That’s a nifty skill, but if you want an orchestra of other people to play the music you have running through your head, you’re going to have to put it on paper at some point.
Based on @lobotomyboy63’s reference to a music typewriter, I think the difficulty being referred to was the pain in the ass of physically scribing notes on paper by hand. When I was a boy scout I earned my music merit badge, and one of the requirements was to create a short musical composition and play it on an instrument for the examiner. I remember it being extremely tedious to write all the notes, e.g. filling in the heads for quarter notes and little bricks for whole rests and such, at least in any way that would be legible to someone else. And that was for a single instrument.
Even if you can hear an entire orchestra in your head, the workload required to transcribe the music onto paper for dozens of instruments seems massive, and the idea of doing all of that by hand makes my own hand want to cramp up.
The number of pieces isn’t particularly relevant to the composer - it’s the different parts she needs to worry about (Violin 1, 2, and 3, Viola 1 and 2, bassoon, oboe, trumpet, etc). Which is still a lot of course.
Someone has to make copies of the appropriate part for the 100 people, but that’s not going to be Mozart.
Ok, so it sounds like the common method of composing is to work out the melody or some set of notes on an instrument you can hear, and then write out those notes, or have someone else do it. I suppose a computer could do that for you if you can play it on an instrument, at least to get started the written score started.
Is this unusual though? Just reading the score, not writing it. Shouldn’t composers and other musicians have that ability?
I am ignorant here, I have virtually no musical ability, and even though I could read music and translate that to the fingering for several brass instruments I would have no idea how the music should sound from looking at the notes, and it certainly didn’t sound any good when I tried to play it either.
Sure. I played in band years ago and we each had a stand and folder, I think, though I’m not sure how the percussion worked (not every song has a triangle part, etc.).
It occurs to me that piano parts could be pretty labor intensive since you may be using ten fingers simultaneously, whereas a lot of instruments only produce one sound at a time.
Sounds likely. My niece has some sort of “tone generator” that’s very portable and she composes using it.
Another niece who has a college degree in music mentioned a class where the teacher had them memorize commercial jingles that included intervals. The only one I remember was the old “By…Mennen.” I couldn’t tell you which interval it was but I know she said that one. A similar take:
I can’t even play piano, so taking in that whole glut of notes at once isn’t remotely possible for me. But I imagine it’s that times…something. I mean ok, maybe the trumpets are doubling the violin parts or other things make it simpler than it might at first appear. But geez there are still a lot of parts.
Perfect pitch is an amazing thing in itself. This ability wouldn’t have to be connected to any other musical skill in order to sense frequencies so well, a process starting in the ear, but it seems likely it will be. He is naming notes and chords and I think he understands those interval things too, those things are a magical property of music. He is operating at a higher level than just the identification of notes, he is able to separate individual notes from a combined frequency, understand the relationship between them, and then translate them to another language to boot.
Ah, finally, I can share this video from the Amadeus movie, that has been actually, yes, improved to emphasize the musical scoring part of the composition. I get chills / tears every time I see it.
That’s lovely. The Requiem gives me chills too. I have sung it with a full symphony and 100 person choir. (I am, or was, a first soprano). WHOO. And pieces of it at funerals. The year after 9/11 there was a ‘rolling Requiem’ on the day, which started in New Zealand (Kiri Te Kanawa sang in it there) which was set up to sequentially across the whole planet to sing the Requiem beginning at 8:46 a.m. wherever you were. I was in one of the west-coast-of-North-America ones.
They do have the root of that ability though, to understand what the written music will sound like. I understand what you are saying, the conductor of a philharmonic orchestra has to understand how different instruments playing differently will sound, an ability that may not be achievable through practice and requiring an innate talent.
Remember, even though I know what the markings on the lines represent in a grammatical form I still do not have a clue what those notes will sound like when played.
To be named conductor of a major symphony orchestra, you have to be amazingly talented. All can read scores and mentally hear the music as people hear have discussed. Most can play multiple instruments. (Leonard Bernstein often conducted from the piano.)
A common test for conducting students involves conducting the orchestra in a piece the candidate hasn’t prepared, in which one musician has been told to play one wrong note. The candidate has to identify the instrument, the note should have been played, and the note that actually was played.
George Szell (late conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra) could identify the exact player who had played a wrong note, even in a large section like the Second Violins.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George V and Czar Nicholas II, the regents of Germany, Great Britain and Russia at the beginning of WWI, were all first cousins. George and Nicholas could have passed for twin brothers, there was a strong resemblance. Nonetheless, Germany fought Russia and the UK, and George refused to grant Nicholas and his family asylum after the Russian revolution.
Frankly, I didn’t even notice at first sight…