Dear Howard Posner,
Thank you for your considerate reply. On reflection, when I've a bit of time
I will, in fact, tunnel into my archives and dig out some the sources I had in
mind (especially those suggesting Roman pitch at around 400 rather than 380).
To an extent some are identified in my early FoMRHI paper ('The sizes and
pitches of Italian archlutes' FoMRHI Quarterly 32 July 1983) which first
speculated on transposing archlutes, archlute pitches and the like.
It seems to me that much of the problem about pitches , especially in the
17thC and especially in Italy, is the heavy, if understandable, reliance on
church organ pitches and, to some extent, statements by such as those by Doni
(eg relating pitch between Naples, Rome. Lombardy/Florence and Venice in
discrete semitone steps). Domestic music making, especially with lutes, might
well have not reflected such a significant and discrete variation. Indeed, from
the relatively small sample of extant Italian archlutes (including the liuto
attiorbato), the sizes of archlutes did not seem to vary so very much across
Italy suggesting rather more uniformity in domestic/chamber pitch than for
large church organs.
Martyn Hodgson
howard posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Dec 10, 2007, at 12:56 AM, Martyn Hodgson wrote:
> As said: I don't really see why I should go to the considerable
> trouble of listing the many scholarly papers and books which have
> dealt with this question in depth (Haynes is but one) since Ellis's
> pioneering work was published in 1880. Especially so when the
> point being made was simply that there was not just one 17th/18th C
> Roman pitch, rather than trying to identify what these pitches
> actially were. Perhaps you disagree? - in which case, since it is
> far easier to disprove a proposition than to test it by numerous
> examples, I await your reply proving that there was only ever one
> pitch used in Rome during this period (say, 1600 - 1750)..............
No thanks. You made a statement that seemed to challenge
conventional wisdom about Roman pitch. I just wondered whether the
statement might have been occasioned by specific information.
Evidently it wasn't. I won't waste any more of your time.
On Dec 10, 2007, at 7:17 AM, Martyn Hodgson wrote:
> Indeed and this is the very point I wished to put across to those
> who appear to think there was some such thing as an established
> 'roman' pitch.
>
> MH
>
> LGS-Europe wrote:
> And I forgot the best quote from the Grove article:
>
> The concept of a precise and universal relation between notation
> and pitch
> was alien to most Western musicians, and there was no specific term
> for
> pitch itself before 1800.
One does not follow from the other. Every organ, cornetto and
recorder built in Rome in the 1650's might have been constructed to
play at A=387.6547498904 regardless of whether the builder had a word
for pitch.
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