PLINCKSTER

Previous: Perfect Pitch     Next: Composing and Record Collecting    My urge to deconstruct and reconstruct the things I loved doing has been a guiding force. I read comic books, and inevitably wrote my own as soon as I was reading (although I didn't follow through and really develop that skill as an adult). I played board games and made up elaborate new ones on poster board, with no great regret even if they were played only once. (Johnny noted this with perplexity). I played chess and built chess sets out of nuts and bolts. Sometime in 6th grade I got ahold of a couple of notebooks of six-staff music paper, and started filling them up with notes. Mostly it wasn’t really composing, but more like musical doodling, copying and sketching. There were bits of music theory, medleys of familiar tunes strung together crudely (as was sometimes done in published band scores, perhaps no less crudely in some cases), and two short original melodies with accompanime...

Previous:  Band    Next: Starting and Stopping Composing Most people can keep a pitch in short-term memory, for five or fifteen seconds, long enough to reproduce it accurately after a conductor's prep beat. "Perfect pitch" is just long-term memory for pitch. People who "have it" have a permanent memory bank by which pitches are recognized and reproduced without constant refreshers, and people with this mysterious-seeming gift are valuable in choruses as human pitch pipes. I noticed that I had it, and that others didn't, some time after starting elementary school band. Even playing on a transposing instrument didn't make it obvious. The notes of an alto saxophone on its staff with a treble clef are on the same lines and spaces as the notes on the bass clef in concert pitch (though down an octave). So it seemed as though was I reading bass clef when playing sax. Eventually I realized that the note I was calling F by this mistaken method the band direct...

Previous:  Church    Next:  "Perfect Pitch" Large urban school districts in the '60s and '70s offered several choices of music ensembles. They might have one band for concert music, another for football games and parades. They might even boast a "wind ensemble" leaning towards classical music, and too dignified to include my instrument, the saxophone. Only a small number of schools went so far as to have an orchestra program, and even fewer (until later) had a jazz program. Saugatuck, however, was a small village with about 60 kids per grade (in the generation before mine some classes had fewer than a dozen). Besides a little general music, that afforded us basically just "band" and "chorus". In fifth grade the kids interested in band were briefly interviewed and outfitted with instruments. I was deemed a saxophonist and was soon the owner of a used alto that was my companion for the next eight years, excluding summers. During tha...