On Beethoven’s deafness
ADDENDUM:
Here’s a description of the premiere of Beethoven’s 9th:
…[T]he Ninth Symphony was premiered on 7 May 1824 in the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna…This was the composer’s first onstage appearance in 12 years; the hall was packed with an eager audience and a number of musicians.
The premiere of Symphony No. 9 involved the largest orchestra ever assembled by Beethoven…many of Vienna’s most elite performers are known to have participated.
…Caroline Unger, who sang the contralto part at the first performance and is credited with turning Beethoven to face the applauding audience.
Although the performance was officially directed by Michael Umlauf, the theatre’s Kapellmeister, Beethoven shared the stage with him. However, two years earlier, Umlauf had watched as the composer’s attempt to conduct a dress rehearsal of his opera Fidelio ended in disaster. So this time, he instructed the singers and musicians to ignore the almost completely deaf Beethoven. At the beginning of every part, Beethoven, who sat by the stage, gave the tempos. He was turning the pages of his score and beating time for an orchestra he could not hear…
When the audience applauded—testimonies differ over whether at the end of the scherzo or symphony—Beethoven was several bars off and still conducting. Because of that, the contralto Caroline Unger walked over and turned Beethoven around to accept the audience’s cheers and applause. According to the critic for the Theater-Zeitung, “the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them.” The audience acclaimed him through standing ovations five times; there were handkerchiefs in the air, hats, and raised hands, so that Beethoven, who could not hear the applause, could at least see the ovations.
Our first German Shepard used to take in all of our music with aplomb, except for the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth. When that massed Teutonic chorus kicks in, he’d always start howling along.
Do you know the design of the original Compact Disk, or CD, a collaboration between Philips corp. and Sony corp., was specifically made to be long enough to contain Beethoven’s ninth? It was or is that popular in Japan.
This video makes me want to re-watch Amadeus. I’ve got a quote in my head today, and I think it is from Amadeus. “Too many notes!” Perhaps Mozart says it to another composer or maybe vice versa. Then a reply something like, “How dare you say such a thing.”
One of the things that’s nice about some modern music compared to the classics is the added rhythmic complexity.
I’m a little obsessed with Chick Corea today, but this is a selection from his “Children’s Songs” catalog. Listen to the first song which is also CS #1,
0:30 — 2:30 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPT6CrYzN8M
It’s seems extremely simple, but rhythmically it’s a bit more than it seems. Those right hand notes aren’t placed at what you feel is the right time, and it tugs at you.
Then listen to Corea’s most famous of the group, Children’s Song #6, same video, at 5:35 min. Is it “Too many notes” or not? If you stop listening for the individual notes, it is almost like a gush of water and quite nice. And rhythmically complex.
TommyJay,
Beato also did a video on Corea a couple days ago.
What? (LOL)
I saw that Griffin. I already skip listened through it, but will listen to the whole thing through the Hi-Fi speakers soon. That video also references a musician, Gary Burton, who rather suddenly lost his perfect pitch. He noticed it when working with Chick Corea.
Glad to see some respect for Corea. I’ll have to get to Rick B on Chick.
I’ve never stopped listening to “Piano Improvisations Vol. 1,” “Return to Forever” and “Crystal Silence” (with Gary Burton).
What I notice in particular, in addition to his melodies, invention and playfulness, is the diamond precision of his beat.
On the back of my old “Return to Forever” album was a quote from Corea that he wanted his music to communicate. Later I realized that Corea had been a Scientologist and the quote was out of the Scientology hymn book.
But I didn’t mind. Corea made some magnificent music, however nudged by L. Ron Hubbard.
Bach and Mozart were similar in their musical virtuosity – and Nikola Tesla was as well, with his science. Their genius had an aspect that allowed them to visualize creatively with sufficient resolution as to imitate reality, in isolation of the physical senses. Tesla would construct inventions in his mind, operate them, disassemble to inspect the wear, and then innovate.
What a gift for them, and for us.
huxley,
Oh yes. I had heard Corea & RTF in concert three times, once on campus out east in college and then twice in Albuquerque. Then one day I was flipping through a local entertainment paper in California and he played a gig at one of our local bars. Naturally, I went. How did he happen to appear at some two-bit bar?
My recollection was that there were some claims that he had been trying to recover from some illness (25 years ago perhaps), but I believe the scuttlebutt was that he was separating from Scientology. If that’s true, I wonder if there was some severe financial toll.
______
… is the diamond precision of his beat.
I heard that he died in his hometown of Chelsea, MA, the I read Wikipedia which said he died in his Tampa Bay home.
But the other thing in his Wiki was that fact that while he started on the piano at age four, several years later he took up the drums and percussion instruments. They said his keyboard work often has a percussive quality. And a diamond like precision?
I recall having to do a paper on Beethoven for some mandatory humanities class I was almost as desperate to avoid as I was sociology; or, American Literature, with its armpit sniffing ponce poet cruising the wounded wards during the Civil War.
Nonetheless I learned a couple of interesting things in the course; 1st, that there was more “science” or at least serious technique in painting than I had ever suspected; and 2nd, – while researching Beethoven – the meaning of the rather obsolete term “leutic”.
The story I heard was that when the CD was in development the developers had the good sense to consult with Author Fiedler, of the Boston Pops. He is the one that suggested the CD be long enough to contain the 9th Symphony in one place. LPs, the 33 rpm things, took 3.
Life was different then.
I was walking and thinking about the end of the above Beato video. I’m not 100% sure what he was trying to say about elderly composers like Beethoven losing their perfect pitch. Assuming Beethoven lost a half tone of his perfect pitch, I think it is possible he heard the live concert (to the extent he could) a half tone different than what he heard in his head while composing.
I don’t think it is possible that he wrote the “wrong” symphony by a half a tone. I think as a great young composer, Beethoven would have known the exact emotional content that each major and minor musical key carries. He would have chosen the keys on that basis, not just what he was hearing in his head.
I recall some rock music theory guy was asked to compare Jimi Hendrix and Robin Trower. “What!?,” he said. “Hendrix wrote in major keys and Trower in minor keys. No comparison.”
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I knew he was deaf at the end of his life, but didn’t realize how long he was deaf, or how severe it had been.
