The Octave

From taking piano lessons as a seven-year-old to teaching Irish fiddle as a seventeen-year-old, one aspect of music has always fascinated and baffled me: the octave. The concept of the octave, to me, is miraculous and bizarre. Consider the note "Middle C", for example. Travel up one octave, and you will again play the note "C", but this note will be higher in pitch. Despite this difference in pitch, the two notes are fundamentally the same. If you played Middle C and the second C at the same time, the notes, while different, would blend together as if only one note was being played. This "octave phenomenon" is the ultimate musical paradox; the two notes are truly different and the same.

I have tried in vain to explain this phenomenon to my young fiddle students. When I finish my explanation, I am exhilarated, and I ask, "Do you understand?" The student always hesitates before she answers, "No." While this inability to explain the miraculous octave to my students has been a source of minor frustration, I take comfort in knowing that someone else must have noticed it: I wasn't the person who decided to give the same letter name to notes standing an octave apart.