Klarinet Archive - Posting 000596.txt from 1999/03

From: "Steven J Goldman, MD" <sjgoldman@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Pitch over the years
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 03:01:49 -0500

Unless you replace the organ pipe itself, or alter it, you have a pipe that
is centered around one pitch. If you want the exact pitch that the pipe was
tuned to, your out of luck, but if you want to know within a fairly narrow
range what the pitch preference of that town/city's kappelmeister was at the
time the pipes were made, you can come quite close.

Same for woodwinds. There is one pitch that any specific instrument plays
best at (even flutes with there corps de rechange have only one best pitch).
Now there is variation caused by a players technique, but it is slight. In
any case, when dealing with historical pitch, no one really cares about
whether A was 440 or 442. However, it is of importance that for example
Parisian pitch rose from roughly A 392 around 1680 to 435+++ by the mid 19th
century.

Steven Goldman,
Glenview, IL

-----Original Message-----
From: Edwin V. Lacy [mailto:el2@-----.edu]
Subject: Re: [kl] Pitch over the years

But, such organs would have been tuned and re-tuned hundreds of times. I
think one could at best get an approximation of the pitch at which the
organ was played at a given time in the past.
Once again, I would feel much better about this statement if it included
the word, "approximate." It's not always easy even today to tell if an
instrument has been built to play at, for example, A@-----.

Ed Lacy
el2@-----.edu

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