We are truly fortunate to be the beneficiaries of the work of great men who have gone before us.
Wikipedia:
Sounds like corporate partners trying to screw each other over. Nice.
TommyJay:
What I am pretty sure Beato meant was that people with perfect pitch have that perception of pitch (the perception that links what they hear with the pitch name identification in their brain) wobble a half tone down as they age. But what happened to Beethoven was twofold. Beato is speculating that Beethoven had that half-tone shift of the pitch perception in his head, and then Beato is also saying that we know Beethoven was actually deaf so he could not hear the live music at all and hear how it matched up or didn’t match up. In other words, Beethoven imagined the music in his head and could write it down without ever hearing it, but the music he was imagining in his head was a half tone different than what he was writing. He never actually heard it with his ears at all.
Here’s a description of the premiere of Beethoven’s 9th:
Neo,
In that same Wikipedia page, the first public demo of the CD was (drum roll):
The first public demonstration was on the BBC television programme Tomorrow’s World in 1981, when the Bee Gees’ album Living Eyes (1981) was played.
The Bee Gees and Beethoven making history together.
Neo,
I had heard that bit of history about Beethoven at the concert, but naturally forgot most of the detail. OK, he’s completely deaf there.
But here’s the crux. I’ll suggest that Beethoven did not write down exactly what he heard in his head, assuming his pitch perception had slipped a half tone. (That’s exactly what Neo said I think.)
But the Amadeus clip is interesting. (Now I really want to see the movie again.)
Mozart: “Second beat of the fourth measure, on F.” Then he sings. And Salieri writes.
You see Mozart tells Salieri the first note is an F. So even if he starts by singing an E#, Salieri knows it is an F. And Mozart calls out an F because he knows what the correct musical key is for this piece. Salieri hears a pitch change of a third or a fifth as Mozart sings, but it is all relative to that F.
I enjoy watching videos of the flash mob performances of the 9th final movement.
Like this one.
I fear for western civilization.
“Sounds like corporate partners trying to screw each other over. Nice.” (re story of how CD diameter was determined)
After working in the electronics industry for a while I realized that “standards”, even when given the imprimatur of august bodies, are usually negotiated around commercial needs.
No tongue in the bell
And the fishwives yell
But they might as well be mute
So you get to keep the pictures
That don’t seem like much…
Revoked but not yet cancelled
The gift goes on
In silence
In a bell jar
Still a song…
,,,Come on now
You’ve got to try
If you’re feeling contempt
Well then you tell it
If you’re tired of the silent night
Jesus well then you yell it
Condemned to wires and hammers
Strike every chord that you feel
That broken trees
And elephant ivories conceal
Joni Mitchell – Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig’s Tune)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvgo0mybHg4
________________________________________________
Not one of her best, but I admire the attempt.
That’s surprising that the famous turning of Beethoven’s attention to the crowd is now attributed to the contralto! That’s not how I’ve ever heard the story before. I don’t recall now who it was supposed to have been in the standard telling, but I would naturally have assumed the concertmaster, I guess, in the absence of anything more specific.
The man narrating this or presenting it is not known to me, but he reminds me a little of Brent Spiner. I am dissatisfied with his reading from the Heiligenstadt letter – somewhat passionless. That letter may be no great poetry, maybe, but the fire in Beethoven’s soul should come out and burn off that page! I went back and read it in the original again just now to hear LvB’s voice in it. But this presenter’s subsequent technical explanation is interesting. When he got to the examples of tinnitus, though, I heard essentially no change; either my hearing is starting to go in some range or other, or my computer’s speaker isn’t being clear. Even with my headphones in, I just got these couple of little tiny blips. (Some of the video comments indicate that the demonstration was something only a high-end system can really depict.)
I went to Bonn once and found the statue of LvB, and have some vague recollection that I might have found or tried to find his house. Whether I succeeded I don’t remember – would have to look through my photos.
I was pretty clueless about classical music growing up, although I did love (and in some cases knew the source of) such tunes as the “Lone Ranger” theme. In college I became hooked on Chopin, then gravitated to Mozart after seeing “Amadeus”. What got me to pay more attention to Beethoven’s work (although I was familiar with many of his more popular compositions) was the choice of Beethoven pieces (from the 7th Symphony and 5th Piano Concerto) in the closing scenes of “The King’s Speech”.
Technology has allowed me to spend more time working from home, where I stream a classical music station. The more I listen, the more convinced I am that ‘Schroeder’ was right. There is no other composer who measures up to Ludwig Van.
Anyway, I love Beethoven’s Ninth, and the more I hear it, the more convinced I am that the second movement is phenomenal. And if I remember correctly, I used to hear a sampling of it at the close of NBC nightly news, back in the Huntley/Brinkley days. Way back in the days when I loved to hear the “Lone Ranger Theme”.
OlderandWheezier:
My mother was an amateur classical pianist, so I heard classical music growing up. Sometimes she would play her records after us kids went to bed. One night she played the Ninth and I woke up during the “Ode to Joy,” convinced the angels were visiting us.
The next morning I asked my mother and she told me about Beethoven. It’s still a miracle to me.
Over the years I’ve tried to penetrate Beethoven’s late string quartets, to no avail. Looking them up on wiki I discovered I’m not alone:
________________________________________________
Beethoven’s late quartets went far beyond the comprehension of musicians and audiences of his time. One musician said, “we know there is something there, but we do not know what it is.”
________________________________________________
I can tell they are well-written and Beethovenesque, but they are too “dry” and don’t come together for me like the symphonies.
Apparently, these quartets looked ahead to more modern music. Wiki goes on to say:
________________________________________________
Opinion has changed considerably from the time of their first bewildered reception: these six quartets (including the Große Fuge) are widely considered to be among the greatest musical compositions of all time.
@Huxley:
Other-wordly, yes. But buried like a gem in Quartet No. 15 (Op. 132) you get the 3rd movement: ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’.
I like buried gems in music. Other examples are the peasant wedding in Smetana’s Moldau and O Mio Babbino Caro as the central still point in the spikey to-and-fro and through-composed Gianni Schicchi <– this to me always sounds so much better as part of the whole than as a solo piece.
