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A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of "A".

Article Excerpt
By Bruce Haynes. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 9002. [lvi, 578 p. ISBN 0-8108-4185-1. $80.] Illustrations, graphs, bibliography, index.

The relationship of musical composition and performance to the notion of an absolute pitch standard is one that is relatively recent in Western musical culture. For much of history, such reference standards were unnecessary, essentially because art music was synonymous with vocal music, and singers were free to set relative and comfortable ranges for themselves. By around the mid-sixteenth century, genres of composition were evolving that brought together unprecedented combinations of voices with instruments of fixed pitch. While the new musical possibilities were sumptuous, they also gave rise to a host of problems. Tuning to fixed-pitched instruments exhausted singers who were forced to sing in too high a register (the literature is full of such complaints); other instruments--and singers--had to cope with older church organs; instruments made in different places with different built-in tunings clashed with each other. The list is long.

From the late Renaissance through the mid-nineteenth century, establishing pitch standards was a variable and geographically localized matter, contingent upon the resources of a specific place, the building and tuning practices of local instrument makers, and a range of general circumstances. Even within a single establishment, different reference pitches might be used (Kammerton and Chorton, for instance) depending on musical function, the performing space, and the instruments involved. The issue was greatly compounded (and mostly caused) by another phenomenon of early modern music--its unprecedented mobility, with the consequences that ensued on the meeting of local traditional resources with new and foreign musical imports (whether compositions, performers, or the instruments on which they...

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