A little-known New Jersey opera company is playing an active role in an international debate to lower the reference pitch by which orchestras tune their instruments. The issue is that the reference pitch, the tone A, has gradually risen over the last 200 years and the consequences may be severe for performers and instruments.
The A used by most symphony and opera orchestras today for uniform tuning ranges between 440 hertz, or cycles per second, to 444 hertz. By comparison, in 1740, Handel favored an A pitched at 422 hertz. Mozart, in 1780, tuned to an A at 421.6 hertz. The French standardized their A at 435 hertz in 1858. A little more than 20 years later, Verdi succeeded in getting a bill passed by the Italian Parliament to tune at A 432 hertz.
In 1938, an international standard for A was set at 440 hertz, but the pitch continued to rise. The New York Philharmonic, under Zubin Mehta, tunes to an A at 442 hertz, as does the Chicago under Georg Solti and the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa. In Berlin, orchestras tune to an A around 448 hertz. In Moscow, the symphony's pitch is even higher, near 450 hertz.
''This is a scientific as well as an artistic issue,'' [Jeanne Percesepe] said. ''Verdi worked with scientists and, based on certain harmonic principles, decided on what the scientific tuning should be. At the higher pitch, you tend to have more strident tones. Body and resonance is lost in the middle and chest registers. Music performed at the lower pitch heightens the poetry and drama. Verdi, Beethoven and Bellini understood that the voice had fundamental characteristics that should not be tampered with.''