It’s late and I don’t want to risk waking the wife watching the video, but I don’t understand the discussion around perfect pitch and mishearing by a half tone. Even if true, I don’t see how that could matter. Music is math and, as someone suggested above, Beethoven certainly knew all the chords and what was dissonant. He would have known what notes could be played by what instruments in concert (pun intended) to produce the tones he intended. Even if his brain “heard” what he was writing a half tone lower, he would have written the score in the exact manner he intended; which would have been the proper key. The key the score is written in.
Regarding Classical, no argument from me regarding Beethoven’s genius, or the glory of the 9th, but I prefer Mozart to Beethoven and Baroque to the Romantics.
Rufus T Firefly — my heretical musical opinion is different.
Mozart died young. So did Franz Schubert.
Schubert, unlike Mozart or even Beethoven, was a supreme melodise. Hence his staggering output of songs (1500, I recall).
My heretical claim is two-fold: unlike Mozart, Schubert’s juvenilia was more mature and interesting. Thus, creates more lasting interest as one ages.
Second, given their similarly shortened lives yet prolific output, in time I’ve come the think Schubert greater composer than the uber metrical Mozart.
Relatively fewer late pieces by Mozart reach the exalting heights of his Requiem. They are there in multiple genres. But the same prodigious preternaturally earlier mature output? No.
I do think this estimate is a tough call, though, and not obvious. (If it were obvious, then there would be more like me!)
“Antonio Salieri: The main rival of Mozart and the teacher of Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, and Ludwig van Beethoven”
An amazing connection for so many great composers? Yes. This short piece also vanquishes Salieri’s sinister reputation as Mozart’s poisoner. Apparently, this was merely viscious rumour.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/05/09/antonio-salieri-the-main-rival-of-mozart-and-the-teacher-of-franz-liszt-franz-schubert-and-ludwig-van-beethoven/
Relatively fewer late pieces by Mozart reach the exalting heights of his Requiem.
TJ:
You might enjoy this remarkably odd video of Glenn Gould explaining “How Mozart Became a Bad Composer” (1968), which I ran into a month or so ago.
http://www.glenngould.tv/2020/09/28/how-mozart-became-a-bad-composer-from-glenngould-magazine-by-kevin-bazzana/
Gould’s point is that Mozart’s facility for improvisation became a crutch for his later work and thus those pieces can often be summarized:
But if Mozart seems to be going nowhere in a hurry, the chances are that’s exactly where he’s at.
In comparison, Beethoven, Gould notes, may use such improvisation to build up to a surprising climax, which Gould illustrates with a passage from the Fifth Symphony.
Much of Mozart hits my uneducated ear as a sort of rock jamming. Marvelous, impressive stuff, but the point…?
All that aside, Gould’s video goes above and beyond the lecture format to something like Monty Python. At one point Gould refers to his distinguished colleague, Sir Humphrey Price-Davies, who adores the later Mozart and expounds on the subject in a tweedy British accent on a television set Gould is watching.
However, Price-Davies is actually Glenn Gould himself!
OlderandWheezier: ” And if I remember correctly, I used to hear a sampling of it at the close of NBC nightly news, back in the Huntley/Brinkley days.”
Oh yes, you remember correctly. When I was a teenager, (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away), I also remember the very first time I listened to the entire 9th symphony from start to finish. When the second movement started, I was surprised: “It’s the theme from the six o’clock news!” I *loved* it. (Still do.) Later, I put together a cassette tape with a playlist of various bits and pieces of “classical” pieces for playing in the car as I commuted. One of them was the second movement, and on the tape I titled the track: “6 o’clock news”.
I still have that tape, though I no longer have a machine in the car to play it on.
Beethoven was an incredible virtuoso pianist. The pianoforte was a pretty new instrument in his early days. That is why his piano concertos are so amazingly wonderful, I think. He could play! Listen to the cadenzas! My favorite piano concerto is #4, not his last, #5 “Emperor”.
As to his deafness, the most credible cause is chronic lead poisoning. He drank wine all his adult life from a favorite chalice, made of pewter, which was then a lead-containing alloy. Our modern pewter is lead-free for reasons of said toxicity.
Huxley: Yes, his late quartets require serious, serious listening.
They demand respect but are hard to love. I can see the same transition in his three Razumovsky Quartets, #s 7 to 9.
For my money , his “Archduke Trio” is wonderfully wonderful.
It is so nice to see classical music as a topic here, instead of the BeeGees or other pop.
huxley wrote … ‘The next morning I asked my mother and she told me about Beethoven. It’s still a miracle to me.’
I agree 100%. The ‘Ode to Joy’ is, perhaps, my single favorite piece of music.
There is a wonderful version – IMHO – ‘The Hymn Of Joy’ that is played at many Churches.
Huxley and Roy, thanks for the replies. Threads like this, which are rare on political blogs other than Neo’s, are a breath of fresh air at times like this in our plague-ridden (as in both Covid and democrat vermin) society.
TJ: Schubert has grown on me over the past few years, especially after hearing his impromptus (played by Alfred Brendel). I think one of the reasons is that there is a simplicity in the beauty of Schubert’s melodies, instead of attempts to overpower the listener.
Roy, Cicero, Tuvea:
There was a time, not so long ago, when classical music was part of American culture. You heard it on Huntley/Brinkley, in Bugs Bunny cartoons, as part of Music Appreciation classes in elementary school, on Leonard Bernstein TV specials.
In my first semester of college I walked by a cafeteria table of older students who spontaneously burst into the “Ode to Joy” in German. For that matter there was a scene in the Beatles’ “Help” film, where the Fab Four sing the “Ode” to placate a tiger (never mind why) then the scene escalates into a football stadium crowd singing.
That’s gone, all gone.
David Gelernter, a Cornell compsci professor, mentioned in an interview that his students are wonderful, good and really smart, but they don’t know Beethoven. Which I have a hard time believing, but … could be.
Reminds me of the composer who told Chopin that his waltzes were actually in 4/4 time, then beat out the rhythm as Chopin played to prove his point. Their friendship suffered 🙂
I finally watched the video. Beato is good, as always (and thanks to neo for putting me on to him), but I still don’t get what he’s on about with his “half step” theory. If Beethoven was deaf, and he was, that’s a different thing than him (Rick) tuning his guitar’s e string to an e flat. Beato is mis-hearing the e flat as an e. Beethoven wasn’t hearing anything, so in his head it was almost certainly still spot on.
