From: allyn@milton.u.washington.edu (Allyn Weaks)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Authentic performance/pitch.
Date: 23 Aug 92 22:54:18 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

ucap22w@ucl.ac.uk (Martin S T Watts) writes:

>After listening a lot, lately, to John Eliot Gardiner's recording
>of the B-minor Mass and Trevor Pinnock's Messiah, it occurred to me
>to see whether anybody else has any opinions on the use of "authentic"
>pitch in authentic performance. I use quotes because I'm not so sure
>why all the ensembles have arrived at this particular pitch, pretty
>much exactly a semitone below modern concert pitch, for Baroque
>performance. Is it that somebody's extrapolated back to the 1740's
>the upward trend in frequency that has occurred since people have
>started making numerical measurements of pitch, or has somebody
>unearthed a Baroque tuning fork? If so, who's too say it isn't out
>of tune? And is pitch really likely to have been as standardised in
>those times as it supposedly is now for conventional performance?

The term I mostly hear is "historical pitch" (or renaissance, or baroque,
or French, or classical or pre-WW1) rather than "authentic".  Over the
centuries and across Europe, pitch has wandered all over the map.  And
indeed, we have historical "tuning forks" - bells, wind instruments, a
few unaltered organs, instructions for instrument builders.  Of the wind
instruments, flutes and recorders are the best pitch estimators, since
they are complete (there are old oboes, but no matching reeds, and reed
length influences pitch).  The pitch that the existing instrument plays
at today is probably somewhat higher than it would have played at 200-300
years ago - in general, as the wood ages it shrinks, changing the shape
and reducing the size of the  bore, which raises the pitch by a very
small amount (Most of the change will occur in the first 10-20 years).
The point being not that the instruments have become significantly
sharper with great age, but that they are very unlikely to have become
flatter.

Though pitch did wander a lot, at any given time and place it wasn't as
wild as all that: from the practical aspect, people with instruments from
different makers have to be able to play together in tune.  There is a
fair degree of latitude of tuning even for a recorder though the tone and
ensemble balance suffers (I can manage to play the renaissance alto I use
anywhere from about 430 to 445, though it sounds best a shade below 440
which it was designed for) but outside that range, forget it - you need a
different instrument.  Then as now good instruments weren't cheap, so
your average musician was unlikely to have ten of them lying around to
mix and match.  Not to mention staying in practice on all of them - even
'identical' instruments from the same maker play rather differently.
Also, instruments tended to be made at various centers.  In the
renaissance, Italy was where most of the good winds came from, and the
Germans made the best brass.  So they had to keep the pitches roughly in
sync across the continent because people and instruments travelled a lot.

As for what the pitches were, renaissance instrumental pitch centered
around 460-465, I forget what the church (organ and choral) pitch was
then.  In the baroque, there were roughly three pitches - german chamber
around 405-410, french chamber around 390-395, and church pitch around
465.  Church pitch was made even more complicated because what was
written often wasn't played - organists were expected to be able to
transpose at sight up or down a 1/2 tone or a third or whatever.  (Early
musicians in general seem to have been expected to be far more flexible
than modern musicians in terms of reading any clef at any transposition.
And there were lots more clefs back then!)

For modern performance, 415 was chosen as a reasonable compromise for
baroque pitch.  Again, people have to be able to play together in tune,
so you need a standard, and modern people like to have their standards be
rather precise.  415 was chosen because it is the integer closest to one
half-step below 440. (No point in being fussier than that).  The
advantage being that you oculd build a harpsichord that plays at either
415 or 440 just by sliding the keyboard over a bit.  Or in a pinch, you
could add a modern instrument to the ensemble by playing transposed down
a 1/2 step.  (This was still in the early days before there were so many
period instrument copies (and players) available.)  Keep in mind too,
that early ensembles tend not to tune to a tuning fork, but to each
other.  So the actual pitch of a performance will vary from 415 depending
on room temperature (winds play sharper in warm rooms), who gives the
tuning pitch, and other factors.  I'm extremely happy not to be afflicted
with perfect absolute pitch!


David Ohannesian, our local Seattle recorder maker, has become convinced
that at least for winds there is a natural pitch for an instrument, and
for flutes and recorders it's near the french chamber pitch of 390.
Which could be why most of the best wind makers were french, and could
have been why french chamber pitch was so low.  David has been trying for
the last several years to come up with a recorder design that sounds good
at 440 because he'd sell bunches (to us amateurs who can't afford two
sets of instruments, one at 440 and one at 415, and who mostly have to
play with people who are already locked into 440 thus perpetuating the
dratted 440).  He doesn't really like anyone else's 440 models either.
They just never get that really rich dark tone of the surviving
originals.  In fact, he and many other makers would rather push the pitch
down further to French chamber pitch.  As a demonstration, he played one
of his 415s for me, then his 392.  He made them to be as identical as he
could except for the pitch, but the tone was so much different (and
nicer) on the 392 (different far outside the normal variation of tone
between two 'identical' instruments).  I think in the future, you'll find
more ensembles playing at the lower french pitch because it sounds so
nice, and lots more instruments are becoming available.  

>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.

Many others have already gone into the old modal and mean-tempered
reasons (and lack of them) for key-associations. But I'd like to mention
a reason that a composer would choose to write a wind piece in a
particular key: on early instruments with no key work, the key you play
in affects the tone quality a lot.  Not because of the pitches, but
because of the fingerings.  Many notes, especially the notes farther away
from the 'natural key' of the instrument (e.g. flutes play in D, alto
recorders in F, regardless of pitch) need to be cross-fingered, which
means that there will be one or more open holes between two closed holes.
Cross-fingered notes sound fundamentally different from
non-cross-fingered notes (somewhat more reedy), and the more extreme the
cross-fingering (the more embedded open holes), the more extreme the
difference.  So the Bach b-minor flute sonata sounds very different if
transposed up a half-step _on the same instrument_, but not as different
if played with the same fingerings on an instrument that happens to play
a half-step higher in pitch.  Whether you want to assign an emotional
content to the different tone quality is up to you. I don't at all, and I
bet your assignments would be different from other people's assignments.

Allyn Weaks
allyn@milton.u.washington.edu
From: chrisr@hpcvra.cv.hp.com (Chris Robson)
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 18:48:25 GMT
Subject: Joining the dots ...
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Co., Corvallis, OR, USA