They're a demanding bunch, classical musicians. Tap into any conversation between musos and beneath the surface all manner of sour one-upmanship will fester. Oh, so you've never heard of *insert name of minor 17th-century Ferrarese composer*? Well, her work is quite specialist. You adore Dvórak? How ... charming. Only came third in the Leeds piano competition? Ah well. Keep up the scales.
But when the conversation touches the subject of perfect pitch, even we lose all sense of scale. For rational beings unaware of this particular musical fetish, there exists a bunch of people - let's call them Perfect People - whose brains are wired in such a way that they are able to produce pitch-perfect notes at will. Ask a Perfect Person to sing an A, and they will sing an A. Same if it's an F-sharp. Or a D-flat. All without reference to tuning forks, ouija boards or indeed any of that miraculous musical technology invented so, well, we don't actually need people with perfect pitch in the first place.
Technically, I suppose, this is some kind of quaint neurological disorder, on a par with muddling F major and the colour purple or mistaking one's wife for a hat.
But, speaking as one of those embittered, competitive musos, I am still a teensy bit eaten up by the fact that I don't have perfect pitch. I've learnt to wince at dodgy intonation like a pro, but I can't imagine behaving like a soprano I once knew, who consistently refused to sing beyond bar four of whatever piece our choir was doing because everyone else was "ruining" it for her.
But there is hope for us fallen musical creatures. A piece just published on the American Web Music Center's website questions whether perfect pitch actually exists - suggesting, rather, it's simply a pimped-up version of so-called "relative pitch", which can be learnt. What the thing isn't, Belinda Reynolds believes, is an innate, immutable gift, and anyone who claims otherwise is simply having the rest of us on. Absolute pitch? Absolute nonsense.
I admit to liking this argument, and not solely on the basis of schadenfreude. Logic dictates that internal pitch must be tempered with external realities, which implies that it's contextual. I'm guessing that musicians who grow up in, say, central Java - rich in pentatonic gorgeousness - have one instinct about what an interval means, while someone who's been listening to a lot of Webern will think something completely different. Both are, in their way, correct. As any acoustician can tell you, equal temperament is a muddled but necessary compromise. A bit like life.
But there are people who absolutely believe in this thing called absolute pitch, and some of them have already weighed in to the debate. Personally I prefer to think nobody's perfect. But what about you?
