On 4 Sep 2005 at 9:48, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > On 5:11 Uhr David W. Fenton wrote: > > When I ordered my own gamba I insisted that it be built for 440 > > rather than 415, since I'm convinced that 415 is not really > > historically justified. > > It's actually quite simple: 415 was approximately the pitch that Bach > used in Leipzig for the church music. That is known because we know > what pitch the organ was at (approximately 465Hz) and have the > original transposed organ parts. It wasn't exactly 415 (that is just a > semitone below a in 440, actually it would be 415.3 in ET).
But I don't play Bach -- for one, he wrote not a whole lot of music for gamba, and what he did write is *very* hard (I am reluctantly concluding that Bach didn't know the gamba very well, because the gamba sonatas really aren't like other advanced gamba music, especially the French, in that they aren't terribly idiomatic, requiring extreme high positions on more than the top string, as well as having bowings that are different (and non-graceful) from any other gamba repertory I've seen). > Pitch in the baroque area was by no means fixed, the French had > something around 392Hz, Bach in Köthen apparently had something around > 409 Hz, while the church cantatas in Weimar were performed at the high > organ pitch around 465Hz. And as far as I know the pitch in England > changed dramatically in Purcell's time after they employed some French > oboists. As far as I remember this is responsible for the pitch being > high in Purcell's early works, but very low for works written later, > which can also be seen in the voice parts. This may well not apply to > Gamba music, so I am not trying to diagree. In the earlier period, pre-Purcell, the pitch was closer to 440 than 415 (though it wasn't 440, nor was it uniformly the same everywhere), and that's why we use 440, since that's the closer to the pitch for the core of our repertory. And when we switched we sounded better. > I have played at 440, 415, 465, 392 421 and 430 Hz (baroque/classical > violin). Some need some adjusting, some need different top strings, > but it does make sense to play music at the approximate pitch it was > written for. The sound in Bach's Weimar cantatas is much different > from the Leipzig cantatas (and of course the voice parts don't fit > well at other pitches). I don't think I have a preference for any > pitch it really depends on the music. But that's precisely why 415 is nonsense -- it offers a single solution to a problem that requires multiple pitches. As I said, it's a pragmatic compromise, just like equal temperament. But it has no historical authority as *the* pitch for playing early music (i.e., music before c. 1840). -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