It is an amazing and interesting tragedy that Beethoven, such a great musician, would lose the sense that he was most gifted at, as Ludwig himself references in his letter to his brothers, but I still don’t get Beato’s wonderment that Beethoven was able to compose so well while deaf. It’s certainly impressive that he overcame the depression that most of us would have succumbed to, and was able to persevere, but the actual mechanics of what he was doing? Granted, it takes immense talent, but I would guess the current, living conductors of all the world’s major symphonies could do the same. Granted, they would be nowhere near as ingenuous and inventive as Beethoven, but composing in one’s brain (seeing music) is something many great musicians can do.
I’ve read more than one account of a young, protege being taken to a concert by his parents, and upon returning home writing the entire score he had heard. The score to compositions he had never seen on the page, nor heard before that day. It’s incredible! But some folks can do it and Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Hayden… were such folks. Temporarily fill Mozart’s ears full of wax and I don’t think you’d slow him down at all. And the same is probably true for most classical composers. I’ll bet Billy Joel and Elton John can do it.
Close your eyes and picture a favorite visual memory. A painting you like. The kitchen of the home you grew up in. A toy you played with. Your first bicycle. If we mortals can reproduce perfect images with our eyes closed, why wouldn’t a genius like Beethoven be able to reproduce perfect sounds with his ears “closed?”
Cicero: “My favorite piano concerto is #4, not his last, #5 “Emperor”.”
Mine too. I don’t claim that this is the best interpretation, but Helene Grimaud certainly is easy on the eyes !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGtI5VdnhwM
Rufus T. Firefly:
I’m no expert on music or perfect pitch, but I see it this way. Perfect pitch doesn’t rely on hearing a note, and when the phenomenon Beato describes happens (the 1/2 note slippage of perfect pitch) it’s not that the person is hearing the actual note being played differently or somehow imperfectly. It’s that he is misidentifying it. How do people with perfect pitch identify a note they hear? My understanding is that they match it to a note in their head that represents (and has always represented, for their entire lives) that note. We call the notes A,B,C, etc.. But they could be called “macaroni” and it wouldn’t matter, as long as the person has an internal naming system for them. Beano’s son, who has perfect pitch, had such a system before he learned the true names of the notes. For example, he called one note “the Star Wars note” because it was at the beginning of the Star Wars theme. So my point is that each of these note concepts exist as a sort of Platonic note in the person’s head, just as we can picture the color “red” in our heads and match colors in the real world to it.
When the note slippage of age happens, apparently Plantonic notes in the head change and move a half tone from the originals. So that, for someone who once had perfect pitch, they hear the note (let’s say it’s “E”) and call it E-flat, not because they are mishearing the note but because they now call the note in their head that matches it an E-flat, the wrong name and the wrong note-concept.
And that’s my understanding of why Beato is speculating that Beethoven may have been writing down notes differently than he was hearing them in his head – because the match between the notes in his head and the names the notes were called had slipped slightly. Who knows? Not me.
Also, I’m assuming that Beato agrees that many musicians can write relatively simple tunes or even simple arrangements in their heads. I think it’s the complexity of the symphony and all the different parts that he is amazed by in Beethoven’s case. I’m amazed anyone can ever write music like that. I’m even amazed that anyone writes a simple tune that’s catchy.
I have a sentimental attachment to the rondo of #1, listened to it on the car radio on a California evening camping among the scented redwoods. It has stuck with me. There is nothing quite so memorable as stumbling into a musical performance by accident.
neo,
In trying to make sense of what Beato was claiming in his theory I first made the same assumption you did, with the “note in his head” concept, but then realized it doesn’t make sense. When you picture your childhood kitchen in your mind as you age the color of the appliances don’t skew more towards the red or blue spectrum as you reimagine them. How would such a degradation happen in the brain?
But it does make sense our sensory organs would degrade with time and use. As I type this I’m wearing reading glasses to see the letters on the screen. In my youth I had incredibly good vision and could have easily read this text in very dim light. Now, even in daylight with an illuminated screen, my eyes need magnification. What Beato describes with a flattening of pitch almost certainly has to be a fault of the process of hearing; the ear and nerves and organs within.
And Beato himself demonstrates this effect when he uses electronics in the video to drop frequencies as an example of what was happening to Beethoven. And Beato explains how a similar, although less extreme thing has happened to his own hearing with age, as it does to most all of us.
Most all good singers have a form of the “perfect pitch” thing to some extent. Many phenomenal singers cannot read music. They are excellent mimics. They hear a tone and can reproduce it. The “Star Wars” note you describe. When Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand hit the opening note of a song they were/are reproducing the memory of that note from their minds. Sinatra would hit his memory of the “Come Fly with Me” note, or Streisand hits her memory of the, “People” note. If the perfect pitch decline works the way Beato says it does, then all singers would become flatter with age. But they don’t*. Because it’s not a flattening of the memory of the note in their minds. When one tunes a guitar without an external tool, like a tuning fork or note played on a different instrument or other device, as Beato describes, one is thinking of the note (that “Star Wars”) thing, and then manipulating the key that adjusts the string until the two match. Matching the note they hear to the note in their memory. Just like the blurring of my once youthful, clear vision, what is almost certainly happening is Beato’s ear is mishearing the vibrations from the string.
*We’ve all likely heard a recording of our voice and been surprised that on a recording we don’t sound like we “hear” ourselves. “That’s not me!” We hear our voices through our own heads. Others, including microphones, hear our voices projected away from our heads. Our skulls change the tone a bit before it gets to our own ears, so the sound of our own voices speaking, or singing is different to others than it is to ourselves. I think most of us hear our own voices a bit lower (flatter) than they actually sound.
neo,
Regarding your final paragraph; I want to be careful here. It is absolutely incredible what Beethoven achieved and well worth the attention Beato pays in his video. I’m not discounting that at all. I’m just questioning the aspects that Beato is amazed by. When you first referenced Beato here I started watching more of his videos (thanks again!) and remember seeing one where he talked about reading music. He was not very good at reading music but when he decided to get a formal education and get into production he knew he would have to master that skill, and gradually he did. It’s a great video.
