[...]Gieseking always proceeded this way; he was thus trained and educated from childhood, and consequently could learn a piece on a train or boat and play it in a recital the same evening without even trying it out first on a piano.
It is not necessary to have perfect pitch for this purpose. There is a general misunderstanding about perfect pitch. It doesn't mean musical pitch ( and I'm speaking here of physical musicality ) . There are people with it who are completely unmusical, and highly musical people without it. I possess it myself, so that this is not sour grapes. As a matter of fact, I was fascinated by this thing and undertook some research.
Years ago it was taken for granted that those who had perfect pitch were geniuses, and were often therefore tortured and forced to work for years. I made many experiments with groups of children in which they were asked to sing any tone they wanted. I wrote down the tone each child sang, then asked them once a week for several consecutive weeks to do the same. I found that some of the children always sang the same tone, while others sang different tones each time. With very few exceptions, those children who always sang the same tone had perfect pitch.
So it may be ( purely hypothetically ) that those who have perfect pitch possess, as it were, a built-in tuning fork, a fundamental tone with which they compare others which they hear.
Also, I divide perfect pitch into three categories:
The highest is active perfect pitch, the ability not only to recognize tones but to produce them at any time.
Then there is what I call passive perfect pitch, the ability only to recognize.
Finally, the lowest quality of perfect pitch is the ability to recognize tones only on the particular instrument we play.
Next time we will continue this very important chapter of practicing, and then, if I think it won't take the whole lecture, we will jump from metaphysical considerations to physical things -- that is, the piano itself. (Anm. Olli: Ende der 2. Vorlesung von 11. )
