Index

Performance Practice

 

Week 4: Performing pitch

i. The road to Concert pitch

Essay Titles

  1. EITHER To what extent is Concert pitch the outcome of prior European standards? Consider known pitch standards from the seventeenth century onwards.

  2. OR Trace the events that led to the international agreement on Concert pitch in 1939. Has that agreement been justified by subsequent developments in the performance of classical music?

Reading

  1. Bruce Haynes, ‘Pitch: 1. Western Pitch Standards’ in Grove Music Online (web)

  2. ———— A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of ‘A’ (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002) (library)

  3. Beverly Jerold, ‘Pitch in the Vocal Works of J. S. Bach’, Bach, 31 (2000), 74–95 (jstor)

  4. Llewelyn S. Lloyd, ‘International Standard Musical Pitch’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 98 (1949), 74–89 (jstor)

  5. Jerry L. Weinstein, ‘Musical Pitch and International Agreement’, The American Journal of International Law, 46 (1952), 341–3 (jstor)

  6. Arthur Mendel, ‘On the Pitches in Use in Bach's Time’, The Musical Quarterly, 41 (1955), 332–54 (jstor), 466–80 (jstor)

  7. ————, ‘Pitch in Western Music since 1500: A Re-Examination’, Acta musicologica, 50 (1978), 1–93 (jstor)

  8. Alexander John Ellis, ‘The History of Musical Pitch’. Journal of the Society of Arts, 28 (1880), 293–336 (jstor)

  9. ————, ‘The History of Musical Pitch in Europe’, in Hermann Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, transl. Ellis, 3rd English edn (London: Longmans, 1895), 493–522 (web)

ii. Case study in Quire pitch

Essay Title

  1. Discuss the modern convention of performing English normal-clef polyphony a minor third higher than its original notation. Has that convention been motivated primarily by historical or practical considerations?

Reading

  1. Roger Bray, ‘More Light on Early Tudor Pitch’, Early Music, 8 (1980), 35–42 (jstor)

  2. Bruce Haynes, A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of ‘A’ (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002) (library)

  3. Andrew Johnstone, ‘The Myth of A+3’, Orlando Gibbons Project (Fretwork Editions, 2017) (web)

  4. ————, ‘The Performing Pitch of William Byrd’s Latin Liturgical Polyphony: A Guide for Historically Minded Interpreters’, REA: A Journal of Religion, Education and the Arts, 10 (2016), 79–107 (web)

  5. ————, ‘“As it was in the beginning”: Organ and Choir Pitch in Early Anglican Church Music’, Early Music, 31 (2003), 506–25 (jstor)

  6. Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘Edmund Fellowes as Editor’, The Musical Times, 93 (1952), 59–61 (jstor)

  7. David Wulstan, ‘The Problem of Pitch in Sixteenth-Century English Vocal Music’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 93 (1966), 97–112 (jstor)