# How Good Is Your Ear?



## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

An interesting pair of articles by Mark N. Grant for NewMusicBox. He goes on to reveal names of celebrated composers who "betrayed their inability to recognize whether their own damn notes were being correctly sounded or not".

Enjoy...

(Part 1)

http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/How-Good-Is-Your-Ear-Part-1/

(Part 2)

http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/How-Good-Is-Your-Ear-Part-2/


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## Grizzled Ghost (Jun 10, 2015)

Actually I have two ears. 


And as far as I know, they've never done anything wrong.
:lol:


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## D Smith (Sep 13, 2014)

My left ear misbehaves constantly and I have to send it to the corner for a time out!


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## LHB (Nov 1, 2015)

I used to have really good absolute and perfect pitch, unfortunately years of playing with my school's orchestras have somewhat desensitized my perfect pitch. I hear that Boulez can hear one wrong note in a piece as dense as his Deuxieme Sonate. :O


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## Gaspard de la Nuit (Oct 20, 2014)

First, there are plenty of occasions in which the way ones ear typically organizes pitch can be suspended or lost temporarily - sometimes when I zone out and listen to music that I usually like, I wonder what all that noise is about and how I ever found anything like it to be beautiful.

Secondly.....composers have other concerns besides aural objective perfection.....some composers (like Wagner and Stravinsky) even wanted it to be avoided in various passages. I also think a composer will often be willing to overlook wrong notes if the playing has overall the right impact.



> r. The stronger that ear, the more liberated the musical imagination


Is that why the composers he panned as having weaker ears had superior imagination to the countless people who have absolute or perfect pitch?


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

Chaotic Good, but Good nonetheless.


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## Guest (Nov 6, 2015)

I've read a few NewMusicBox articles, a couple of them recently, and I'm starting to see a trend.

And Mark has produced what I'm probably prematurely starting to suspect is a NewMusicBox template:

Questionable thesis
Some non-evidential support of the thesis
Some evidence that tends to undermine the thesis (including side-swipes at Cage followed by denials that they were side-swipes)
Doubling down on the thesis
A promise to provide something
Promise broken with some other something, usually self-aggrandizing anecdotes* and tangential points
A summing up that includes all the points that completely destroy the thesis but that defends the thesis anyway.

*One thing you can take away from this article is the dictionary meaning of anecdote. In the why creators create thread, the word anecdote is now being used to refer to any reference to or presentation of first-hand experience and/or observation.

[Edit: I left something out that's crucial, but it's not something that goes on a list of items. It's a way of presenting what people do or what they think that betrays either a vast ignorance of the subject or a willful distortion of same.]


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

some guy said:


> *One thing you can take away from this article is the dictionary meaning of anecdote. In the why creators create thread, the word anecdote is now being used to refer to any reference to or presentation of first-hand experience and/or observation.


OT, but just to clarify: one of the dictionary meanings of _anecdotal_ is "based on or consisting of reports or observations of usu. unscientific observers" (Merriam-Webster 1998). Perhaps a back-formation of _anecdote_ to refer to such observations isn't strictly correct, but (coming at it from a science background) that's how I interpret it in contexts such as the creators thread.


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## Abraham Lincoln (Oct 3, 2015)

Which one? I have two ears.


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## TwoPhotons (Feb 13, 2015)

Fairly average. I tend to hear only the top and bottom voices, but I've been practising trying to recognize inner voices as well. It's easier said than done!

However, a few days ago I was at a piano recital, and I had a moment of revelation where I could actually recognize the overtones in each key note (specifically the 3rd overtone, the compound fifth). Usually on recordings and on my digital piano I never paid attention to the overtones, but when you're in a room with a pianist playing on a grand piano it's much more noticeable, and for me it was the first time I could actually _hear_ those overtones as they existed. It was fascinating!

Btw I have 3 ears.


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## Guest (Nov 6, 2015)

Nereffid said:


> OT, but just to clarify: one of the dictionary meanings of _anecdotal_ is "based on or consisting of reports or observations of usu. unscientific observers" (Merriam-Webster 1998). Perhaps a back-formation of _anecdote_ to refer to such observations isn't strictly correct, but (coming at it from a science background) that's how I interpret it in contexts such as the creators thread.


I stand corrected. I never intended to suggest that one meaning was better than another. But that is probably an easy conclusion to have drawn.

Anyway, as Nereffid has correctly pointed out, the newer meaning, the one being used in the creators create thread, has indeed already gotten into a dictionary, which is the kind of thing which is always at the very least about two years out of date. What is clear from the 1998 date is that my sense of what is or is not in dictionaries is woefully out of date. Almost twenty years.

Well, it's good to learn. And the extent to which I have given the idea that I disapprove of the newer meaning of "anecdotal" is the extent to which I was simply wrong.


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Or as professor Peter Schickele of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople declared "P.D.Q. Bach had a good ear - but unfortunately, his other one was terrible "


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Morimur said:


> An interesting pair of articles by Mark N. Grant for NewMusicBox. He goes on to reveal names of celebrated composers who "betrayed their inability to recognize whether their own damn notes were being correctly sounded or not".
> 
> Enjoy...
> 
> ...





> Glazounov, on the other hand, was capable of prodigious feats of ear, but Glazounov certainly wasn't as great a composer as Stravinsky.


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