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Well, yeah, there aren't that many.

But I'm surprised there are like 4 or so who frequent pianoworld!

Why not? How do you come up with stuff like Gross Fugue? Structure and logic only gets you so far.

Some say he gets his pitch from the vibration of his piano. Or a tuning fork. So it's possible he has a ridiculously good relative pitch--but I'd go with Occam's razor here and just say he has perfect pitch.

Liszt and Sibelius are said to argue about colors of keys; it's possible they have synethesia, and as a result certainly perfect pitch. These accounts could be fishy, but I've read stories how some composers are famous for needing to compose in front of a piano. Some think that it's considered cheating--I don't know, but I get a feeling that those who considered this practice cheating has perfect pitch.

Given that we're talking about pretty much only generational talents here, one shouldn't be surprised by the chances of great composers having perfect pitch.

(Perfect pitch isn't necessarily indicative of musical ability--I'm not suggesting that. The above paragraph putting "talent" together with "perfect pitch" seems to suggest that but that's not what I'm trying to say.)

I agree with Jason here. I don't know whether Beethoven had perfect pitch or not, but I often compose without reference to the piano, in my head, and while I have the advantage over Beethoven in being able to play it and check what I've written, I can still imagine music and write it. I don't have perfect pitch, but I do have well-developed relative pitch. Plenty of well-trained musicians can do this. Work on those intervals, Lingyis, and your relative pitch will improve too.

If there were a specific emotional response to a particular key, there are a couple of things that would make it meaningless for classical music. One is that the pitch standard has varied quite a bit from time to time and from place to place. The other is that pieces are quite often transposed from key to key. That is particularly true of songs, where one would expect that the emotional response would be the greatest.

I used to tune a piano to A 435, and I found the resulting tuning disturbed me when I played music I was familiar with on it. However, recordings at different pitches do not seem to affect me as much.

You hear the music 'in your head', which is a skill that can be learned, as children learn to read without speaking out loud.

Most (all?) composers can do this to some extent; some are very good at it. I'm not -- I attended a course last year to improve my 'mental composing' skill and it drove my bats. Generally I compose at my piano or in front of the computer. But a modicum of mental composition is required even for ABRSM theory exams, at least at higher grades. That is, it's something that perhaps all musicians should have some ability at, even a rudimentary one.

I would imagine that most of the greats composed, at least at times, without instruments. Mozart was notorious for it.

You can certainly compose if you go deaf, and it's got nothing to do with perfect pitch, I think.

Exactly.

I don't have perfect pitch, but can imagine new music in my head without outside help from a piano or whatever. I just tried composing something in my head right now - it became a simple little six measure motif - and realized that I can even see the notation for it in my mind if I want to, along with hearing it. I didn't know I could do that!! So, if I were a composer, I could simply write it down. Just like Beethoven.

Just wanted to share this if it's not already known, a list of affective key characteristics characterised by Christian Schubart: http://www.wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html

I personally think the attitudes aren't inherent in the keys, but because of the music that happened to be written in that particular key, which began to reinforce any associations/connotations each key carried. Like D Major as the heroic key if I'm not wrong began from baroque times with pieces like the Hallelujah chorus, and has been associated with heroism and victory ever since, not because the key sounds heroic, but the pieces written in the key are heroic.

It's pretty similar to colours even, you don't look at blue and immediately think of calm, it's because of the vast expanses of blue in the sky and sea than convey that sense of peace. Of course, there are people who see blue as depressing in the sense of "feeling blue", and that just goes to show how arbitrary our perceptions of the connotations of colours, or even key signatures, are.

My guess on the reason for the difference between enharmonic equivalents is just the basic human impression of raising as positive, and lowering as negative, just as raising a key to a sharp would seem symbolic of raising one's mood, and lowering lowering (irrelevant but I like how zeugmas make for really interesting clauses haha).



I totally agree with this, no matter how much people claim muscle memory to be important. If a piano's out of tune, or even if the transpose button on my keyboard is on, I feel exceedingly uncomfortable playing even a familiar piece, because I keep trying to 'correct' the playing by hitting a note in the untransposed key. Don't even talk about trying to improvise on an out of tune piano haha.

Interesting, so most think if your relative pitch is highly developed, you can compose quite well without the aid of an instrument.

Hmm, how interesting. For simple stuff, I can see how, because while I'm not good at identifying intervals, I could hum melodies in my head and write the music down (though I should really learn solfege at some point to help out). And I can hear simple chords in my head, like major + minor triads and dominant 7ths. But for slightly more complex stuff... like when I see a score in front of me, what I "hear in my head" is almost always completely different from what I hear when I go to the piano :P

Obviously, 95% of this is simply because I'm not that great at relative pitch.

Anyway, at this point, I'm still inclined to believe that Beethoven had perfect pitch, just not as strongly convinced I was yesterday. I don't like Occam's razor too much, but it could work here.

