Jotting down thoughts post-recital. You know, my Ravel-only solo piano/string quartet show filled with an hour of insanely ambitious repertoire.
Tag Archives: orchestra
Music Against Medicine
A hospital floor is so noisy. Despite posting signs reading “Quiet is Healing” in the halls, it’s mostly an iatrogenic cacophony.
Some of it is necessary distraction, like IV Pump alarms, telemetry alarms, bed alarms, telephone rings, beeper beeps (lol, yes still a thing). Sadly, they’re all dissonant tones! Phones are B-E trills, heart monitors are a high B-ish, beepers are mostly F#. Why couldn’t they be harmonic in the same key so that when they inevitably pile up it’d be a pleasant chiming instead of this din of ding-dings we have to yell over? Continue reading Music Against Medicine
What’s perfect pitch like?
Imagine for a moment that your friends all see the world differently. They can see everything fine, the shapes, the shadows, the textures. The colors are there too: the sky glows blue, the leaves on trees look pretty green, and the earth is a homely brown. All is well.
But wait! They look away for a moment then back at the same scene. The sky’s purple now! The trees have turned teal, and the earth’s a sickly yellow. Good thing they’re still all different colors, though, or else it’d probably be hard to see. Your friends look again and now the sky’s green, the leaves brown, and the ground blue. What in the world?! It’s like the color wheels in their heads are rotating!
The world always looks resolutely normal to you, no changing color shenanigans, so sometimes your friends ask you to tell them what color the sky actually is. You say it’s blue. They’re all amazed that you know the sky is blue and you look at them funny, puzzled by how their shifting notion of color doesn’t bother them in the slightest.
That’s what it’s like having perfect pitch. Continue reading What’s perfect pitch like?