Beato can now, almost certainly, “read” music just as you and I read text. There was a time when Neo was very young; perhaps 3 or 4, and her parents and others were teaching her the alphabet and the sounds we associate with written symbols; phonetics. When that young neo first started reading by herself she would look at the symbols and make individual sounds. “P-I-A-N-O.” She’d see the “p” and reproduce the sound she had been taught that goes with that symbol. Next the “i” and the “a.” Like “p,” the “n” is easy, most all consonants are. She’d likely try speaking each letter using the long vowel sounds (the vowels “say” their names) and her brain would not recognize a word she knows that sounds like those five sounds said together, “pie-ain-oh.” So she’d try short vowel sounds, or combinations of short and long and diphthongs… Until she hits a combination that her brain recognizes; “pee-ann-oh!” And now, forever more, her brain hears “pee-ann-oh” when she sees the five letters, “piano” together in print. She no longer has to read each, individual letter. Those five letters together represent the sound of the word, “piano.” Now, instead of five, individual symbols, it’s one symbol to her brain.
It’s the same thing with reading music. That’s why it’s called, “reading.” I’m not great at it, yet, even I, when presented by my band director with a new score to a song I am not familiar with, even I can read the notes from left to right and reproduce the sounds in my brain before I attempt it with my instrument. It’s just like reading text silently. And folks like Beethoven had/have that skill in spades! They see groups of notes and their brains know the exact, precise sound that will be reproduced when violins, or oboes, or violins and oboes together… hit those notes. My band director can do that. My score just has my part on it. His has all 18 parts on it and even when we play through something the first time, if someone is off somewhere he knows by “reading” his score.
Imagine if Samuel Clemens became deaf. Would that mean as he wrote (or even typed, he was involved with the invention of the typewriter, after all) he would be slowed at all from his prior ability because he can’t speak the words out loud and hear them as he’s writing them? Of course not. And what if this deaf version of Samuel Clemens writes notes for one of the public lectures he was famous for? Could he not go on stage and speak it perfectly to an audience, even if he could not hear anything? Of course. Now the performance would be less than optimal because Clemens would not hear the audience, and its reactions. He might not pause long enough to let a laugh line hit, etc. And when Beato recounts the descriptions of Beethoven’s attendance and “conducting” of the Ninth these are exactly the types of errors that are recounted. But Beethoven bloody well knew exactly what he wrote on the page sounded like in that room, just as Sam Clemens would know exactly what his voice retelling “The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County” would sound like whether he was deaf, or not.
Again, I want to be careful because I don’t mean to minimize Beethoven’s greatness or talent. It’s well deserved of the attention Beato gives him; I just think Beato places too much emphasis in the wrong place. Especially since Beethoven was not even performing the piece, as Clemens is in my hypothetical example. Imagine our hypothetical deaf Samuel Clemens is writing a humorous monologue for someone else to read on stage. Clemens would know exactly how to annotate the text for maximum enjoyment. “Raise your voice here.” “Pause here.” “Imitate a frog’s croak here…” Why would all of that ability go away when Beethoven’s ear organs failed?
Rufus T. Firefly:
I took Beato’s episode on Beethoven’s deafness/perfect pitch as speculative. I had some of the same problems with Beato’s piece.
Beethoven died almost two hundred years ago. We have some good guesses, but we’re not sure what caused his deafness. There is much we don’t know about how hearing works, how sounds waves get converted into what we experience and what happens when that process is damaged.
Which isn’t to say Beato shouldn’t offer his thoughts on the matter.
I would add to your Clemens example, the well-known phenomenon of blindfold chess. Most grandmasters don’t need a board to play chess and some are capable of playing dozens of games simultaneously without looking at a board, then winning most of them. Quite remarkable.
I recall a story, I think about Bobby Fischer and Tigran Petrosian, that they were playing in a tournament when the power failed and the lights went out. So the tournament director stopped the games and stopped the chess clocks. Petrosian objected that Fischer was still thinking about his move.
Fischer said, “Yes.”
It’s quite a story that Beethoven composed the Ninth Symphony and the late string quartets while deaf, but it’s within the human realm of top-talented people who have devoted their lives to an activity.
huxley,
Funny, but in my first comment on this post I thought about incorporating blindfold chess as an analogy. I’d now make a reference to the idiom, “great minds think alike,” but since I’m one side of that comparison maybe the old saw, “even a blind pig occasionally finds an acorn” is more apt!
This seems relevant to the discussion:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=mandy+harvey&&view=detail&mid=69DBC4A23D73EAEE783269DBC4A23D73EAEE7832&&FORM=VRDGAR&ru=%2Fvideos%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dmandy%2Bharvey%26FORM%3DHDRSC3
Rufus T. Firefly; huxley:
Actually, unless you have perfect pitch, you do NOT “read the notes from left to right and reproduce the sounds in my brain .” Not he exact sounds in terms of pitch. Perfect pitch is very rare.
What you do if you don’t have perfect pitch – and the vast majority of people who read music very well do not have perfect pitch – is to read the relations between the notes and reproduce the tune, but the key it’s in depends on your pitch memory (if you’ve sung the song or played the piece often enough, you might be able to start on the right note). Otherwise, you need someone to play the starting note or you might very well start on the wrong note and be in the wrong key.
When I used to tune my cello, I could tune the strings to each other in relative pitch. To make sure I had the right notes, though, I had to get independent corroboration (a pitch pipe) for at least one of the notes so I could tune the others to it. Over time, I found I could often get it right without the pitch pipe, and just used the pitch pipe to check to see if I was right. But I often was wrong, too, because although I was accessing memory pitch there I do not have perfect pitch.
Only people with perfect pitch can reliably and always “read the notes from left to right and reproduce the sounds in their brains.” And Beato is saying that ability gets lost over time with age.
The sounds of the alphabet are very different. Virtually all of us can reproduce them quite perfectly in our brains. They do not depend on pitch and reproducing them in the brain is not a rare trait. However, what does happen to people who become deaf (at least, I have read that this happens) after they have gained speech as a hearing person is that over time their speech does tend to degenerate because they’re no longer getting the auditory feedback about their speech and they’re no longer matching the sounds properly. But the alphabet and the sounds of speech seem irrelevant to me when discussing pitch in music.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Also, although hearing itself degenerates with age in a lot of people, what apparently happens is that certain frequencies drop out. I have never seen any indication whatsoever that the pitch perception of a note a person can hear perfectly well changes (although I assume that would be difficult to test). Beato is saying it’s the naming ability that changes, in those formerly with perfect pitch.
