----- Original Message -----
From: "howard posner" <[email protected]>
To: "Martin Shepherd" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2015 12:25 AM
Subject: Re: [LUTE] Saturday morning quotes - Pitch
I responded to Ron's post but I think Wordpress deleted me, so I'll say it
here. Having a standard "early music" pitch is historically unjustified
but very useful in modern times, but the standard of a'=415 is ridiculous,
being a semitone below modern pitch. It makes mixing modern and "baroque"
instruments impossible, it makes keyboard players (and possibly others)
transpose by a semitone (yikes!) and thereby make unequal temperaments
impossible, and for us lutenists it creates any number of problems.
Semitone transposition on lots of modern harpsichords in unequal temperament
is not such a problem because the keyboards transpose: push on a lever, move
the whole keyboard over one string, and retune. On unequally tempered
instruments without transposing keyboards, transposing a semitone is not all
that hard: you just mentally substitute a different key signature, so you
take a piece written in D major and play it in Db. It’s a common keyboard
skill.
If we had settled on a'=392, we could not only have avoided the
aforementioned problems, we would also have a possibility of proper-sized
continuo archlutes (minimum 67cm), the lute quartet would have a treble
lute "in D" of 44cm (and other sizes accordingly) and singers of lute
songs might be able to pronounce words properly and get their message
across, instead of projecting their "voice" at the expense of all emotion
and meaning.
But God help them when they have to sing low notes over an orchestra at a
pitch 30 hertz lower than the composer intended.
Hi Howard,
Yes but the point is you do have to retune! Of course transposition is a
necessary skill for an accompanist, but playing in Db major instead of D
major in an unequal temperament is a nightmare for everyone.
Last time I looked it was not normal to use a full symphony orchestra
playing at a low pitch in order to sing lute songs, but in any case we
mostly don't know what pitch the composer intended, and when we do, it's
often lower than modern pitch.
M
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