Somewhere in my files of printouts, or in my bookshelves, I have a reference to a German tuning with A=380. I don't remember the era, but as all my research is on harps and lutes - and I haven't looked at harp pitches - I assume it was on the lute. I think it was probably something referenced by Ephraim Segermann as he seems to address that topic in the notes I can find immediately.
But that leads me to a question for you all. How did they know? In the absence of modern measuring equipment how could one tell the actual frequency of the vibrations? I doubt that anyone could actually count the number of vibrations in one second of even the best mechanical clock of the time. Of course there were standards, the tuning forks. We have estimates of the ancient Greek pitches, although I know of no tuning forks from that era. Probably good guestimates from the size of the instuments and the string material. I would have to assume that the orchestral instruments were made to a relative pitch to some tuning fork standard rather than an actual knowledge of the cps (Hertz for you new guys) of the pitch. I think it likely that there were various standards in various eras and various places, each with their own "A fork". I would like to be disabused of this opinion - I would love to know what technology allowed the old musicians to know the absolute number of vibrations per second that they pitched their instruments to. Until someone can tell me that I have to assume that we know the absolute pitch by using their forks and testing them. It was hard enough to measure a second in olden days, much less one 440th of a second. The relative pitch is easy, the octaves double the frequency - but where is the base? Best, Jon (Yeah, I know, a Ukranian genius invented a water driven occilliscope in 1647) To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
