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 had invited me to give a presentation about my work with microtonality, but I had to fly to California that day, so I made this video the week before, on a rehearsal break.

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, beginning at home but mostly at Juilliard Pre-college. When I started at Juilliard at 9 years old, I was placed in level 2 of ear-training, skipping the first-year class. I struggled at first but I was encouraged by teacher Sandra Schuler to persevere and after a couple of months I was good at it. I continued with ear training every year and when I entered college at Juilliard at 18, I wasn’t required to take it any more. But Rebecca Scott, who had 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.