On Jan 8, 2012, at 5:17 AM, Christopher Wilke wrote: > I find the area of performance practice in the early 20th century to be > extremely fascinating. There were a lot of changes that effected the quality > of instrumental timbre, but they seem to have happened with little complaint > or fanfare. You would think that composers like Schoenberg and his > followers, concerned as they were with Klangfarbenmelodie, would have had > something to say about gut versus metal strings or the difference in > brilliance between low vs. high pitch, but I can't think of a single > utterance. The Second Viennese school composers orchestrated in an extremely > specific manner in regards to timbre, (see Webern's orchestration of Bach's > ricercar from Bach's "Musikalische Opfer") but the change over from gut to > metal seems not to have concerned them. I don't perceive a difference in how > they orchestrated even though their works straddle the periods. Where is the > pining for the "good, warm" tone of gut or the celebration at the "new > brilliance" of metal?
Performances of their music were rare in those days, so the issue of performance practice alternatives would not have loomed large. And with the exception of the modern early music movement, I can't think of many places and times when we know that pitch was a matter of choice and subject to discussion. Pitch was established by local practice (I don't believe there were different pitches among players in Vienna in, say, 1910), and you wouldn't expect players to retune their pianos or buy a different clarinet to accommodate a different pitch. Not for playing music that was likely to draw ridicule or start a riot, anyway. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
