By Corinne H. Smith
When I was growing up, our house was always filled with
music. Daddy’s specialties were (and
still are) the flute and the piccolo, with the occasional saxophone and rare
clarinet thrown into the medley. He has
played with local community bands, big bands, musical pit orchestras, and small
combos nearly non-stop since he found his first piccolo under the Christmas
tree at the age of nine. One of his main
teachers and influences was Berthold “Bert” Wavrek, a piccolo player with the
Allentown Band, and a man who had performed and toured with John Philip
Sousa. Daddy still plays in church every
Sunday and has done so since about the mid-1990s.
Mom sang alto in the church choir and also played the piano.
She had a trick that she unveiled
whenever she and my father entertained friends.
She turned the piano bench so that it was perpendicular to the
instrument. Then she lay down on it,
with her face nearly underneath the keyboard.
She put her hands on the ivories – upside down, backward, and over her
head -- and played a bouncy version of “Somebody Else is Taking my Place.” I wish we had been able to film her in
action.
I began taking piano lessons when I was in
kindergarten. Mrs. Hiestand in Salunga
was my piano teacher. So it was from her
that I first learned scales, key signatures, and how to read music. Once I hit fourth grade, I took flute and
piccolo lessons from my father instead, so that I could be in the band. I still played the piano afterwards, but just
for personal enjoyment. A lot of this
came later than the story I’m about to tell.
 |
| Me and Daddy: An early duet, before I even started taking piano lessons |
One day my mother sat at the piano in our dining room,
practicing for the voice lessons that she was taking. She played a note on the piano and then sang “mah-may-mee-mo-moo”
on it. Over and over, on various notes, moving
up and down the scale.
I couldn’t understand why this exercise was so
important. I was busy in my toy corner
at the opposite side of the room, playing with Barbie and Midge and Ken in their
dream house. I was quiet and could
certainly hear what my mother was doing.
She ended by focusing on one particular note, singing
“mah-may-mee-mo-moo,” again and again and again.
When Mom finally paused, I said to her, “That’s a whole lot
of Gs you’re singing.” I made it as a
casual remark. I certainly didn’t think
anything of it. I was more focused on
rearranging Barbie’s cardboard furniture to accommodate Skipper and Scooter.
Mom stopped short. “How
did you know I was singing a G?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t
know. I can just tell.”
She didn’t believe me at first. She began to hit other notes at random,
testing me. I recognized each pitch and
told her what each one was. By this time
I had been taking piano lessons for a while.
I knew what the notes sounded like.
I played them whenever I practiced.
I didn’t see what the big deal was.
Couldn’t everybody do this?
Here began a new parlor game, added to the repertoire of
Mom’s party trick with the upside-down piano playing. Strike a note and ask Corinne which one it
is. To their credit, my parents didn’t
do this very often. The uniqueness
didn’t wear too thin. After all, having
perfect pitch isn’t exactly a marketable skill.
It doesn’t make me a flawless musician.
It merely means that I can identify the notes just by hearing them.
It’s been rare when I’ve admitted having this ability, even
to friends. However, I do remember the
issue arising in one session of Mr. Nolt’s seventh-grade music class at Centerville Junior High School. We must have been studying Mozart, who
famously had both perfect pitch and a photographic memory. Mr. Nolt must have asked if anyone in the
class had perfect pitch. Unbelievably, I
felt the need to raise my hand.
“You have perfect pitch?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
“I do, too!” shouted the boy sitting right in front of me,
thrusting his arm into the air. Let’s
say that his first name started with S.
S had been in some of my classes at Farmdale Elementary School. We were not friends; we were more like wary
adversaries. I could not believe that S
was claiming to have perfect pitch. I
was sure he didn’t. Evidently Mr. Nolt
doubted it, too.
“OK. What’s this
note?” he asked. Without looking, he
dropped his hand to the piano keyboard, and his finger landed on the two tones
that most people use to start the ditty called “Chopsticks.”
“That’s not a note!” quipped S.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“It’s F and G together.”
The bell rang, and we filed out of the classroom. As I stepped into the hallway, Mr. Nolt
called out, “Don’t touch her, she’s Mozart!”
That was pretty cool of him to say, that day. It made me feel good. Naturally, in the end, it didn’t really mean
anything.
We wondered how I’d gotten perfect pitch. Was it inherited? Daddy said that he had relative pitch, and
that he could get close to identifying tones, especially when hearing flute
music. For decades now, he’s been prodding
me, showing me notices advertising the “Genetics of Absolute Pitch Study” at
the University of California at San
Francisco.
Researchers want to pinpoint the exact gene that is associated with this
ability. They want to collect as many
DNA samples as they can so that comparisons can be made. No thanks.
I refuse to donate mine to the cause.
They’ll have to compile their statistics without me.
I never read anything about perfect pitch until I picked up
the book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks. It’s a terrific read. Dr. Sacks devotes a whole chapter to perfect
pitch, seemingly because it’s one of several music-related anomalies that he’s
dealt with as a neurologist. Hmm. Yes, it was an invaluable talent that gave me
an advantage in music theory class in high school. And it sure helps whenever I sit down to
figure out how to play popular songs on the piano just by listening to
recordings of them.
I’m still thinking that it may be even more fun to learn how
to play a honky-tonk tune upside down and backward, while lying on a piano bench.
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