The other day a classical music radio program was presenting a performance of one of Beethoven’s works. The commentator noted that those of us with perfect pitch (not me, that’s for sure) would notice that the c-notes would sound a little different. He said this was because the conductor had the musicians play it as it was in Beethoven’s time.
I know next to nothing about music. What’s the story? Why did C change, and when did it change?
Probably because the paper they’re printed on now is made of a different blend than they were back then. :rolleyes:
sorry
Maybe you’d do better over in Cafe Society.
It can’t be a tuning issue because then every note would sound different.
Maybe it has something to do with the key that the piece is in and where “C” (or maybe B sharp) fits in.
Generally, concert pitch has risen over the last hundred or so years. Today, concert A is equal to 440 hertz. This has not always been the case. 'Round classical and romantic times, concert A was closer to 420 hertz. But it all depended on where you were. Check out here: http://www.mozartpiano.com/pitch.html for plenty information.
I also recall reading that during the Baroque period, instruments were tuned so that A ranged from below 400 in France to something like 470 on the organs Bach composed on. That’s a full step or more of difference.
All the notes have changed, not just C. Pitch has risen over the years and has been standardised around A=440 (vibrations per second). In the 18th century it varied, but was around A=415. When I used to be a serious recorder player one could play a piece with a modern instrument or one tuned to typical baroque tunings. The latter were substantially flatter and required different instruments
IIRC various orchestras arund the world play tuned to different pitches, and the tendancy to tune sharper (because it sounds “brighter”) continues today. See for example here.
It might also relate to having instruments set to pure (?–might be wrong term) tuning or even-tempered tuning. In pure tuning, everything’s just right for certain chords, but quite dissonant for some others. In even-tempered tuning (pretty much the standard nowadays), everything’s just a tiny bit off, so nothing’s perfect but nothing’s awful either. For more info, try a Google search for “even tempered tuning.”
I’m backing up Gary T here. If the announcer mentioned just one particular note then I can only assume that the piece was written when each musical key contained different notes.
Today many instruments which have distinct notes (eg the piano rather than the violin which is a fretless instrument and therefore the pitch of a note is entirely reliant on the accurate placement of the performers finger) are tuned or designed such that you can play any chords/notes in any key and it will sound pretty good but not perfect. In the good ol’ days an instrument would be tuned to a specific key and would sound very nice in that key but horrible if you attempted to play in a different key.
As a concrete example, a D chord contains F# as the major 3rd, played on a piano today that F# is slightly sharp (high in pitch) relative to the D. The key of D would’ve had a slightly flatter (lower in pitch) F# relative to D than it does with current methods of tuning. Also today, F# and Gb are identical notes, previously they were different with F# being flatter and Gb being sharper.
Pulykamell and hawthorne are right on this one. The modern not of A=440 hz whereas the earlier A=a range between 408 (can’t remember where I saw that) to around 432. All of the notes in the scale were tuned to whatever the appropriate A was in order for it to sound correct.
On a side note, piano music and fretted instruments use what is known as tempered pitch meaning that every note on the keyboard is always the same. Choral music and unfretted strings on the otherhand are untempered and can and should sing/play scales slightly sharp when ascending and slightly flat while descending.
During Bach’s time, the keyboard would need to be retuned when the musician played in a different key since it would sound out of tune. The set of pieces in the Well-Tempered Clavier set the stage for even temperment. It showed that a given performer could play the gamut of the scales and not need to retune the instrument. It was probably one of the most significant trends in musical history, in my opinion at least.
I sing in a chorus that doesn’t use even tempered tuning. This means that, say, C sharp is not the same note as D flat. From C to C sharp is a large half step, while from C to D flat is only a small half step. (The tiny distance between D flat and C sharp is called a Pythagorean comma, which I think is a really cool term.) It’s a lot more complicated than that, and I don’t understand it all. It all arises from the fact that if you keep going around the circle of perfect fifths, you never get back to perfect octaves but end up that tiny bit off. For more info, search for “Pythagorean tuning” on Google.
But I’m pretty sure the answer to the original post is, as other people have pointed out, that we keep tuning sharper and sharper. Some early music choruses still keep to the older, lower pitches.
Actually, there’s a lot of history here.
First off, there seems to be lively debate as to whether Bach was in fact an advocate of equal temperament. In fact, his choice of words “The Well-Tempered Clavier” rather than “The Equal-Tempered Clavier” indicates that he wanted to make a distinction between the two. Or at least that’s what many scholars argue. From what I’ve read, it seems to me that Bach’s work was not meant for the modern equal temperament tuning.
Equal temperament is a system in which all keys sound equal good (or equally bad, as Mozart might have argued.) There were several such tunings around during Bach’s time. Now equal temperament as such is a very new beast…Only strictly appropriate for music of the last 150 years at most.
During Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, etc, piano tuning was well-tempered, allowing playing in all keys, but not equal tempered. In other words, keys would actually have different sounds not simply because of pitch, but because the ratio of intervals would vary slightly depending on the key.
So when composers spoke of different keys having different colors or emotions associated with them, it’s not a phenomenon of perfect pitch, but rather because the keys actually did have different sounds to them.
My first suspicion was that the radio programmer was refering to a lowering of the “orchestral A” down to A420, a not all-together-uncommon practice. But if he’s plucking out the “C” specifically, then it probably does refer to well-tempered tuning rather than an equal temperament.
Whoops. BIG MISTAKE above.
Equal temperament is a system in which all keys sound equally good (or equally bad…) Well-temperament is the name given to a variety of systems in which one can play in all twelve keys, but there were slightly different ratios between the pitches in all the keys. There were several such systems **(well-temperament, not equal temperament) ** around during Bach’s time…