You are perfectly correct - but thank God I'm not a professional, expected to do all that transposition on sight (sorry, Michael - site-) reading.
P.S. Does anyone else who dabbles in different instruments experience the same phenomenon as I do, one example of which is that I can play the gamba from alto clef, but I can't read it on the keyboard? TC ----- Original Message ----- From: "Howard Posner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 10:08 PM Subject: Historical pitch (was lute notation) > Tony Chalkley wrote: > > > If you happen to be playing with a wind instrument, you've kinda got to go > > with its pitch. This I think is what gave rise to "Baroque pitch being > > lower", not the note at which strings break. > > The premise is correct, of course, but the historical conclusion doesn't > necessarily follow. Say it's 1695 and you want to use the newfangled > woodwinds like the oboe and bassoon, which come from Paris and are at > Parisian pitch, about A=392, or a whole tone below 440. You can lower > everything to that pitch, but you can also raise the pitch to 440 and use > the woodwinds as transposing instruments. Or you can have two sets of > pitches a whole tone apart, as was the case in Bach's Leipzig where there > was high pitch in church to match the organ, and low "chamber pitch." > > I certainly agree that strings are not likely to be the driving force in a > systemic raising or lowering of pitch. It's a fairly easy thing to put on > thinner or thicker strings to change pitch, but it's a time-consuming and > expensive job to re-pitch an organ, and a hopeless task with a woodwind. > > > HP > > > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > >
