I have real problems with the so called "authentic movment" having adopted the totally stupid 415Hz as their de facto standard ...
I know, it's annoying isn't it? I mean,
who decided - and why - that "Baroque pitch" so called was 415?! There was never any standard across all of Europe, each country had their own, quite arbitrary idea of what an A was and sometimes even within the
same country an A on a church organ could be anywhere up to 4 semitones lower
or higher than a A on a harpsichord in some composers house!! Sorry if I'm rambling, it's become a bit of a pet topic for me over the past few years as I've been researching into the various applications of pitch/frequency in certain environments.
it's far worse to hear a C major symphony played a quarter of tone flat: makes my skin crawl to the top of my head and jump off ...
Even though I don't have perfect pitch, that sort of thing annoys me as well because it won't take too long before I'll realise something is amiss. This also raises the whole issue of how those who possess Perfect pitch became entrained to it. The A that you, and my wife, and everyone else (with perfect pitch) knows as 440 is not the same A that someone with perfect pitch back in the time of Beethoven or Bach knew.
While I'm on this I'll tell you an odd story, (if you're all still awake); When my wife was pregnant with our first boy, would you believe, she was a semitone out!! It happened when I was trying to transcribe a chord sequence from a CD recording but we were nowhere near an instrument at the time. So I asked Cheryl what key this piece was in and she told me, without hesitating, it was D-flat. So, then having the key, I jotted down the chord progression (just using my relative pitch, only occasionally checking with her to confirm). Several days later, I was near a piano and had the CD player with me, so I sat down to check things over. Imagine my surprise when I started playing along to the CD, to hear that it was in D and I was in D-flat! When I alerted Cheryl, she came over to the piano and was quite startled saying that she could see me playing in D but she was "hearing" (or her brain was telling her?) D-flat. After Daniel was born, everything was back to normal. Furthermore, the same thing did
not happen when she was pregnant with our second. That was a strange one, but it did alert me to the fact that there are obviously certain biological factors that come into play with the individual's perception of perfect pitch.
Very sorry to hijack the thread ACC - it's simply grown from my curiousity over why an organ builder from the 1800s would tune an instrument at 415Hz. (note to self - I should perhaps change my signature quotation!)
Matt
