Raw thoughts: I'm supposed to be working. 😃
The "perfect pitch" idea felt to me, back then, like the mindset of a physicist used to dealing with absolute measures, and transferring that mindset into music, and how he understood his daughters' lessons with that good teacher.
I cannot remember the details of what I read 17 years ago and what specifically got me to not read further than that page. It had something to do with memorizing a passage. I had, in fact, done a lot with mind, head, ears at that point because of the lack of musical training up then (i.e., basically none). I had done mostly standard diatonic type music. Fuer Elise was the first piano piece I had done as a kid because it was in the 1905 book my grandmother sent from Germany. That together with lots of Clementi, Kuhlau - all of them sonatinas generally. Ok, so:
The sonatina will have a theme - little melody-thing, which asks and answers a question (how I felt it) - like a sentence or two part conversation. "What are you looking at?" "What am I looking at? - those birds!" It did a twiddle-diddle and suddenly there was a "new Do" (it had modulated), danced around there. Then more twiddle-diddles and the old conversation came up in the original key (old Do), "What are you looking at, pray tell?" What am I looking it? - those birds, those lovely birds!" This is how I had absorbed music as a child. A story tells itself in a logical way, and thus it is not hard to remember. Whatever this gentleman proposed seemed abstract, like memorizing a chain of numbers and letters in some code. I could not relate to it.
Memorized music was also like an unfolding story where you have the key points. That camping trip has packing up stuff, traveling, arriving, setting up, the adventures while camping (maybe a key one), decamping, travel home. As I get to each point, that part "unfolds" - 'setting up' a bunch of things happened. This is also how I experienced music.
Is starting with the mind, primarily, being in the mind, the best thing to (always) do? I don't think so. I was not aware of technique at the piano, what to physically do; how things worked, or even a real way of reading music. I believe that we need all aspects, and there is a back and forth. If you are strong in one area and have another one missing, then you want to push the missing part more. If Chang or his daughters mostly had technique, but had not memorized and done head-things before, then it would be important to balance that out. Thus "mind" might be important for him or them.
Also, what you associate with and end up using will also work with your background and makeup. What I wrote described stories, literature, poetry. That's my world. I could add metaphor and imagery that springs up. The same thing may not work for someone else because they have a different mindset.
I also get that the book may be very useful for some. Plus it's just fun to discuss these things and potentially even disagreeing, no arguments involved!
