Hello all. In an orchestra, playing right has little to do with producing notes with frequencies in the right theoretical proportion with the reference one (was it 440 or 442). The musicians always alter the pitch of one particular note regarding many criteria. The process is completely intuitive, and based on the aim for everything sounding as good as possible. When one musician plays the fifth of a chord, he will intuitively alter the pitch (when possible) so the fifth is perfect, because that is where his note sounds best at that moment; another moment, the same written note can happen to be the tenth of the chord, and then he will alter the pitch to make this tenth sound best. More than that, if he plays an expressive melodic line, he will intuitively make some ascending half steps with slightly higher pitch than the others, and descending ones with lower pitch, as this is a well known efficient trick to make the melody expressive. All this is done according to what the other musicians do (they too may have altered their pitch, sometimes in quite large proportions; for example, when playing fortissimo the lowest note on a cello or a double bass, the pitch of the note raises quite a lot because of the extra tension in the string, and the musician can not correct this as it is an open string), so it is all about tweaking, all the time. Exactly like when we stretch the high treble of a piano in order to make the treble notes sound better, all those pitch alterations are musically desirable. The problem is when we reach the limits of what is physically feasible. Problems are multiple, but I heard that one of the worse comes from the brass instruments who are very sensitive to temperature. The instrument’s temperature will raise a lot from the beginning to the end of the concert (the player continuously blows warm and wet air in the instrument); of course, there are devices on the instrument and techniques from the player to counter the bad effect of the temperature on the pitch, but voila, here is a severe physical limitation. When tuned to 440 Hz, the brass of an orchestra playing repertoire with busy brass parts will be objectionably out of tune at the end of the concert. Of course, when there is a piano involved, everybody gets crazy. Nonetheless, when tweaking stays in the non objectionable domain, the music will sound good, if god will. There may be differences of a few cents between instruments without real problems. Anyway, the difference between an equally tempered third on a piano and a “just” one like those played intuitively by the strings lies inside this domain. Or ? Stéphane Collin. The 1st violinest overheard the conversation and came running up all excited-and in broken english -Piano at 442 right - right. I answered yes, Its 442, I would just like to know WHY' -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090430/a4a08166/attachment.html>
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