Breaking Strings and perfect pitch

[Susan Kline]

At 05:21 PM 7/3/98 -0300, John Ross wrote:
>Hi List,
>I haven't heard anyone mention the importance of having the piano up to
>pitch, if a child is taking lessons or if it is being played with other
>instruments.
>If I run into a problem with broken strings, I always determine what the
>piano is being used for. In the above two cases I feel it must be
>brought up to pitch if at all possible. 

I might just add that it is particularly crucial if a young child, even one
not taking lessons, has absolute pitch. Once set at a certain level, it
cannot be changed. In our tuning course, one of the students had perfect
pitch, and grew up around a piano that was 1/4 tone flat. I asked if it had
changed once he heard normal pitch being used. No, he said, he still
remembered what he had grown up with. He hummed a note, and said, "this is
what our piano was like," and then hummed another, 1/4 tone higher, "and
this is standard pitch." He had the two scales coexisting in his mind.
While it is a remarkable demonstration of tonal memory and the capacity of
people to adjust, I doubt he would have chosen to have to do this.

It's a remarkable capacity. I knew someone in his mid-sixties with perfect
pitch, who was having a lot of medical problems. His pitch sense had
shifted a semitone low, and it was driving him nuts when he played, since
he had learned a lot of the piano repertory by heart while "hearing" it a
semitone higher. Has anyone else come across someone whose absolute pitch
has shifted?

(I hope that this mention of perfect pitch doesn't start another round in
the "it's not _perfect!!!_" discussion. Perfect pitch (absolute pitch) is a
term that, like Topsy, "just growed." It means the power to remember and
identify pitches without losing track of them or forgetting them. It has
nothing to do with _exactitude_, which varies a lot with different people
who have absolute pitch. Some string players with perfect pitch whom I have
known had excellent, exact intonation, and others had a terrible time with
it. They knew it was F#, or whatever, but not how to place the F# with any
precision.)

>I do
>however point out the piano will sound better at the pitch it was
>designed for, and eventually it should be brought up.

I agree. In fact, today I tuned an 1882 George Steck grand, and moved it
from just below 440 down to 435. The bass in particular sounded much more
comfortable. Rounder, fuller, less edgy. I don't, however, know what the
pitch standard (if there was a single one) was in 1882. Can anyone help
with this? What sort of pitch would the people at George Steck have used
when designing this piano? I can only guess that it would probably have
been below 440.

Does anyone else do this sort of thing, since so many pianos which we tune
were designed before A440 became standard? I tune them to A440 if they look
strong and are going to be played with other instruments, but often tune
them to A435 if they are going to be played alone. Sometimes they even have
a decal on the plate, saying, "Standard pitch: A=435." Partly I do it
because I'm interested in how they sound when they are at their original
pitch. 

Sorry about the endless length. Just unwinding from a very long week when I
saw too many pianos. Looking forward to two days to catch up.

Susan








Susan Kline
P.O. Box 1651
Philomath, OR 97370
skline@proaxis.com