At 11:59 AM -0400 9/8/07, David W. Fenton wrote:
And let me add that in Germany different Kammer- and Chorton pitches were not at all unusual, lest anyone get the impression that this is some kind of oddity of Leipzig and its environs.
Yes, and every time this difference among high and low Kammerton and high and low Chorton comes up I have to stop and relearn it. I doubt that they refer to specific frequencies, because I'm not sure the technology existed to measure specific frequencies. More likely to specific pitch ranges. Does anyone happen to have a handy guide?
And the implications for instrumentalists are something that would not occur to most of us. The courts and the churches had to own their own instruments, tuned to the local standard pitch (probably that of the church's organ), instead of individual instrumentalists owning "all-purpose" instruments and carrying them from one gig to the next. (I own an 18th century viola d'amore with a church mark on the back.) The inventory taken on the death of King Henry VIII included many sets of instruments in various castles, but each set was probably tuned to itself and not to any (nonexistent) standard pitch.
John -- John R. Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