It certainly is a curious thing.
What you are describing with most singers is relative pitch and memory pitch, not perfect pitch.
Rufus T. Firefly; huxley:
I also tried just now to look the topic up, and so far haven’t found any research that answers the question of what’s happening.
Neo says,
LOL a good point. Sometimes, it just isn’t worth the bother to do more as you can’t even get close. “Somebody turn the damn furnace off!” ( as you cringingly noticed if you tried that old guy clip link I sent you regarding Americans actually making homemade music.) Of course, now, with electronic tuners (you see them nowadays clipped to the gear heads of many guitarists’ instruments ) you don’t have to run to the piano and start counting leftward from middle C to find the matching E for your open bass string. If you even have a piano, that is.
Usually, guys would tune in reverse from the high E to the bass E, as it seems easier and more natural. Then just use the matching note technique to make sure the relative spacings were correct.
The final check for the casual player was to try and play an open C chord which hardly ever sounds perfect anyway. I read somewhere that because of the way the guitar scale is constructed you can get a perfect C, or a proper scale, but not really both.
I don’t have any idea how a cello is tuned. I used to be under the impression that all stringed instruments – plectrum if not bow playef types anyway- used guitar tuning. Surprised me to find out not.
By the way Neo, if you played cello, you certainly could have performed at home for pleasure. After piano and guitar, I would think that flute, cello, and violin come nearest to parlor performance instruments, but with the proviso perhaps that one of the other species accompanies.
I saw it done in a move once. Something about a ship captain and his doctor pal.
neo,
I think some of what we are discussing is getting lost in translation, and would likely take a long time to sort out in the delayed, back and forth of the asynchronous method of commenting on a weblog. So, I’ll stop droning on regarding the subject, but for two points.
1. I still think Beato has it wrong. I agree with your point that one loses some musical reproduction ability in time through deafness, as your example of the speech of folks who go deaf as adults becoming more intelligible over the years. If Beethoven had mastered a brass, reed or woodwind instrument that, unlike piano, takes continual auditory feedback to produce a clear tone, it is almost certain his playing would suffer over time. And of course, even with piano, where (if the tuner has done his or her job) Mr. Beethoven will be in tune no matter the profoundness of his deafness; his sensitivity to dynamics would likely diminish. This seems to be reinforced by the video I linked where Ms. Harvey’s speech is a bit muddled, but her singing and (of course) ukulele sound just fine.
2. Perfect pitch. I do not think this is as rare as people claim. First, yes, as I read the notes left to right I reproduce them exactly in my brain. Not in some random key. In the key the song is written. I have always been able to recognize precise notes, and I am not anywhere near as talented a natural musician as many, many, many folks in the world. And I also know people who are “tone deaf.” Play two notes on a piano, even an octave apart, and they cannot tell you which is higher or lower. Their singing voices are gosh awful. There is almost certainly a spectrum among humans with complete tone deafness on the left and absolutely perfect pitch on the right. If we break that line into tenths from right to left; my guess is I am in the top 30% – 40% of the range of the skill. My musical gifts are rather pedestrian, but I have always been able to hear a song, walk over to a piano, or stringed instrument, or the few brass instruments whose technique I’ve mastered, or harmonica, and reproduce the melody in the exact key I heard it. I may have to hunt a bit. I may not know what fret on what string produces which sound, or which valve on the horn, but when I hit the note I’m looking for I know it. Because it matches the sound in my brain. Which also matches the sound I heard in the original. And many, many, many people can do this. Hum a note. Any note. And ask someone to reproduce it on a keyboard. Folks who don’t play keyboard will hunt and peck a bit, but they’ll know when they hit the appropriate key. Think of the first note of the “Jaws” theme. Most all of us here have the exact same note in our head. Play us a random note on a cello and we’ll be able to tell you if you’ve bowed the “Jaws note,” or not. I think you’re saying most folks would know if you play the first four or so repetitions of those two famous notes in any key, as long as you have the right interval between notes, they’ll recognize it, which is true. But play it in a series of keys and when you play it in A minor most folks would also recognize that is the exact key of the score.
And, as you point out, people can improve on this. Some of it is natural gift, sure, but the more one messes around with music the more accurate their pitch recognition gets. You write that the more you tuned the cello, and heard the starting note, you could eventually hear it in your brain without an outside aid. Like most bands and ensembles, my band tunes to two notes; concert A and concert Bflat. While typing this, about 4 miles from my trombone, I can imagine being on stage and the pianist hitting a Bflat and hear it, right now, in my head. If I had my trombone I could tune to that memory. And I’d be right. I’ve done it many times. Look at how many children are gifted singers. What is singing other than using that “perfect pitch” trick in your head to manipulate your vocal cords, jaw, tongue… until you know you’ve duplicated the sound you just heard from the radio. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that, among other skills, great impersonators like Rich Little, John Bynam, Frank Caliendo… must also have some level of perfect pitch? How does Caliendo know he’s close to John Madden’s voice unless he can listen to Madden and hear when his version is in the same range of tone?
Now, there are people in that 10% range of the scale (Paul Shaffer is someone I’ve always admired who seems to be in the 1% range) that can do phenomenal, incredible things. (I’m just a single note guy. I can’t really recognize chords.) They couple their incredible, natural gift of pitch hearing with years of practice mastering an instrument and can do amazing, wonderful things. And some singers are not only great singers, but, when asked, can imitate styles of other singers to remarkable effect. How do they do that? They have a memory of the other singer singing a song in their mind and manipulate their vocal cords, jaw bones, tongues, nasal cavities, diaphragms… to perfectly reproduce the sound that is in their mind. Not just the pitch of the note, but the tone, the timbre, the vibrato… It takes them practice to get the imitation correct, but the sound they hear in their heads is the guide to knowing when they nail it. And some talented folks I know can step that up or down, into different keys. Tell them to play their brain’s memory of “Singin’ in the Rain,” but drop it down three steps to make it easier for a singer’s range, and folks like Shaffer can instantly do that. That’s freaking amazing to me!! They change the version their brain has memorized, the actual version from the movie, and in real time alter the key!
