Michael Thames at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > When I was visiting the Yale Museum of Instruments this past summer, >I had an interesting conversation with the curator about Baroque 415 >pitch. He said that Baroque pitch ranged from country and city anywhere > from 300 something up to I believe around 560, (I can't remember > exactly),and that "the horrible group called the early music society" > simply established it at 415, not based on actual evidence? Just > figured they would set it a half step below A 440. Is there anyway to > know the exact pitch of the city of less say, Dresden at the time of > Bach and Weiss, based on what wind instruments were tuned to made during > this time? Or any other historical evidence?
He's right about the enormous local variations in pitch, but the business about "the horrible group called the early music society" sounds like cheap conspiracy theory. Woodwind instruments, the occasional tuning fork (Beethoven's is still around, I think) or whatever, and organs (assuming they haven't been retuned) are the principal evidence of pitch. Bruce Haynes did a two-volume survey of local pitches at as many times and places as he could put together. I don't know how accurate his work is; I looked briefly at Ray Nurse's copy during a seminar a few years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the latest Grove's has some detailed article on pitch. In the modern international early music community, you have to have standard pitches if you're going to use woodwinds. A bassoon player can't afford to buy and maintain 30 different instruments. Nor does it make sense to retune between the Handel concerto at A=415 (London pitch in his day) and some other piece at A=405 or A=425. So there are a handful of standard pitches, the most prominent of which are spaced half steps apart (A=392, A=415, A=440, A=466) which has the advantage, from the keyboard players' point of view, of allowing a quick transposition by moving the keyboard over one key and then (if the temperament is unequal) touching up the tuning. There are also "Classical" pitches, which tend toward A=430 or so. I just did a concert of Hotteterre's flute music at A=392, a pitch which became common all over Europe precisely because the Hottetere family's instruments were made at that (Parisian) pitch, and if you wanted those newfangled flutes, oboes and bassoons in the late 17th century, you got them from Paris at Parisian pitch. They would therefore dictate the pitch of Purcell's music with oboes. They were also apparently the reason that there were two pitches, a whole tone apart, in Bach's Leipzig and other German cities: high "choir" pitch and low "chamber pitch" (if I recall correctly, 440 and 392, respectively). Parts for some of Bach's cantatas reflect this spread.
