Jeremey McMillan wrote:

>Does anyone on this list have perfect pitch? I want to know if it serves
>as a good advantage.  I heard a lot of good and bad things about who use
>perfect pitch only but don't use relative pitch.

Of the conductors that I know of, Bernstein, Ozawa, Previn, Mehta, Kahane
have/had it so I don't think it is likely much of a detriment, if one has
good training.

I started playing along with the phonograph and radio before 3 so I always
know where the sounds I hear are, on the keyboard - this includes all
pitches in chords (unless it's super modern and makes little sense to me).

As a singer in our symphony chorus I found it really came in handy since I
don't have much of a voice at all, to put it mildly, but I could sight sing
any modern piece perfectly with confidence.

However, because of that I didn't develop relative pitch in that if the
conductor says to sight-sing a piece 4 notes higher or 4 notes lower I
can't do it with any security at all whereas the people trained with
relative-pitch could do much better.  In other words they had better
musicianship in that case, by far.

But I can fool myself by 2 notes in either direction.  This helped when
I spent 12 years playing in low pitch (A=415 or even 392) as I love early
music too.

Another place it helps is in ensemble playing.  During a session I can tell
immediately who's played which wrong notes in the middle.

But for the fun part ... if I know a piece (in the way a person 'knows' a
song because he knows, in his head, how it goes), then I can play it in any
key that's requested, no matter how many black keys.  So, in school I used
to play for all the singers.  I did learn how to tranpose on the piano by
sight for the most part on simple things like Broadway tunes.  A lot of
that is knowing how the chord patterns will go anyway.

The chief factor is that a person with perfect pitch who's had some decent
musical training can hear sounds and know instantly where they all are on
the piano and can play them back without thinking.

Another plus is that we can pick up sheet music and hear how everything
goes without having to hear it via instruments.

So, people who tell you that it's disadvantageous just haven't, for some
reason, taken advantage of the perfect pitch, OR it just wasn't adequately
developed by a certain age.  A book called "The Psychology of Musical
Ability," used at Stanford for years, with quite a lot of emphasis on the
Seashore studies of the 50s (a friend online and I were involved, we later
discovered) found that there is a very strong correlation between how old
you were when you started your musical training and how strongly you
developed the sense.

Tends to be that if you started between 5-6 and have the ability, it'll be
developed strongly if you keep up the studies.  People who tended to start
between 7-8 may become excellent musicians (and of course better than some
who have perfect pitch because they have other musical capabilities that
are more important to professions) but don't develop the PP sense as well.
When I skimmed this book at the store, I asked the twins I was with, who
started music about the same time I did, and who are professionals but who
bemoan the fact they can't play by ear or sight-sing, how old they were
when they started their training, "Oh, about 7-8."

I stopped my lessons at age 10 because I liked to try to ornament in our
4-hands at lessons and my teacher was very against it.  I can understand
her point now, but it wasn't fun for me because she got so upset at me.:-)

Also, if you were brought up in a household where the family sang together,
that was another thing that figured greatly in development of the sense in
any meaningful way (other than just announcing notes, which doesn't do much
good), per these studies.

Many conductors have to learn scores on the fly (literally), in airplanes
and some have said they study the scores for the first time on the plane,
but these tend to be the ones who developed perfect pitch.

If you have it and want to develop it just keep taking lessons and playing.
I really don't consider it a drawback unless it's half-developed, in which
case it can become confusing.

Andrys in Berkeley
http://www.andrys.com/books.html   search sheet music, videos, CDs
http://www.andrys.com/cbooks.html  newer classical music books