Although I am in the minority on pitch, I feel that the so called pitch of the organ is not relevant, as they used a transposing system through the 17th century and in to Bach's time. The idea that the actual key on the keyboard is "A" is the same as saying that the top string on the lute is "G" (or "A") And the reason that this is important is that you cannot play this music without a transpositional system in place.
Interestingly, we have actual documents dating from the renaissance, such as Bermudo, showing different note values for different keys on the keyboard. Lute player are in a unique position to grasp the significance of the multitranspositional systems. If we accept that the system in inherently transpositional, then any statement x=yHz where x is a note letter and y the value in Hz cannot be true, since x is relative, not absolute which then makes us reconsider at least 90 percent of the writings on historical pitch. Obviously, if you believe that there was a "fixed do" in a hexachord world, then you can try to sort the systems in an absolute way, but no one has yet been able to do that. The only result has been that we transpose less. On the other hand, of you consider a transposing world, then you tune your instrument any way you want, as long as you can transpose to the network. And the pitch can simply be described as "relative". dt >You could have said >something like: > >"The organ at the 17th-century Church of the Holy Pistachio is tuned >to A=603, according to Haynes at p. 259" To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
