A=435

[Israel Stein]

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At 11:00 AM 11/21/2005, you wrote:
>I wrote right after that I meant a435.  I did a typo in my first 
>email.  Sorry.  It is written inside the piano on the medal plate 
>beside the Sohmer symbol.  This is a piano made back in 1890.    I 
>knew to check because a gentleman I called who rebuilds pianos told 
>me to check inside to see if it was written or engraved, "A435"  and 
>it was.  I did a history search and most composers including Chopin 
>composed songs in a 435 pitch.  It was around the time of WW2 that 
>the 440 became universally accepted. Before that 435 was most common 
>but there was other pitches that were accepted as 
>well. 
><http://www.uk-piano.org/history/pitch.html>www.uk-piano.org/history/pitch.html 
>Check out this website.

You might want to do some more thorough research than a web search - 
and examine the veracity of your sources. For example, the website 
you cite is no authority - just a fellow who posted some commonly 
available information who doesn't even claim to for it be complete. 
It's an interesting collection of factoids - not conclusive evidence.

There is very little evidence that any pitch was "most common" at any 
time before WW-I or maybe even II. One bit of evidence suggests that 
in the mid 1860's there were 5 different pitch standards in the city 
of Paris alone - 3 at the 3 different opera houses, one used by the 
Church and one by the military bands. A-=435 was an unsuccessful 
attempt to agree on a common "Concert" pitch, and no such agreement 
was achieved even on the concert stage - never mind in common 
practice. As to how common A=435 became is open to conjecture. (For 
that matter, it is rather questionable if A=440 today is very widely 
accepted on the concert stage - many wind instruments are being 
manufactured at higher pitches these days, and so pitch in orchestral 
contexts is being forced upward. We were forced to tune our concert 
instruments at San Francisco State University at A=441+ so that the 
wind players could tune to them...).

As for your claims about Chopin and "most composers" writing songs in 
A=435 - I would love to see some of those "songs" Chopin wrote. I'm 
not aware of any... Most of his  output - at least as a mature 
composer - was for piano solo, where pitch made no difference. And 
since his favorite pianos were Pleyels, and your source cites 
Pleyel's pitch in 1836 at A=446 - what gives? Did they drop their 
pitch just for him? Or did they drop it by 11 CPS sometime before 
1849? Does the data even mean anything - did they only use that one 
pitch, or were they all over the place, and the other tuning forks 
were never found? See the perils of speculating about pitch in the 
19th century?

Really, the question of pitch at various times is much more 
complicated than the oversimplifications you will find on websites. 
The push for standardizing pitch doesn't really happen until after 
the development of rail travel (and increased concert touring) all 
over Europe - 2nd half of the 19th century - and the problems that 
instrumentalists in various locations had tuning to each other. Even 
the evidence from surviving tuning forks is suspect - how do we know 
these were the rule rather than the exception, the common practice 
rather than the one-time experiment? We don't... And I suspect that 
piano companies recommending specific pitches were strictly 
promotional - to show that they are "with it" on the latest trends, 
not as any result of specific scale or structural design features. 
Theirs were "seat-of-the-pants" trial-and-error design methods - not 
precisely calculated engineering...

Israel Stein



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