ng to no less than Schoenberg and Virgil Thomson his ear was technically deficient by even modest traditional measures. Schoenberg told Cage he couldn’t be a composer because he didn’t have an ear for harmony (though he did call Cage a “genius” inventor), and Thomson concurred that “with [Cage] the original gift, the musical ear, is not a remarkable one. Neither did he ever quite master the classical elements, harmony and counterpoint—a failure that has led him at times into faulty harmonic analysis.” (Please don’t misunderstand me here; clearly many, even most Cage compositions are absolute piquant delights for the ear. Still, I view him as the exception that proves the rule.)
Of course, even the most acutely endowed ears can be fooled. In his extraordinarily perceptive memoir With Strings Attached, violinist Joseph Szigeti tells an anecdote about Richard Strauss conducting one of his works. During a rehearsal Strauss asked the violin section for an “almost inaudible” tremolo. They tried it with more bow hair, less bow hair, at the frog, at the tip, ad nauseam, but Strauss remained unsatisfied. Finally the concertmaster whispered something to the players, and at last Strauss was happy. Years later, the concertmaster revealed to Strauss that he had merely instructed the section to keep the bow just above the string without touching it. The violins weren’t playing at all. Strauss’s ear had been duped by deft pantomime.
Strauss had a phenomenal ear, but, wrote Nicolas Slonimsky, “Ravel was completely helpless in spotting wrong notes in his own compositions when he conducted. Alfred Casella told me that even Debussy let pass the most horrendous mistakes in his orchestral works, and in one instance failed to notice that the clarinet player used a clarinet in B-flat instead of one in A….Stravinsky had a very limited sense of pitch [and]…was also a poor proof-reader.” Glazounov, on the other hand, was capable of prodigious feats of ear, but Glazounov certainly wasn’t as great a composer as Stravinsky. In the last analysis, the only thing that counts in composing music is what is on the score page, not the composer’s sense of pitch.
Still, if someone other than the composer knows better than he what the notes should sound like, the composer has some deficits in his gift, in my view. And next week I will put my own ears where my mouth is to further expound on this topic.