One sentence from a quote in my Friday Miscellanea has been troubling me: Theodor Currentzis said "Mozart composed music at 430 Hz; that was the pitch of the time." Was it? I almost hesitate to bring this up as I have discovered over the years that all mention of pitch and tuning brings a flurry of comments from very knowledgeable people. Wait, that's actually a plus, isn't it?
I ran across a very interesting and informative website about these questions: The History of Musical Pitch in Tuning the Pianoforte by Edward E. Swenson. In this article he has a lengthy list of pitches derived from existing tuning forks from the years 1715 to 1880. They provide an historical record of where the note A was tuned to over the years. They vary between 419.9 in 1715 to 421.6 from Vienna in 1780 which he comments that "A= 421.6 is probably the pitch which Mozart used to tune his fortepianos and clavichords." Interestingly, many tuning forks from the 19th century range from 445 to 455 or even higher. I don't recall hearing any performances of 19th century music advertising that they are performing at the historically high pitch! One thing we should take away from this is that, despite numerous attempts, no standardized pitch was actually settled on until into the 20th century. Every orchestra and opera house, not to mention every piano builder, had their own "standard" pitch that might have been quite different from the one used the other side of town. In 1869, for example, the Gewandhaus Orchestra used a tuning fork at A = 448.2 while in Vienna the orchestral pitch was 456.1. But the Vienna Opera tuned to A = 446.8.
Until quite recently "standards" in the matter of pitch were local, not international.
And before 1711 when the tuning fork was invented, of course, pitch probably varied even more.
Here is a performance of the last movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488 by Mozart on the fortepiano played by Steven Divine which is probably at the "standard" early music pitch of 415 or just a bit below what Mozart probably used!
Don't pay any attention to Currentzis or even most other conductors. They mostly speak nonsense. They are about at the level of pro athletes.
ReplyDeleteI have an interesting book by Hermann Helmholtz entitled "On the Sensations of Tone," wherein he describes a siren disc with holes through which puffs of air would blow as the disc rotated over a pipe of pressurized air. Through a system of wheels of known ratios, the siren could be made to turn at exactly controlled speeds to produce pitches of frequencies known by the speed of the siren. The preface to the first edition of the book is dated 1862. I doubt there were many or probably even any musicians or instrument tuners before then who could even guess what the frequencies were, and therefore our only evidence of pitch would be their artifacts, such as the tuning forks you mention. Somewhere a few years ago I read about the great varieties of pitch in evidence from a more interesting set of artifacts: pipe organs. It was speculated (I wish I could recall the source to provide a pithy quote) that in the cities where there were great organs, whatever was the organ tuning would have become standard pitch for the singers and musicians in that time and place.
ReplyDeleteAgain, the tuners wouldn't have known what frequency they were using, but in their expertise they could tune with great skill from whatever reference pitch they started. Also relevant I think, elsewhere I read of viol consorts of the English aristocracy (who themselves were amateurs socializing after a long day of managing their estates and enterprises) that the one professional amongst them might be an organist on the positive, functioning to keep them in tune. Elsewhere again I seem to recall reading that what we call A has probably ranged from a French baroque of approximately 390 to Italian cities well above today's "standard" 440 or 442. I think I'm a somewhat critical reader but I must have found these reports plausible and even credible enough that I still recall the ideas after forgetting the sources.
Yes, the other great source of historic pitches are organs--but many organs have been updated over the years. For example, the organ at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig is NOT the same organ that Bach used. But unaltered organs must go back a millenia or more.
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