In one of my singing groups we encountered a problem common to ensemble music-making: One of the singers was singing the wrong vowel. While everyone else was producing Oh she persisted in Oooo. The sound was not in tune. It turned out she was obsessing about her attack. But the point in group singing is that there is no individual attack: a group intention produces the in-tune sound. How to agree on that? Simple: Look around; match the facial preparation of your fellow singers, and the vowel will come out in agreement.

To do this you have to tolerate losing control of your individual sound, in a way, of your individual will.

Concerts are full of such refusals to become part of a whole.

Then there is the opposite: equally upsetting. Too much blend at the expense of individual passion in linear playing. This requires some sophisticated musicianship and the appropriate setting. A string quartet is not an a cappella singing group.

The trouble with piano study based on technique only is that listening is ipso facto left to someone else. This is not only demeaning for the student, as it denies the validity of the student's own ear, but it is grossly unfair to the composer.

Yesterday I had the experience of playing a Brahms duo sonata that I have heard and played many times. This time I decided to take Brahms's notation seriously and vowed to respect his note values as indicative of actual sound "values," so to speak. It was a different piece.

Among the more potent discoveries: 1) Rests, as in Mozart, are most often not pauses but indications of interrupted sounds.
2) Bass notes in extremely low registers affect the intonation of the clarinet and the ear of the pianist. (Am I alone to have found them problematic all my life?)
3) Much of what we accept as standard Brahms interpretation is simply the result of not paying attention: this music is incredibly multi-layered.

Boredom or inattentiveness, as usual, proved to be reliable guides in discerning the places that needed closer examination.

Reading music is so much easier if one can read and listen at the same time--which very few of us can when we are starting out. I give priority to the listening aspect of reading; it takes longer to achieve a synthesis but the results are more fun. What's wrong with fun!

The article on pitch in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is quite revealing: It seems that there was no such thing as standard pitch until well past the Baroque era. Voices sang where they were centered, the way I like to have my vocal tuning classes work. Introducing fixed pitch became the practice as instruments were added in to fill out the sound. Even then there were deviations from a given pitch.

It would be good, I think, instead of arguing about whether A should be 415 or 440 to postulate A's of all different frequencies. Incidentally, that's why a lot of Renaissance vocal music is available in modern editions in a wide variety of keys, some of which make no sense at all to me, like F# major. I have nothing against F# major but it is not a tonality in which people ordinarily sing, whereas F is, as is G.

Another "scientific" study was described in yesterday's paper that purported to show that people who had had some musical training responded differently to pleasing sounds than those who had not. Perhaps the study shows something altogether different: Perhaps it reveals that people are no longer singing, training or no.

Voices "true" instinctively. Responding to overtones is a natural occurrence, no training required--in fact, usually the less the better.

Pitch, like so many other things, is being mechanized to a point where it no longer is recognizable. The piano, ubiquitously (and wrongly, in my opinion)used as the arbiter of pitch, supports this tendency. Alas.

People with little or no theoretical training often have the deepest insights into musical line, provided they are given free rein and are unafraid to open their mouths and sing. What they sing -- i.e., how they tune pitches in relation to one another -- is most of the time amazingly revelatory of the inner dynamics of pitch relationships.

I learned this from reading back in the 1960's Viktor Zuckerkandl's splendid study Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World. The study, now considered dated in the light of current fashions in scientific inquiry into musical phenomena, is all about the inherent sense of tone and how it is revealed by people's response to it.

The two sight-singing groups I now lead are actually tuning classes. In each the quality of the singing is, if vocal quality is the standard, mediocre. The quality of the musical experience has been for some of the participants life-changing and it never is anything less than extraordinary in what it reveals about the inner workings of tone.

One notable exception to the observation that musicians do not like to talk about tone: An eminent cellist came to rehearse Dvorak's Dumky Trio, a work he had recorded several times and performed hundreds of times. He began the rehearsal by drawing attention to one note that never came out in tune. As we worked that moment through, right then and there, many options came to mind about how to handle it: it was a moment of collision between the cello and the piano's black keys. As soon as we took our ears out of conventional tonal thinking in which the 6th degree of the minor scale resolves on the 5th degree, everything fell into place.

Just because one tone follows another does not mean they "go" together in any conventional sense of the term.