ark@rabbit.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) (05/11/84)
This is all from memory, so take everything with a grain of salt. The most widely accepted standard for pitch today is A=440. However, I understand that several orchestras are inching up to A=441 or 442, or even 443. This happens for two reasons: 1. Playing a tiny bit sharp tends to make the music sound "brighter" and more exciting. 2. String players have a great deal of latitude in pitch. Wind players do not. If an oboe is playing with a piano, the oboe sounds much better if it is a tiny bit sharp than a tiny bit flat. Oboe players thus start ordering oboes tuned to A=442. Now they play with an orchestra. The orchestra tunes to the oboe. And so on. There was a period of many years in the early 20th century that the standard pitch was A=435. It has worked its way up a bit. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the prevailing pitch was more than a semitone lower than today. We know this by examining wind instruments that survive from that period. I think that A=about 408 was not uncommon. It is for this reason that growing numbers of Baroque performances are being heard at A=415. Why 415? Because it is almost exactly a semitone lower than A=440. Thus one can build a harpsichord that can play at either A=440 or A=415 by shifting the entire keyboard over a semitone (the key levers are equally spaced in the back). Curiously, some instruments that survive from the 14th and 15th centuries show that pitch was higher then than today. I seem to recall something about A=460.