Of course, since Beethoven never took a test whether he had perfect pitch, we'll never know So I can say one thing and you another and we'll never convince each other

Thanks for the key characteristics link--it's exactly what I was wondering about earlier.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find he did have perfect pitch - but that wasn't my point. My point was that it's quite normal for a trained musician without pp to be able to compose without reference to an instrument, just as it is normal for such a musician to read a score and hear the music in his/her head. Even quite complicated scores. In my training we had to write fugues on a given subject, in the exam room. No instrument, and a time limit. I'm not saying it didn't have its challenges, of course!

Ah I see your point. I think we agree on this--when I was taking those ABRSM exams I had to do some similar stuff too. But I didn't even try to hear things in my head--and in retrospect I clearly should have--I was just applying one rule after another, like a kid who's used to solving math problems.

[edit: i think the only place where we disagree is that the complexity of beethoven's late music is sufficient evidence that he had perfect pitch]

One question: you have synesthesia w.r.t. to notes but not perfect pitch? How is that possible? After all, if a note is consistently associated say the pale pink color, how can you not know what this note is?

Amazing, do you have synthesia?
I have played alot of Ab major and its one of my favourite keys.
e.g. Chopin Ballad 3, Chopin Polonaise Fantasie.
I can't find a good word to describe, but i often have a liberating, and kind of heroic experience playing them.

No, I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that I didn't have an association between sound and colour, only between letter names (also words) and colour.

As to Beethoven, if I, a mere mortal, can do what I can do, I feel sure a genius like Beethoven could do far more, even without pp.

I think the complexity is irrelevant to whether he had perfect pitch. He was writing within common practice, and his music is solidly framed by tonality. A good sense of absolute pitch is all that's needed to work in that realm, not matter how complex the music may be. After all, when composing, it's not as if you are attempting to snatch the music out of real time. You have all day to contemplate the imagined sound of a move from one chord to another, if that's what you need. And it doesn't take perfect pitch to do it, mentally.

I just remembered this - IIRC, Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony was a project where he decided to attempt to compose something without using any instrumental aids, a first for him at the time. Seems to have worked out pretty well.

Who knows where it began? The idea of emotions being tied to specific modes goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks.

Indian classical music uses a very complex system that, if I understand correctly, ties scales not only to emotions, but to times of day and seasons of the year.

Yes, but...

Modes are audibly different, one from another. That is they consist of different pitch intervals. Leaving aside those few individuals with perfect pitch or other peculiarities of perception, one equally-tempered major scale is not intervalically distinguishable from another.

So it seems to me there are two separate and important questions here:

1. How does emotion get associated with a particular _kind_ of scale (C major, C minor, C dorian, etc), where the differences are audible?

2. How does this association get generalized to different _instances_ of a scale (C major, D major) where the differences are (for most people) _not_ audible?

Arguable (2) is just a conventional carry-over from (1). In the pre-ET days C major was often a slightly different scale, intervallically speaking, from D major. So I guess it's not hard to see how the association would get continued into the days of ET, even when it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

(1) is, for me anyway, a much more interesting question. It's generally thought that the emotional associations with scale classes (minor=sad, etc) are learned responses. But I've observed the connection in very young children. I read a similar comment from an ABRSM examiner: he said that nobody entering the grade 1 exam (typically 7-8 years old) chose to play a particular piece on the syllabus because it was in a minor key and was described as 'too gloomy'.

I've always wondered if there actually is something going on here at the psycho-acoustic level, that we don't really understand.

The sharp edges of sharps look painful - the more sharps, the more pain.

Flats on the other hand have a nice soft shape about them.

When I was younger I thought different keys had different colors (since I had read that a certain composer also thought that). I thought of lot of different things when I was younger and didn't look at things so critically.

I don't know about "soft shape" for flats, but b flat minor is by far my favourite key.. so dark and intense.

1. I think the point is somewhat linked to us hearing different modes and linking them to certain cultures, for example the pentatonic for Chinese/Eastern music. There's nothing inherent in the pentatonic scale that makes it synonymous with the Chinese culture, yet we've come to associate it with Chinese music by basis of experience. Ultimately, I think the idea of modes/scales/keys and so on being linked to specific emotions is something entirely perceived.

2. The major/minor happy/sad distinction is not self-evident, and there are upbeat pieces in minor keys and vice versa, for example the presto from Vivaldi's summer is in minor but can hardly be described as gloomy or depressing. The mood conveyed by the music is not tied to any audible differences in the key, but rather, and more simply, the piece itself. It was not so much that the piece was written in a minor key that it was gloomy, but rather, it was meant to be gloomy, and therefore gloomy, however tautologicla that may sound. Whether the composer deliberately chose a particular key for the piece to be in is another matter, but I highly doubt composers decide to, say, write something in D major and therefore has no choice but to make the piece heroic and victorious.