> We're not sure about the pitch of voices in the past; one of your problems
> with singing anything from 18th c Scottish MS is that the intended pitch is
> at least one tone, maybe 1.5 tones, lower than the notation makes it appear,
> due to the change in concert pitch to our higher 440=A tuning.
The commonest pitch of the period was A=415 and there are thousands of
surviving woodwind instruments at that pitch. A tone down was far less
common; a few organs in continental Europe were built a tone above modern
pitch. I don't think anything as low as A=400 was found anywhere except
in France or after 1700.
David Greenberg's A=415 fiddle sounds very convincing for music of this
period.
>> Was silk [for strings] usable in Scotland, or is it too sensitive to
>> humidity? It could never have been very difficult to obtain.
> Do you think that silk thread - raw strands, not spun, would have been
> imported?
Why not? It's light and easy to transport, so if there was a market for
it a Chinese silk merchant could have got the same margin as on spun fibre
simply by declaring it to be Special Musical-Grade AA Quality.
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