I was thinking of my high-school friend Clemens Weigel the other day. Clemens lived with us in Vienna while studying the Cello with Heinrich Schiff and Walter Nothas, and, truth be told, was mildly obnoxious in his ability to frequently prompt my mother to tell me that I should be rather a lot more like him. The reason of course was, that Clemens was a gifted musiciant and I wasn’t.
Clemens also has something else that I don´t - and apparently- never will have: Perfect Pitch.
Perfect, or absolute pitch, as some call it, is of course, the ability to hear a tone played and name it correctly and the probability of any of us westeners having it is about 1 to 10´000 against. It is in fact so rare that in late 18th Century Europe that young “Wolferl” Amadeus Mozart started his musical career largely as a circus act curated by an ambitious father who led him around the continents courts surprising an audience of aristocrats by naming notes played to him correctly, amongst other stunts like composing his own opera, perhaps.
Clemens, you see, would walk over a doorstep in our old house and correctly diagnose the tonal squeak it made as a “G#”, leading to another of my mother´s dreaded proclamation of “Son, can´t you be more like Clemens”…
Perfect pitch vastly helps people being good musicians, and is generally deemed rather desirable. But if you are like me and don´t have it there is also a distinct upside in blissful oblivion: Many people who posses perfect pitch report considerable distress when listening to music familiar to them, that has been transposed from the original key especially if such transposition occurs incomplete intervals. This can lead to an otherwise gifted musician to abandon baroque music in dismay due to the not infrequent tuning of one half step down from the standard key.
Another potential problem for those who have particularly astute perfect pitchers is playing the piano. The piano, you see, is unbeknownst to many, an un-tunable instrument, since sharps and flats are played on the same key while their theoretical frequency varies ever so slightly in reality. Johann Sebastian Bach was in particular disarray about this leading to him tuning his own pianos, harpsichords and clavichords shuddering at the shoddy job of what was the custom of equal temperament tuning. Bach´s “Well tempered Clavier” might thus well be one of the most abused works in musical history since usually performed on pianos that the composer himself would have considered almost entirely “ill tempered” and unplayable.
And worse yet: There are those who suffer from a skewed absolute pitch in that they will name a note a half key above or below what it really is. These people, as gifted as they may be in all other aspects of music, are almost always exiled into a world musical solitude and have few their works enjoyed only by the 99.99% of us who don´t have perfect pitch as the remaining 0.01% will run in considerable panic. A less than perfect market you see.
While thinking about this a few days back, I tried to figure out what contributes human beings to developing perfect pitch and I found a few methods, some rather difficult to implement.
People, who fall within the autism spectrum disorder, for one, have a global likelihood to develop perfect pitch of 30%. thus adding to the long list of remarkable gifts of such people.
Developing a rather obscure condition called Williams–Beuren Syndrome also vastly increases our ability to name a note played accurately. It is also said to cause a generally cheerful nature, strong language skills and a particular ease of strangers, while on the downside leads to cardiovascular problems and developmental delay, so by all means choose wisely.
But since obtaining either falls outside our control, what else can we do to become at hearing music?
The bad news upfront: No human adult has ever been reliably reported by science to develop perfect pitch. In other words: 99.99% of us are now toast. "But what about our children", I ask as an ambitious father, what has to go right in childhood for perfect pitch to emerge in our offspring? Well not surprisingly, early musical training before age four, helps somewhat. But really not that much as one might hope.
Apparently it´s not genetics either, that is unless you do have Williams-Beuren Syndrome. You see, no one has ever reliably demonstrated a clear connection of nature over nurture when it comes to this phenomenon.
Here comes my surprise: The real number one, sure way to teach our children perfect pitch according to the works of Diane Deutsch at the University of California, San Diego is: Being raised in a tonal language. Tonal languages, you see are languages that rely on pitch as much as they do on sounds and the same “word” can take on a totally different, sometimes even opposing, meaning if uttered in C vs. say B flat. This would imply some serious "walking on eggshells" for those of us who hear relative pitch and wish to communicate in such languages. Dr. Deutsch´s research suggests that 60% of people who are Chinese and are studying to be professional musicians absolute pitch vs. only 14% of Americans in the same demographic, and she correlates it back to language.
Now if raising your child in Cantonese is not your thing, don´t be alarmed, as there is a wealth of other tonal languages to choose from. The list is actually 26 languages strong, but Mandarin, Bantu, Ubangian, Yoruba, Loloish or KX’a perhaps should give you sufficient choice to not deprive your child from a serious shot of being the next Johann Sebastian Bach.
Clemens, by the way, went on to be a professional Cellist at the renowned Orchestra of the Munich Gärtnerplatztheater, and playes beautifully for the Rodin Quartett while I went on to build Loudspeakers for people like him. He came to visit with his Orchestra not too long ago and mentioned he wanted to get a pair of our KVART & BØLGE SoundSommeliers for his daughter´s musical training. An unambitious choice compared to learning to speak, say Hmong Mien, I may add, albeit with considerable conflict of interest, a respectable choice nonetheless. Hope it works out.