Story of a Perfect Pitch Child Playing an Out-of-Tune Piano

Story of a Perfect Pitch Child Playing an Out-of-Tune Piano

http://ingenira.hubpages.com/hub/A-Perfect-Pitch-Child-Playing-on-an-Out-of-Pitch-Piano-An-Eye-Opening-Experience-for-the-non-Perfect-Pitch-Mother

If you have a child with perfect pitch who can play by ear, but you don’t have perfect pitch yourself, you will have much challenging, frustrating, humorous and gratifying experience bringing him up in his music education. There are not many people who can help you. So you basically have to pray a lot and follow your intuition, as you’re walking along this unknown path. The first thing you need is a very good piano with good pitch and properly tuned. So what happens if you have a really old piano for a perfect pitch child to play? Here is my story.

It was Chinese New Year and as usual we went back to my hometown. There, lying in my house, is a thirty years old Shanghai brand piano. Yes, if you know what a cheap Chinese piano is like, you can guess that it is in a very bad condition. Since I left home, nobody has played the piano much, no maintenance has been done on it and it has probably been attacked by termites. I don’t have perfect (absolute) pitch but I have good relative pitch. With that, I could still play a few songs on the old piano.

When my perfect pitch child, Ivan, played the piano, his first reaction was a laugh. Then, he tried to play his ABRSM[1] exam pieces which he had practiced for weeks. I know how familiar he is with the songs. He doesn’t need the book to play them. His piano teacher thinks that he is almost ready for the exam. However, he kept playing with errors and stopped this old Shanghai piano. So, I asked him, “What’s wrong? How’s the piano?” He said the piano was badly out of tune.

My sister told me that the piano was tuned about 6 months ago, after Ivan complained that it was one tone out of tune. That means, almost every piano note is one tone lower than the original pitch. With a one-tone out of tune piano, my son had to readjust his playing. For example, if he wanted to play the pitches “C D E”, he had to play, “B flat, C, D” instead. With this adjustment (регулирование, приспосабливание, корректировка) in his head, he could play some simple songs with additional hand and brain coordination. It was hard for him. He didn’t touch the piano much after that.

So, my sister got the piano tuned. I thought, after the tuning, the piano should be in a better condition this year. I wanted to know how badly out of tune the piano was this time. I knew Ivan could give me the answer. I played “D” on the piano while my son was lying on the sofa quite a distance away, and asked him, what key was that. He said it was “C sharp”. Then I played, “F sharp”, and he said, “F”. I laughed. After tuning, the piano is now a semi-tone out of tune! He told me that out of the three exam pieces he could play only one of them on the piano as the song was more scale-like. The other two songs required his jumping from one key to another with many keys apart, hence (из-за чего) too many adjustments were needed, and therefore (поэтому) he kept playing with mistakes.

We stayed at home for a week. We have plenty of free time. I thought I would teach him a new song on the piano. We had this piece of nice music he liked in A flat major. He didn’t know major before, so I decided to start off by showing him the A flat major scale. So, I played the scale starting with A flat, and asked him to follow me. He couldn’t follow me. He started the scale from G! I showed him another time, he did exactly the same mistakes! I just couldn’t help but laughing out loud. When I played the scale, he did not use his visual memory to remember which key I pressed. Instead, using auditory memory, he remembered the tunes he had heard and played from his memory! So, with a semi-tone out of tune piano, he would always play the wrong key! We decided to stop there and then (тотчас, тогда же). There was no point to keep trying.

It is absolutely impossible to let a perfect pitch boy play an out of tune piano. If he manages to adjust to this out of tune piano, he will have the same problem playing a well-tuned piano. So, I’ve learnt an important lesson. A perfect pitch boy needs a perfectly tuned piano.

[1] ABRSM (the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music) is an internationally recognized educational body and charity that provides examinations in music. The organisation, which is based in London, UK, runs exams in centres all over the world.

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