On June 5th, Johnny Reinhard’s American Festival of Microtonal Music held a one-day Microtonal Violin Festival, part of his Microtonal University courses. He invited me to give a presentation about my work with microtonality, but I had to fly to California that day for the Ojai Festival. So I made this video the week before, during a rehearsal break (and shortly after having had a fortunately mild case of Covid).

Relative pitch is most useful for a musician. The only times I wish I had perfect pitch are when there’s a very complex harmony or cluster and I wish I could identify individual notes immediately, instead of needing time or effort to figure it out.

For the most part, I think really precise intervals are important when 1) there’s a long sustained harmony or you’re using the overtone series, so the exact frequencies are really discernible, and 2) if the piece returns to the same pitches and intervals repeatedly so you need to be consistent. But in many pieces, and especially in melodic or fast passages, the point is to have more ways of being expressive through a greater variety of intervals, not to play exactly a 6th-tone or whatever. As Georg Friedrich Haas told me, just make sure a 6th-tone is a little smaller than a quarter-tone!

As I mention in the video, I did ear-training as a kid, first at home but mostly at Juilliard Pre-college. When I started there at 9 years old, I was placed in level 2 of ear-training, skipping the first-year class. I struggled a while but I was encouraged by my teacher Sandra Shuler to persevere and after a few months I got good at it. I continued with ear-training every year and by the time I started college at Juilliard, I wasn’t required to take it any more. However, Rebecca Scott, who’d been my ear training teacher in Pre-college the past few years, persuaded me to take the advanced college class, which was required of conductors. (I think she was hoping I’d become a TA.) I’ve realized since then how much I use those skills.