I made this video for the Festival of Microtonal Music during a rehearsal break for the Ojai Festival (after having had a brief case of Covid).

I experience the expressiveness of music intuitively and always by ear primarily. I have relative pitch and that’s generally the most useful aural skill for hearing intonation and aural color and context. Perfect pitch is a more abstract ability but it can be useful in the moment, when there’s a complex harmony or cluster and a need to identify the individual notes immediately.

For the most part, I think really precise microtones 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 meaningful, and 2) if the piece returns to the same pitches and intervals repeatedly so you need to be consistent. But in some pieces, especially in melodic or fast passages, the point is not what each interval itself is, but more expressivity through a greater variety of intervals and their relativity. As Georg Friedrich Haas told me, make sure a 6th-tone sounds 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, where I started at 9. I was placed in level 2 of ear-training, skipping the first year. I struggled at first 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 when I started college, I wasn’t required to take it any more. But Rebecca Scott, who’d been my ear-training teacher in Pre-college the past few years, persuaded me to take the advanced class, which was required of conductors. I’ve realized since then how much I use all I learned.