tied to the idea that composition amounts to the writing down of a mental image of a piece that would somehow take shape in the composers brain away from any particular instrument.

on another note, i am not sure why there would be a point in claiming that the ability of improvisers to react to each other in real time is an index of perfect pitch. there are any number of other factors at play there as well. maybe how you think about this is a function of the genre you work in? maybe all that is really at stake here is the question of how you map the features of the genre you work in outward, how you use those conventions to assimilate all music?

12-21-2004, 06:34 AM	#23 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i have long wondered whether the idea of perfect pitch as something built into one's wiring from birth is more an ideological than descriptive proposition. having this ability would be one way of marking members of the hardwired cultural aristocracy that 19th century aesthetics understood to be the proper producers of Art. these would be the folk who engaged in Creativity in the 19th century sense: you know, the Genius who worked in direct communication with some god somewhere, delivering unto us examples of platonic Forms that we can later go experience in a Museum....or a Concert Hall....which in a sense is not surprising, given that so much of this same aesthetic ideology was about excluding the processes particular to making things from consideration, replacing them with systems of classification and conceptions of the Great Tradition and how it reproduces itself. i am not sure what the functionality of the notion of perfect pitch is, either---if folk above are linking it to having taken solfege, then it should be obvious that the naming function--the ability to identify particular pitches on the piano---is a function of training. nor am i sure what level of cognition would be most operative in the ability to identify pitch. i would imagine that you would see how good somone';s pitch recognition was by listening to how they interact with other players in an open-form space. i would imagine that these interactions would be far more indicative than would be the matter of whether you have assimilated the particular tasks associated with solfege, which is itself tied to the idea that composition amounts to the writing down of a mental image of a piece that would somehow take shape in the composers brain away from any particular instrument. on another note, i am not sure why there would be a point in claiming that the ability of improvisers to react to each other in real time is an index of perfect pitch. there are any number of other factors at play there as well. maybe how you think about this is a function of the genre you work in? maybe all that is really at stake here is the question of how you map the features of the genre you work in outward, how you use those conventions to assimilate all music? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite