Klarinet Archive - Posting 000378.txt from 2006/08

From: Randy S Miller <meistersinger1@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Re: higher pitch standard in Europe?
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:05:08 -0400


On Aug 28, 2006, at 5:01 PM, klarinet-digest-help@-----.org wrote:

>
> Message-ID: <001e01c6caa8$c5272030$2302a8c0@DFLVJ341>
>
> I have posted about my clarinet intonation book recently and the
> question has come up about the pitch standard. For the Cd's I used
> A440. However, a player in Italy emailed me that if I wanted to sell
> in Europe, A442 should be used.
>
> I did an archive search here and there seems to be some confirmation
> of this.
>
> Does anyone know just how widespread the higher pitch is? Do
> instrument makers have to make instruments pitched differently for
> different markets?

Which (at least for me) begs the question, why have a standard at all
if nobody USES it? I thought ISO (iirc) set this standard to avoid
problems that were endemic in the past. (for example, in J. S.
Bach's time, what might have been concert A in the Thomaskirche in
Leipzig, was not necessarily the same pitch in Coethen.) Case in
point: As a former librarian/cataloger (hey, it's how I got into
I.T., after earning my MSLS), that worked for a major library
automation vendor about 20 years ago, I got into major shouting
matches with all the book vendors (including my former employer's
sister company) about the issues regarding the skirting around
Library of Congress' Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format.
While the book vendors were using the standard format, they would add
additional fields and subfields that were NOT defined in the USMARC
standard. Most of the time, the system would just choke on the data,
because our software didn't recognize the fields, since they weren't
defined by Library of Congress. Granted, that was 20 years ago, and
the issue was resolved a few years later by the American Library
Association, the Library Association (U.K. and the British
Commonwealth of Nations), the Library of Congress and the book and
software vendors.

I was fortunate(although some of his former students may
disagree ;-)), as an undergraduate to study conducting for a semester
with the late Hugh B. Johnson (fomerly of Indiana University in
Bloomington, IN, and of Indiana University of PA (my alma mater)). I
remember asking him why the Europeans (especially the Berlin
Philharmonic, under von Karajan, and, to a lesser extent, the RIAS
Symphony) always tuned to the higher pitch. His answer was that it
supposedly gave a brighter sound to the strings. I never gave the
answer another thought, until now. Is there any emperical evidence
that the higher standard pitch does affect the sound of strings, as
well as wind instruments, or is this another effect that can be
chalked up to psycho-acoustics?

Randy
(frustrated I.T. geek, musician and Mac user)

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