How’s this for a shock, horror headline: “Tone-deaf professor of Music at Liverpool University.” Can it be true? Well, up to a point, yes. It’s complex.
I’m head of music at Liverpool, but I honestly can’t pitch a note when I try to sing – and you certainly wouldn’t want me turning up on your doorstep belting out Christmas carols. When I was at school, a choir conductor once told me that I had a “voice like a cracked saucepan” (as they say in Hungary).
On the other hand, I certainly can discriminate pitches acutely when other people play or sing, or on recordings. And a reviewer of one of my books once wrote, I quote: “Spitzer is a consummate musician“.
So what’s going on? The fascinating thing is that being musical can take many forms. At a most spectacular level, I am amazed at people of all ages who can nail a note effortlessly, because they can imagine it in their head and then their brain tells the vocal folds in their larynx to adjust their length and tension to fine-tune a pitch. The result is the kind of crystal-clear, resonant tone you hear in choirboys at evensong.
And when it came to Florence Foster Jenkins, the infamous and much-loved “diva” from early 20th century New York, that fine tuning was hilariously awry.
Florence Foster Jenkins murdering Mozart. She loved music but couldn’t sing.
But it’s not just a vocal ability. Gifted string-players – like my ten-year-old daughter – know instinctively where to place their fingers on the unfretted bridge of their violin or cello to produce that perfect note (guitar-players cheat because they have frets!). I say “instinctively”, but the thorny issue is indeed whether people are born with this gift, or whether it can be shaped through musical training.
There is evidence that tone-deafness, or congenital amusia, is genetic, and I probably inherited mine from my mother. But the line between musical nature and nurture is fuzzy. Even those singers who seem to nail a note are cheating a little. What really happens is this: the note they first sing may be out a bit; their ears pick this up very quickly and then their larynx adjusts the pitch accordingly, so they home in gradually on the correct note, ears and larynx working in perfect partnership.
