Pitch Battles: How a paranoid fringe group made musical tuning an international issue.

[Recursion]

http://longform.org/stories/pitch-battles

In 1989 over a dozen of opera’s greatest superstars—including Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and Birgit Nillson—added their names to a petition before the Italian government, asking them to lower the standard pitch at which all orchestras are tuned. At the time, international standard pitch was set at 440 Hz, which is to say that the A above middle C should be tuned to resonate at 440 cycles per second. The petition asked to lower this to 432 Hz, claiming that “the continual raising of pitch for orchestras provokes serious damage to singers, who are forced to adapt to different tunings from one concert hall or opera to the next,” and that “the high standard pitch is one of the main reasons for the crisis in singing, that has given rise to ‘hybrid’ voices unable to perform the repertoire assigned to them.” The petition ended with a demand that “The Ministeries of Education, Arts and Culture, and Entertainment accept and adopt the normal standard pitch of A = 432 for all music institutions and opera houses, such that it becomes the official Italian standard pitch, and, very soon, the official standard pitch universally.”

...

The petition had its origins in one of the strangest conflicts to have overtaken classical music in the past thirty years, and many of these luminaries were completely unaware of what they’d gotten themselves into. The sponsor of both the petition and the conference that featured Tebaldi was an organization called the Schiller Institute, dedicated to, among other things, lowering standard musical pitch. At the time, the New York Times identified it as “an organization that promotes a strong alliance between the United States and Western Europe”; its website defines the organization as working to “defend the rights of all humanity to progress—material, moral and intellectual.”

But behind this respectable front lurks a strange mélange of conspiracy, demagoguery, and cultish behavior. At its founding in 1984, its chairman Helga Zepp-LaRouche laid out the Institute’s role in surprisingly apocalyptic terms: “The clock of mankind has advanced to a point where the old lackluster ways will no longer work. According to all established criteria, mankind has gambled away all its chances for survival. Too many catastrophes are crowding in upon us, the entropic process has proceeded too far and the rift between the U.S.A. and Western Europe is all but accomplished.”

Far more extreme is Lyndon LaRouche, Helga's husband and the intellectual heart of the Schiller Institute. LaRouche, who has run for United States president eight times, and whose followers can often be found handing out pamphlets on college campuses, has been in the news on and off for the past four decades—a former labor advocate who shifted radically to the fringe of the hard-right in the 70’s and whose work has increasingly focused on bizarre conspiracies involving both Jews and the Queen of England (who, according to him, controls an international drug cartel), and international monetary policy (like many Libertarians, LaRouche is in favor of returning to the gold standard). As the Schiller Institute petition was going before the Italian Parliament, LaRouche was going to trial—since 1986, the government had been building a case against him for conspiracy to commit mail fraud, part of a scheme to embezzle over $30 million through defaulted loans.

This is absolutely fascinating, at least to this former music theory teacher... I used to advocate A 400 but this is putting me back in the 440 camp.

[antigop]

1. Thanks for posting...very interesting. Will pass along to my musician friends. nt

[MuseRider]

2. Bookmarking for later.

Interesting. I have always suspected our oboist tunes higher just for the trumpets! I believe we pretty much go with 440. Can't wait to get home and read this.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. From a mathematical point of view, middle C = 256 Hz looks neat

So that any C is a power of 2, right down to the infrasonic limit (and beyond). However, if there's an ISO ruling that 440 Hz is already the standard since 1955, and that comes from a 1939 international agreement, then it seems better to stick to that. It means that all the musicians in the second half of the 20th century grew up with it.

[Recursion]

4. When I got into early music we tried the lower tunings

The difference wasn't as great as the difference of doing just intonation (which can be amazing with those high major thirds), but you could definitely feel it.

I miss early music. "What's that?" "My sackbutt." "Huh?"

Also, the powers-of-two bit is really interesting, especially from a DSP standpoint.

[dhill926]

5. fascinating.........

thanks for this....

[Heidi]

6. Kick!

[Manifestor_of_Light]

7. I thought orchestras in the 19th cent. tuned to A-435.

??????