hartun - 2-9-2013 at 03:49 PM
hello everyone,
my old 78s of armenian american musicians playing armenian and turkish music, for some reason are all in Ab...i am speaking of typical folk songs that
are in "a minor" typically....is it possible that in the ottoman era the note A was tuned a whole half step lower and corresponds to modern western A
flat?? I thought at first it could be different recording speeds of 78 records but there were too many of these A flat tonics to be a coincidence.
Brian Prunka - 2-9-2013 at 05:07 PM
I don't know about Turkish, but many old Arabic recordings are also a half or whole step lower than current "concert tuning".
fernandraynaud - 2-10-2013 at 04:22 AM
The A=440 standard is actually quite recent. It has slowly crept up over the last two centuries, in "concert hall" setting, and it's not at all
unusual for older recordings to be referenced to a lower pitch, if even referenced at all.
jdowning - 2-10-2013 at 05:10 AM
Presumably the old 78 recordings were made prior to 1950? In which case the ouds would have been strung with gut trebles and wound basses on silk or
gut core. Gut cannot be taken to as high a pitch as modern plastic strings (nylon or PVF) without frequent breakage - so need to be about a tone lower
than A440 (or only a semitone for the risk takers).
The old ouds presumably were designed to give best acoustical performance at these lower pitch standards of the pre-nylon string days.
As fernandraynaud mentions, concert A440 pitch is modern. It was first proposed and adopted as an international standard in 1939, in a conference held
in Germany, replacing of a couple of earlier attempts in the 19th C (a low and high pitch standard). However, even the 1939 standard was not fully
verified until quite recently (1960's or 70's - I can't remember off hand?) as World War 2 got in the way of any 'progress'.
In any case I doubt if the oudists of that era would be concerned with pitch standards for solo oud performance - they would just tune the instrument
so that it sounded best at a comfortable string tension.