At 05:26 PM 9/27/2000 +0100, "David Kilpatrick" wrote:
>>> 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.
>
>Jack, if the pitch change was relatively small - a semitone or a touch more
>- why are we told that so many fiddles had to be rebuilt entirely to take
>the increased tension of the 'new' orchestral pitch in the early 1800s? I
>thought the general shift between 1750 and 1830 was about 1.25 tones.
I'm going to jump in here and try to answer this at least in part.
There were actually *two* significant changes that happened, I believe,
close to the same time. One certainly was a change in pitch. But some other
changes to the design of the instrument were introduced in order to make
it *louder*, to accommodate larger ensembles and larger concert halls.
The most significant change was to increase the string length from
the nut to the bridge. For this purpose, the bridge height was raised to
where it is on the modern violin. The other change that was apparently
made was to the length of the neck. As an example, one of the last times
my husband and I were at our luthier's, he also showed us a couple of very
old instruments that he thought had been reconstructed during that time;
on both of those instruments, the scrolls had been spliced onto the necks,
rather than the necks and scrolls being all one piece, which is what you
normally see. His assessment was that the necks had been replaced in order
to lengthen them slightly.
Increasing the length of the strings alone would have increased the
tension simply to maintain the same pitch, and thus would have required
structural changes in the instrument to support it. I had an opportunity
this summer to get a good look at David Greenberg's baroque violin, and
there is a *noticeable* difference in the size of the bass bar and in the
thickness of both the soundpost and the bridge, compared to a modern violin
(they are smaller on the baroque violin.) I suspect that the top and back
may be carved a bit thinner too, but maybe David could tell us that. :-)
The effect of those differences in structure is that the baroque
violin doesn't produce quite the volume that the modern violin does, but
its sound is incredibly powerful; it has a fantastic dynamic range and
responds to a much lighter touch.
You have to keep in mind that a well-made violin of any type already
treads a fine line between having the maximum amount of flexibility in
the top and back, to allow them to vibrate as freely as possible, and being
sturdy enough to withstand both the stresses of that vibration and the ten-
sion of the strings. So, if it is well-designed for a specific setup, it
won't take much of an increase in string tension to damage it.
Wendy
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