Watch: Holst’s take on Purcell

La plus belle voix says:

Perfect pitch is simply another name for absolute pitch. (The auditory system of those with AP differs neither in physical nor functional terms from that of non-absolute listeners and is simply an innate, unerring expression of pitch awareness.) Relative pitch is arguably more useful to musicians, enabling them to compare a reference note to its successor, and is the capacity to identify correctly the interval between those two notes.

In the Purcell, the interval g-a at “let my” is a textbook example of “think it big folks”. My issue is not with the singers, but with what happened (or did not happen) in rehearsal. If the a natural is not heard and sung as a high-lying leading note to the b flat, it becomes impossible to pitch the b natural as a leading note, in reverse as it were, to the c natural. The pitch class set a-b flat-b natural-c is not a chromatic scale per se, but two pairs of strongly directional semitones, one rising and one falling. Think Gesualdo.

The question is, how do you like your whole tones? To paraphrase W.C. Fields: “Boiled or fried.”