Today was a good day at voice lessons, for me anyway. We did a little one on one, where we actually had to sing by ourselves, which was a little nerve wracking, but not too bad, because it wasn’t a performance, just a sort of test.
At one point, Desiree, the teacher, was giving me tips about beginning the first note in our song and she asked me, “Can you hear the note in your head?”
“Yeah,” I answered. She looked surprised.
“You can hear it, right now?”
“Yeah.” I was confident.
Sara, the accompanist, hit the note on the piano and Des asked, “Was that the note you were thinking of?” I said it was. I had just told her I could hear the note, hadn’t I?
“Alright, you rock!” she said pumping a fist in the air, as if that was some great accomplishment. I was bewildered. “I can hear notes fine,” I said. “I just can’t read them very well.
Then Sara asked, “Do you have perfect pitch?”
“Ummm…what does that mean?”
“Can you hear any note and be able to tell what it is?”
“Yeah, probably.”
Desiree, curious, nodded to Sara to try it, so Sara hit the note middle C. Well, that was easy, and I named it. Sara would nod at Desiree when I got it right. The next one she did was way up high on the keyboard.
“I’d probably have to think about that one,” I said.
Desiree, seeing me hesitate, took a stab at it. “Is it E?” she asked. Sara smiled and shook her head.
“Wait, F#,” I said suddenly, without doubt. Sara nodded. “How about this one?”
“A,” I answered.
“That is so not fair!” my sister burst out, laughing.
“That’s a rare gift,” said Sara. “I’ve never seen anyone who could do that, and I’ve been around tons of musicians.”
“I knew one boy who could,” said Desiree. “He sat next to me in the class, and I would be like ‘shut up!’”
They both went on and on about how rare it was to have perfect pitch. But it makes sense now. That’s why I get so frustrated with others in church choir practice when they won’t believe me when I say, “No, it was THIS key, not THAT key, I KNOW it was!” and they have to go and consult a piano, or they ask someone “older” and “wiser” who really doesn’t know, either.
And when my sister and cousins and I played a Nancy Drew computer game, there is a part where you have to play the same notes on a harmonica as you hear from a band organ. So Nathaniel got out a piece of paper and clicked to tape tissue paper strips over the holes on the pipes where the air comes out, and wrote down the letters written on the pipes which blew the tissue paper forward.
Needless to say, this was a ridiculously long and unsure process, seeing as Nathaniel had to play the song twice over for each note. Also needless to say, no one listened to me when I insisted that the notes were AEDEFE, AEDCBA. Nathaniel wanted to be SURE. But guess what the notes were when he finally finished? *gasp* No way!
This is so awesome! I’m really glad I could impress Sara. She was always a little superior acting before (though she's really nice) and she had good reason to be. She knows four languages, and she can play any music set before her on the piano. She's really smart and I could tell that before we asked her how many languages she and knew and she told us. She will respect me now.
I didn’t know I had any rare talents. But I’m not sure what I can do with this one. I can pick out a song and then memorize it, but it will take a while. I can tell when I’ve found the right notes and the right chords, but that’s not going to help when I’m TRYING to find them. I just can’t make that connection between the music in front of me and where my fingers go, unless it’s fairly simple.
Erm...okay...
We just have to draw the line somewhere.