On Apr 18, 2005, at 6:00 PM, Leigh Daniels wrote:
wondering why Concert Pitch A in America is 440 Hz and different in Europe. He said when he was touring in Europe, he had to request the American 440 Hz tuning and if the piano was tuned to the European standard, the other performers had a hard time playing.
I know that in the last 500-odd years the range has been 440 plus or
minus about 50 Hz. Does anyone on the list know how America came to have
440 and Europe has a different frequency?
**Leigh
Ok, first of all, there is no different standard. The A-440 standard was adopted because in ages when instrumental music dominates, there is a constant pressure to raise the pitch because instruments sound more brilliant at higher pitches. Without regulation, the result is pitch inflation to uncomfortably high levels. Since A 440 was adopted as an international standard (by convention, not by law) ca. 100 yrs. ago, pitch inflation has been successfully capped--but it has not been abolished. A great many orchestras play sharp by small amounts, and this is what your friend seems to have encountered in Europe--though believe me, he could have easily found it in this country too.
You're wrong about past pitch standards too. Instruments first came to the fore in the 16th century, and the resulting pitch inflation got so bad that by 1610 pitch was fully a minor third higher than it is today (Praetorius, for example, gives C below the bass staff as the standard bottom note for choral basses). Singers were going hoarse trying to sing old music at the notated pitches, and string players were snapping strings when they tuned up. To get around this, competing Chorton and Kammerton pitch standards were adopted for different types of ensembles. The two came back together in the late 18th c. (exactly how has never been clear to me), but pitch inflation persisted, and had once more become troublesome by the mid-19th c. A series of commissions settled on A-440 as a compromise, and that's how it's been ever since. (And since someone's bound to mention it, yes I know that the US held out for C-256 for many years after everyone else adopted A-440--but eventually we came round, and the end result is unity on a single standard. Watch for a similar outcome in RE the metric system.)
There is, BTW, a short-wave radio station that does nothing but broadcast a continuous A-440 worldwide as the embodiment of the standard.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/
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