Ragtime Music

John de Saulles was a contemporary of Irvin Berlin and Scott Joplin. I don't know if he ever met them, but I know he listened to their music when he was out partying the night away and neglecting his wife. When I listen to Ragtime or Swing, I think of Jack smiling and tapping his foot. 

There's another more personal reason why listening to Ragtime music gives me such a sense of calm and clarity. The explanation is going to be a bit long and complicated, but bear with me.... it's really neat.

First, I have a sort of congenital brain disorder commonly known as “perfect pitch” or “absolute pitch.” It's pretty rare, some estimates put it at 1 in 10,000 or fewer. It's poorly understood because it gets muddled with talented musicians who are very well “ear trained.” About 15 years ago, a doctor in Boston started doing MRI scans to prove that people with genuine AP ability processed music in the language center of their brains. That is, musical sounds are stored in the same area as speech. Whereas 99.9% of everybody else does not have permanent storage for notes and they process music in the short term memory. That's why, if most people have a starting note on the piano, or a toot off a pitch whistle, they can go forth and sing. Professional musicians build up a familiarity with their own instrument, and “ear training” can be pretty darned reliable. They'll name that note, too. The difference with my odd brain is that I didn't have to learn it. I don't have to think about it. "A, E, I, O, U" are as instantly recognizable as blue and orange, as six and seven, as "C sharp and B flat."  I remember being a little preschooler or kindergardener listening to my favorite LP album of Wizard of Oz. One day, I asked my older sister (who was in 6^th grade) to sing, “Over the Rainbow.” She did... and I'm sure she did a fine job, but I threw a tantrum. I still recall screaming at her, “You're singing it wrong!” before I could articulate what was so wrong about it. 

So, to all you skeptics out there, yes AP is real. I've got it. I've been officially tested by clinic professionals. I have my DNA on file at 2 separate university research projects to prove it.

OK, so now comes the funny little wrinkle. My identification of pitch is a half tone off (flat) compared to the rest of the world. This came a great shock to me when I first figured it out. See, I never pursued a career in music because it is just too frustrating and confusing to play an instrument with a group. They go off one way, and I stay my own course – following the little tuning fork in my head that no one else can hear. I became a writer and a paralegal. I got married. I had kids.

One day, my daughter is starting piano lessons. Fine. We go shopping for a piano, hoping to find an inexpensive upright for her to start on. (BTW, neither one of my kids has “it” but I strictly enforced correct singing at an early age. If they sang the Barney theme song in the car, and they were in the wrong key, I made them stop and start over.) Just for fun, we wandered over to the $ 10,000 grand pianos. My husband does the thing, where he makes me do the show. He pokes a key on a grand and says, “What's that note?” I say, “C sharp.” Then I look, no, it's just plain middle C. So we linger. We go from one ridiculously expensive, perfectly tuned grand piano to another. Every one of them... the white keys sound like black keys to me. I think, this is weird. It's one thing for the electronic keyboards in Radio Shack to sound sharp to me (they always have) but these are the real deal.

I went home and made a phone call to my brother, who is a jazz musician and has one of those electronic tuning devices. I have always ignored and scoffed at such gadgets, but now I needed one. I asked him to toot a simple “A” and over the phone I heard a “B flat.” I started crying, no... no... Suddenly all the little inconsistencies of my life, that I had shrugged off, made sense. My note names are a half tone off. My husband and I worried, for a while, that I was developing Alzheimer's and this was the first symptom. I really thought I was losing my mind.

Research time!! This was the middle/late 1990s, so the internet was not such a big thing yet. I did it the old fashioned way at the public library, in printed encyclopedias, in hardcopy periodicals, etc. Lucky for me, it was right around this time that the guy in Boston was doing his MRIs and articles about AP were accessible. I bought a nearly incomprehensible textbook on cognitive perception, and another book that changed my life: a history of musical pitch.

Brace yourself.

The music notes that you think you know, that you think are solid and absolute and echoing in the rainbow colors of the universe...? They have changed in the 20th century. Do not buy those Chakra meditation chimes at the New Age bookstore. Your body and soul does not resonate to particular pitch tones. 