Some people can reproduce things visually. One of my kids is great at this, as is my wife. When I watch them it is like a magic trick. I must be in the bottom 10% of people regarding that skill. When I see someone look at another human’s face, in 3 dimensions, and they pick up a pencil, or pen, or piece of charcoal… and start making marks on 2 dimensional paper… I am dumbstruck. My brain does not do that. Some people can. Some people can to an incredible level. And most of us can improve to some level if we practice. I think “perfect pitch,” or at least “pitch recognition” is very similar. If you play a C scale to a group of 8 year olds, and say each note as you play it, every day for a month, it’s almost certain a majority of them could name any single note you play on that scale at the end of the month.
(O.K. This was still a lot of droning, but it’s a topic that has always interested me. 🙂 )
Rufus T. Firefly:
You may indeed have perfect pitch.
Good musicianship doesn’t necessarily go with it.
Also, virtually all studies on perfect pitch say it is quite rare, and that most people who think they have perfect (otherwise known as “absolute”) pitch actually have good pitch memory and good relative pitch.
My stepfather claimed he had perfect pitch. He lied about many things, but perhaps not that. He was discovered by Stokowski as a teenager playing bass and he worked in top symphonies the rest of his life.
When I took up viola in fifth grade, partly to please him, he put the kibosh on my practice at home because he said my playing might damage his perfect pitch.
___________________________________________
Here’s Bugs Bunny in a parody of Leopold Stokowski:
–“Bugs Bunny… ‘Leopold!'”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt1V61SPI_w
neo @5:33pm,
OK, so I’ve read the wikipedia entry you linked. (One funny thing I discovered in reference to that; the fifth bullet point… Several decades ago there was an alarm sounding and I wondered to myself, “Self, I wonder if I could guess what note that is?” I thought of a chromatic scale in my head and when I got to F sharp I stopped, as it appeared to match. I walked over to a keyboard. Sure enough, F#!*)
I won’t debate the definitions of “absolute pitch,” or “perfect pitch,” (I cede that ground to you and your argument) and I think this is where we may have been passing each other, asynchronous communication-wise. It seems you are referencing definitions of those, specific terms. And, that’s fair enough. You never claimed otherwise, and words do have meanings. I am writing of a general phenomenon; regardless of terminology. For example, that Wikipedia entry states identifying notes, keys and chords as essential to claiming the ability. So, yeah, I imagine it is rare, because how many people study keys and chords and notes with enough familiarity to reference them casually? As I wrote earlier, I cannot really guess chords. I can get the main note of the entire chord, but I can’t guess the other notes that make it up**. Or, to go back to my Jaw’s theme analogy; the majority of people who would recognize that it is played in the identical key as the movie theme would not know that key is referred to as, “A Minor.” To bring it around to the visual arts; I am rather ignorant of architectural terminology, but that doesn’t mean I am unable to recognize similar structures. I’m not 100% sure I know what a tudor style home is (but I know it’s a “thing”), but I’m 100% sure that if you have 100 photos of various home styles and two and only two are Tudors, I’ll successfully match them.
But regarding the perfect recognition of sounds (whether one knows what it’s called in written music, or not)… I’ve been thinking about this a lot today, and it seems almost foolish to think most humans would not be naturally good at this. A baby who cannot recognize her mother’s face AND/OR voice is in trouble. It’s also good to know what dad and grandma and grandpa and sis and brother’s voices sound like. We know fetuses respond to their parents’ voices while in utero. How do they know it’s mom or dad, and not someone else? They can distinguish pitch. Really well. Of course we humans would typically be very good at that. It is a matter of life and death. There is a sudden catastrophe and dozens of voices are shouting. Which one is my mother and what is she telling me to do?
When Dana Carvey impersonates Johnny Carson how do 80%, 90% of the audience instantly know what he is doing? They have a memory of Johnny Carson’s voice in their minds and the instant they hear Carvey’s spot on impersonation their minds say, “Johnny Carson.” Not, Johnny Carson, but in a different key, or different octave. They know he is spot on Johnny Carson’s actual voice sound, range, intonation, vibrato. It’s much more than even identifying just the pitch of Carson’s voice. Carvey gets it all correct; the pitch AND the pace and pauses and intonations and word choices… It’s ten times more difficult than just the pitch, and a lot of people can do it. And even a lot more of us are capable of recognizing it the instant one of those talented people is doing it.
I think the music world makes a big deal out of the terms, “absolute pitch,” or “perfect pitch” as a test of the ability, coupled with one’s knowledge of music theory, but the actual ability to hear and recognize similar sounds is not rare in the human species.
*The Chinese-made oven my family owned the longest plays a particular melody when the timer is up. When we first got the oven I mimicked the sound when I heard it, and it became a thing my kids and I would do whenever we’d hear that alarm melody. I am confident, right now, I could call any of my kids and mention the oven song and they would instantly sing it back to me, spot on. We humans do stuff like this all the time. One of my kids could probably name the notes (he has studied music formally), and likely guess the key accurately, but the others would still be just as accurate in their aural reproduction. So I guess they would not fit the technical definitions of absolute or perfect pitch, but their brains would be doing the same thing the one who did learn the music theory is doing.
**Although this is improving as I study and learn more about chords. I can often now tell if I need a major, minor, seventh, diminished… And am getting better at knowing what the root should be, but I still cannot “hear” variations. I just have to try different variations until I find one I like. I often can’t even distinguish much among the variations.
huxley,
That is one of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons. And, that is saying a lot, as there are many Bugs Bunny cartoons I really appreciate.
I’ve always thought one could tell a lot about a person of a certain age by asking who they enjoy more; Bugs or Mickey.
In an embarrassing side note, I did not discover until a few years ago that Bugs was modeled on Groucho Marx. I am a huge fan of both, and the instant I heard it, I realized it was true (the walk, the carrot/cigar, the eyebrows…), but I can’t believe I did not make the association on my own!
huxley:
Not to go on and on about it (and perhaps I already have) – yes, I was using the term “perfect pitch” in its technical sense, and contrasting it with memory pitch and/or relative pitch. And I still think you are confusing perfect (absolute) pitch and relative pitch, at least somewhat. The point is not whether people are musically educated and can name the chord or even the notes perfectly, it’s that they can distinguish the notes in a chord immediately and can be consistent about naming them (they can call each note by whatever idiosyncratic name they want, as long as their system of naming is internally consistent). They actually can hear this instantaneously without any training at all, even with chords.
