Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!ogicse!milton!allyn
From: allyn@milton.u.washington.edu (Allyn Weaks)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Transposing early music (was: Perfect Pitch)
Message-ID: <18797@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 21 Mar 91 03:34:13 GMT
References: <1991Mar19.082948.10987@athena.mit.edu> <3722@ssc-bee.ssc-vax.UUCP> <1991Mar20.154120.24561@eng.umd.edu>
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 65

tpermutt@eng.umd.edu (Thomas Permutt) asks:

> What do you advocate doing about early music?  There is evidence that A
> in, say, Handel's time was lower than today (I can't remember how much,
> but more than a semitone).  Aside from the psychoacoustic subtleties
> you mention, there are real differences:  the sound of a tenor singing
> his highest note is quite a bit different from that of a note a semitone
> or two lower, and sensitive composers used these differences to good effect.
> Tenors today may be physically different to some extent, but probably not
> precisely in such a way that A-440 now has the quality of A-420 or whatever
> then.


The pitch difference doesn't only affect the tessitura of voices, but the tone
qualities of instruments.  David Ohannesian, a maker of wonderful recorders,
once gave me a demonstration of three of his baroque altos, all made as near
as possible just the same, but at three different pitches - 440, 415, and 390.
They were completely different in character, well outside of the normal
variation you'd expect between different instruments.  The 440 was rather
harsh and windy, the 415 was very nice, and the 390 was marvelous.  415 is the
modern standard for playing at baroque pitch, but there seems to be a movement
afoot to lower that to at least 410, and some people want to push it down more
towards 390.  415 was chosen mostly for the convenience of being almost
exactly a semitone down from 440 (making it possible to build harpsichords
switchable between 415 and 440), but measurements on old woodwinds show that
405 - 410 is more common, and lower isn't rare.

And renaissance pitch was nearly a whole tone higher than today.  Most
instrument copies are made at 440 (even professional instruments), again for
convenience, but they sound a lot more mellow than perhaps they should.

Also, artificially raising the pitch by speeding up the recording will have a
different effect than building, tuning, or playing an instrument at a higher
pitch.  The speed up changes all frequencies equally, but when you do it on an
instrument, the harmonics change relationship - some will get stronger, some
will detune, etc. so you change the tone quality along with the pitch.

As far as I'm concerned, recording engineers have no business making things
'sound good'.  They have a responsibility to make things sound as much like
the live performance as possible, and not muck it up with their own personal
taste, or lack thereof.  Many (fortunately not all) engineers spend so much
time listening through headphones to the warped stuff coming in through their
electronics that they no longer know or care what naked instruments sound
like, and prefer abominations like close miking, boosted bass, and a
'brighter' tone. Which is one reason that I spend nearly as much money on live
concerts these days as on recordings...  

On the subject of perfect pitch:  I don't have either flavor (absolute or
relative).  I knew a long time ago that I didn't want perfect absolute pitch,
because of early music and the transposition problems that have been
mentioned.  But now I'm discovering, as my relative (interval) pitch
discrimination becomes better, that even that can be a liability.  All of my
ear training computer programs are based on equal temperment.  Then when I go
to play woodwinds with strings in meantone or just intonation, it's hard to
tell when I'm really in tune, because the correct tuning sounds strange to
equal tempered ears.  It's not enough to minimize the beats, because sometimes
that's exactly the wrong thing to do.  I think the only solution is to keep
playing with other people (hopefully better than me) as much as possible, and
learn to stay as flexible as possible.  

Sigh, when I got into all this music stuff, no one warned me that I'd have to
_think_ so much :-)

Allyn Weaks
allyn@milton.u.washington.edu