For thousands and thousands of years, people have played instruments or sang to whatever pitch they felt like. A guy carving a bamboo flute makes the holes sync up and sound right to his ear, and that's good enough. Some guy did a scientific study of European pipe organs and antique tuning forks and found WILD variation all over the place. Poor Mr. Bach, when he went on tour, scribbled transposition of his melodies to adjust the pitch range for the choirs in one cathedral to another. Seriously, he did. In the 19th century, a brass band in Berlin would tune to a sharper pitch than a string quartet in Paris, and the banjoes in the New Orleans bayou would be different from either of them. It was never a problem before, because wherever you were – they tuned to themselves, and it sounded good in that spot.

Then, people traveled. People manufactured instruments and sold them to other countries. People started figuring out that there was some confusion. Singers especially complained because the higher pitch means they have to shriek higher notes. Each country established their own standard, with France being a little lower (the tuning note A is 435 Hz) and British set philharmonic pitch to (A=452 Hz). A lot of the upright pianos manufactured in America tended to lean toward French pitch, the lower, and they churned out thousands of uprights as Stephen Foster sheet music made it popular to have a keyboard in every home.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, and oh boy, for the first time people recorded music, packaged it up, and sold it to faraway people to spin and listen. The problem is, when you record something at a lower pitch, and play it at a higher pitch, the music sounds like squeaky mice. Folks created a need for standardization, so that a recording from Carnegie Hall in New York would sound the same to someone playing the LP in Vienna.

Blatantly copying from the Wikipedia article, “In 1939, an international conference recommended that the A above middle C be tuned to 440 Hz, now known as concert pitch. This standard was taken up by the International Organization for Standardization in 1955 and reaffirmed by them in 1975 as ISO 16. The difference between this and the diapason normal is due to confusion over the temperature at which the French standard should be measured. The initial standard was A = 439 Hz, but this was superseded by A = 440 Hz after complaints that 439 Hz was difficult to reproduce in a laboratory because 439 is a prime number.”

OK, so 1939 is the black day in history when A=440Hz became the rule. But, let's face reality. It did not immediately sweep away all those thousands of pianos that were in every home and every jazz cafe in America. Just like today, when Windows 7 hits the stores, a lot of people using Windows 2000 at home are perfectly happy to save their money and keep on using the old outdated computer.

There's a group called The Academy of Ancient Music that performs Baroque Era and Classical music on antique instruments in “historical pitch.” You can't crank a 300 year old violin up to A=440 because it will snap in half. When they play Mozart pieces toned a half note down from modern pitch, they advertise that this is exactly what ol' Amadeus would have actually sounded like. I really like them.

I think our family had an old, lower pitched piano in the home when I was growing up. Dad was cheap; he would have bought it used. My mom wanted us all to be brilliant musicians. I remember her taking my tiny little finger and pressing it to the white key, and saying, “This is middle C...” My mom passed away, and my dad sold off everything to pay the hospital bills – including the old piano – before I made this discovery about my pitch sense being half tone flat. I have no real proof, but aside from a stroke, it's the best explanation.

I bought an antique piano (from the classifieds) that was built in 1884. It has a heavy mahogany cabinet and a wonderful rich voice. I called in a professional piano tuner to polish it up, and he tuned it to the lower pitch. He affirmed that you cannot tune this piano to modern pitch (A=440) or the strings will break, the sound board will warp, etc. In order to bring it up to speed, they would need to gut the whole thing out and restring it with new. I said, no!

Ragtime music of the late teens and 1920s, and the Big Band Swing of the 1930s, was recorded on old grainy equipment BEFORE the pitch standard was set to A-440. Even in the 1940s, when the recording equipment improved and the meters set their dials to the higher pitch standard, the musicians in the studio might have kept their old antique pianos like mine.

I can feel the difference. I can tell when a song is being played on a piano where the white keys are pitched lower, compared to a piano that's tuned to A=440. When I listen to Ragtime, it feels like going home.