But comparisons with speech or even voice quality/identity just seem irrelevant to me. Everyone (or practically everyone) who can hear can recognize voices quite well. And each one is different. We don’t recognize voices as a category of things, like a note. We hear the same note and can identify it as such on whatever instrument it’s played. The voice is like the instrument, not the note. Each person speaks in varying pitches; it’s not by pitch that we recognize a voice.
neo,
I think you meant, “Rufus,” rather than huxley, above, (but if you’re mad at the person debating you, I’d prefer you think I’m huxley 🙂 ) I think we have to agree to disagree. I do think pitch matters in voice recognition. And my point regarding voices is that most of us humans are fairly good at recognizing a voice and a lot more goes into that than recognizing a note, or chord. You could hear a recording of a woman whose vocal range matches the exact pitch of your mother’s, yet you would almost certainly know it was not your mother’s voice. To me, that’s even more impressive than recognizing notes from an instrument that is fairly static. If we agree most people can recognize distinct voices, even when they have the same pitch (making the pitch irrelevant), then that must mean we humans are generally very good at aural differentiation*.
I’ve heard it many times, “perfect pitch is rare,” but that just doesn’t seem to reflect the world around us. You wrote a post recently about trios, and harmonies. How did they do that? Pitch. Hearing and manipulating pitch. And those groups of sisters taught themselves to do it from hanging out together, and goofing around. If I played a recording of your mother’s voice with the pitch altered a step above or below, you would instantly recognize it. “That’s my mother, but her voice wat not that high/low.” I think the fact that you might not know exactly how many “steps**” is simply a reflection of a lack of practice and familiarity with terminology. And if my experiment is correct, then that means your ear is able to recognize much more than “perfect” pitch. It’s recognizing the unique timbre of your mother’s voice, breathiness, whether she speaks more, or less through her nose, where she’s placing her tongue on certain consonants…
*On a few occasions I’ve been able to do something that I’ll bet others here have also done. About 10 times in my life I have heard a song I had not heard before, and guessed the instrumentalist based on their tone. The unique signature they produce from their instrument. Hand Dizzie Gillespie and Miles Davis the same trumpet and have them play the same score and there will be a difference in the sound; even if they play the same pitch of notes at the same pace and tempo.
**A man-made construct. Unlike guitars and pianos, sitars are tuned to quartertones. Fretless string instruments (like your cello) and slide brass instruments have an infinite number of tones between notes.
*** (OK, I didn’t have a third asterisk above, but I just thought of something else and I’m sure people are beyond tired of me pounding on this topic.) Back to my original point about Beethoven, and this is exhibited in that clip Beato showed from “Amadeus.” Folks like Mozart and Beethoven are so great at hearing, reading, writing and thinking music they can hear dozens of notes and timbres and tones and vibratos simultaneously in the same, single beat of music. Not only that, but they can read it, or write it. When Beethoven got to the 14th measure of the 1st movement of his 8th opus he knew what he wanted that to sound like and knew what the first, and second and third flute would have to do along with an oboe, and a handful of trumpets, and a timpani… And if you showed what he had written in that measure to Mozart, Mozart would hear it precisely as written in his head. Mozart could write a measure of music in multiple parts for multiple instruments, and without it ever being played, hand it to Beethoven who would know what it would sound like when it is eventually played!! That’s my point about learning to read phonetically. That’s the level of which some people hear music in their brains and read and write. So even with Beethoven losing his hearing he didn’t lose that ability. The ability to read, write and “think” musically. Just as losing the ability to speak the spoken word would not eliminate one’s ability to read the written word.
That is one of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Likewise. It was also true to Stokowski — the hair, the intensity and the open-handed conducting. Stokowski performed in Disney’s “Fantasia” btw.
–‘Legends’ – Leopold Stokowski – A Great 20th Century Maestro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C79uZBPfC5w
A different world, where children watching cartoons could be exposed to a great conductor and maybe go on to explore further.
I’m embarrassed to say that the only recent conductor I can think of is Sir Neville Marriner and he died in 2016.
It’s amazing how long conductors tend to live. Stokowski made it to 95 and Marriner to 92.
Re: Bugs Bunny as Groucho Marx…
Rufus T. Firefly:
I experienced similar chagrin when someone pointed out that Alan Alda copped much of his Hawkeye shtick in “MASH” from Groucho.
Good Lord! Hasn’t this thread lived long ad lively with insights and shared connections and diversion? (Replies to Olderandwheezier, huxley, and others.)
It’s Beethoven’s 250th birthday, more or less. Then perhaps a thread of such epic length is completely appropriate? Hmmm.
So why does Beethoven occupy the centrepiece in Western Musical tradition? Glenn Gould answers that his music most deeply exemplifies the central tension within all arts, between imitation or structure and invention or free-form expression. (Gould in 4 minutes of intro before Sonata No. 17 “The Tempest”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPDBcdDGrnE)
And adding Beethoven’s great summa, the Ninth Symphony and how he heroically faced his tragic disability down in silent triumph (ABOVE) would seem to prove it. Or else be the personal and biographical synecdoche to his musical corpus.
Gould is onto something. But in another lecture (See YouTube), somewhere, Gould also says another valid and specific point which elevates him above all other masters of great music.
Gould points out that in Mozart, as in Bach, we hear the inner working logic of a piece. It has an arithmetic or metrical direction and goes there. We can practically foresee it!
And Beethoven is often similar. Yet different — but how? Gould explains, again, that Beethoven is different and trickier than Bach or Mozart, arriving at a different, creative, more inventive musical resolution. And it is that expressive elevation that makes him Beethoven, our musical Michelangelo or Shakespeare.
Gould is right, I think. Beethoven shows us that it is possible to excel the received forms, to go beyond them. And that is why these culture hero’s are worth comparison to God (or the gods, if you prefer). Greatness points this way forward.
We receive the highest possible tie or exalted connection to genius in the arts through them. Therefore we treasure them, celebrate them, and honour and remember them.