Martyn Hodgson wrote: > In some usages Rome pitch was considerably higher than current A440
I wrote: > This is tantalizing (assuming you're talking about 17th-century > Rome). Where in Rome was pitch high? And who documented it? On Dec 9, 2007, at 12:12 AM, Martyn Hodgson wrote: > As I said, I wished to point out that the picture on pitch was far > from simplistic even within one region. However I really don't > think I should need, or indeed bother, to duplicate the journals > and other published work on pitch - do you? Many posts here contain information that duplicates what can be found in other sources. I find them much more helpful than a post which merely states that unspecified sources contain information, something tend to assume. Since you'd already offered a statement purporting to be based on information of some sort which could be found somewhere, but which was too vague to be of any use, I thought you might offer an example if I asked the question. You could have said something like: "The organ at the 17th-century Church of the Holy Pistachio is tuned to A=603, according to Haynes at p. 259" which would have been less than half as long as your 40-word refusal to respond, and been vastly more useful. For one thing, it might have satisfied my inquiry, and let me know that I, and doubtless some other folk, were mistaken in thinking it could safely be said that pitch in Rome was lower than in Mantua. For another, it would have given me some inkling as to whether you actually knew something about the subject, or were just blithering in a general sort of way. Here in cyberspace, as elsewhere in life, we often need to evaluate the merits of an opinion or piece of purported information (since every message essentially presents the choice of believing what it says, writing a message contradicting it, or deleting and moving on), and asking for support, or detail, or additional information, is the best way of doing it. It's a way of evaluating both the information and the purveyor of the information. I think it's wise to do this before I spend a day in a library searching "the many journals," as you put it, for information that may not be there. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
