> And Gordon, with no insult to your intelligence intended, I think your > professor at McGill (my father's alma mater) had perfect "relative > pitch" rather than "perfect pitch". Just the fact that you say it was > tunable.
Actually Bruce does have perfect pitch, because he can write down by ear most 20th-C music from a recording. He demonstrated this once to our advanced analysis class using a Varese piece from a record. He could write down the ten-minute Varese piece entirely from one hearing: in his demo, he was still writing 45 minutes after the piece had stopped playing; we went home and left him. He also has a photographic memory and what we called a tape-recorder memory, as he could write down, for example, any of our compsitions weeks after hearing them just once. Once (about 1982 I think) he was brought into Halifax (Nova Scotia) on three-days' notice to play the piano part in a Ligeti orchestral piece. He received the score at the airport and memorized it the way from there to the rehersal. (I think he can speak about five languages.) GJC
