From: ucap22w@ucl.ac.uk (Martin S T Watts)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Authentic performance/pitch.
Date: 20 Aug 92 15:56:52 GMT
Organization: Bloomsbury Computing Consortium

conrad@brahms.udel.edu (Jon Conrad) writes:

>My understanding is that that pitch was settled on (by groups that use
>it) for reasons of convenience -- it seemed to fit the instruments they
>had.  But there's considerable variation, as indeed there was back then.
>Norrington used, I believe, an A of 430 for his Beethoven, which is only
>slightly below modern pitch.  And Gardiner performed Monteverdi's Orfeo,
>on his recording, at a pitch one semitone HIGHER than modern standard
>pitch.  (It eased the vocal demands, and he reminds us that pitch was
>all over the map then anyway.)

I noticed that Gardiner used an A somewhere between a modern A and A-flat for
his Missa Solemnis too, but this seems fair enough; you would expect pitch
for Beethoven to lie somewhere between Baroque and present-day. But Gardiner's
claim that pitch was all over the show in any case makes it all the more
absurd to me that it should be standardised, more or less, a semitone below
what is usual for historical performance of Baroque music.

>>The case would be that ever since the Well-Tempered Clavier
>>(and possibly before - I'm no historian) particular keys have built up 
>>particular associations for a great variety of composers and listeners, and
>>these 'key associations' seem to have remained the same, even if pitch has
>>steadily crept upwards. Thus the B-minor of Bach's Mass is very much the same
>>as that of Liszt's Sonata, the G-major of the Preludes and Fugues from the 48
>>is very much that of Beethoven's Sonata Op.31 No.1 and Dvorak's 8th Symphony,
>>as the E-flat of Beethoven's Eroica and Sibelius' 5th is a common image in
>>both. There must be many more examples.

>Ok, but can't you allow your notion of "the pitch of B" to vary with the
>performance you're hearing?  As you rightly point out, these
>characteristics are not immutably bound up with particular frequencies,
>but with the idea of certain notes.  So one could adjust oneself
>accordingly, no?  (I admit I may not fully understand the problem, not
>being cursed with perfect pitch.)

I'm afraid that, by some disastrous misfortune, I have indeed been cursed with
perfect pitch and so as a consequence a note and its frequency are inextricably
connected for me, and I can't therefore allow my notion of pitch to vary with
performance, really. But, from what I gather from others, perfect pitch seems
only to be an ability explicitly to recognise notes by name, and I wonder 
whether it's not possible that ANY modern trained ear has subconscious
associations for particular frequencies. Many violinists I know are able to 
tune they're instruments without any other reference, which presumably indicates
some sort of frequency association and, after all, presumably the reason that
pitch has been allowed to increment over the years is that people favour the
brighter sound that a sharp note produces.

Admittedly, it's no major problem, but this baroque-tuning business seems
like cleverness for the sake of it, rather, with no very convincing 
justification. I would have thought, though, that there's ample justification
for the standardisation of pitch now from a practical point of view, and since
these historical performance groups are mostly using modern reconstructions
of instruments this oughtn't to make life too difficult for them.

Martin Watts.
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical