a pitch rant

Here's something from a music article:

Considering the rise in tonality from Puccini’s time, a high C then is like a B natural now, so nowadays, we’re basically singing a high C sharp! 

No. 

Not true.

. . .    still not true.

This is a guy talking about La Boheme, which premiered in Turin. 

One of the most important things I ever did was read Helmholtz's Tonempfindungen cover to cover, including the amazing appendices, at the age of 23.   Here you have it —– a multi-page table of all the tuning forks the man could find, and their pitches. 

The standard 440 is *lower* than many used around Europe before standardization.

For reference:  415 is the G-sharp below A440, and 466 is the A-sharp above it.

So when people marvel at the orchestra that tunes to 443, . . .  they're just listening to their eyes.    If you play a 443 together with a 440, it sounds like the same note with the beats of being out of tune —– 3 beats a second —– "wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh."

Most orchestras have more variation than that in a single note played by a string section.

Most singers live at about 20 cents low, no matter what.    Which means that at A440, their A is likely to be 435 or so.

Helmholtz proves it:  the idea of a single standard pitch (at 415 or 422 or 440 or elsewhere) just ain't right —– pitch was all over the place well into the 20th century.

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Just for fun, listen to this.

OK:  impressions!    What do you think?

Would you say this ensemble is . . .   

Bright?

Modern?

Dull?

In tune?

Out of tune?

****SPOILERS AHEAD*****

Listen again and form your impressions first.

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What you hear is a trio of instruments, one playing at A440, one at 441.5, and one at 443.    What it sounds like to most of us, I think, is a normal group of musicians playing.

The final long note is an A.

It doesn't register as much out-of-tune to most of us.    So when you hear not 3 but 100 musicians playing together in a symphony, even if they're all playing the same A, you are hearing many many different As.

The above example sounds a *little* chorussy, but not unpleasantly so, and even one that sounds less chorussy than this is still not right at A440.    It's humanly impossible.    Any recording of the Vienna Philharmonic or the Cincinnati Pops will contain moments with more pitch variation than this.

(I think one thing that makes the digital orchestras of kids' action-adventure shows sound so digital is precisely this.)

So.    When someone complains about an orchestra tuning to A443 instead of A440, for 99.99% of musicians, the proper question is "how on earth can you tell?"  and for the remaining 00.01% the question is "why on earth would you care?"

This is just something people love to talk about but has almost *no* import.    I dare anyone to set up and then pass a real listening test with a real orchestra, in which 'passing' would mean being able to decisively say, after a 10-minute movement, that one was different than the other and which one was higher.