It is a complicated matter. Some violinists, when playing in quatuor, take long time to adapt their pitch to the others, that is altering the note they would play if they played alone in function of what and how the other players are playing. Then comes the problem of the open strings on a violin, which you can't alter in pitch at play time, only at tuning time. Curiously enough, most of the violinists tune their open strings in pure fifth. But most of them search for pure intervals when playing together, forcing them to tweak all the time, depending on the piece's modulations. All this rewarding work (it makes the music sound well) is ruined when they play with a piano. Hence the feeling that it is the piano that is false, which, depending on how you look at it, is very true. Most noticeable is that all this tweaking happens intuitively. And when they play with brass instruments, it goes a step further in boogaloo-woogaloo, because brass instruments do go high in pitch when they warm up. Strings should follow them then, but if a piano is in the scene, well, they are caught between two fires. That is why, I think, brass use to tune a bit low at the beginning of the concert, so they end up a bit high at the end of the concert, and all other instruments can blame them never to be right on pitch, was it at the beginning or the end of the concert (which they don't care, because after the concert they like more having a good beer than having a pain conversation with violinists). Harmony is the master word. Harmony comes from the clashing of the opposites. Best regards. Stephane Collin. -----Original Message----- From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Richard Brekne Sent: lundi 30 juin 2008 0:17 To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Wives tales ... violin tuning Yes... a good sense of relative pitch memory is an interesting thing indeed. Its just that it would be best for all concerned if it were kept better in perspective... i.e. words like Perfect and Absolute left out of it. Severely extreme cases of pitch sensitivity are more a handicap then an asset. Fortunately... there are very very few on this planet that actually suffer to that degree....and correspondingly few that could with any hint of justification fnyss at someone else for erring <<absolutely>> pitchwise. Cheers RicB
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