On 16 February 1859 the French government passed a law that fixed
the frequency of the A note above middle C at 435 Hz. Besides the
benefits of uniformity, the new standard sought to end a growing
problem: pitch inflation. Violins, pianos, and other stringed
instruments sound livelier when their strings are tightened to
raise the pitch. The tightening amplifies the harmonics. High,
bright notes sound thrilling to an audience, but they're harder to
sing. Pitch inflation was troubling opera singers, whose complaints
helped bring about the French law. Although the French standard
didn't catch on everywhere, the idea of a standard did—sort of. In
1995 the International Organization for Standardization chose 440
Hz for its A-note standard, but orchestras around the world have
not unanimously adopted it. Strained singers aside, does it matter
if the New York Philharmonic favors A = 442 Hz whereas the London
Philharmonic favors A = 440 Hz? Perhaps not if you lack perfect
pitch and hear the music in a concert hall. But pitch standards do
matter when it comes to recorded music. On 2 March 1959 Miles Davis
and his band went into Columbia Records' 30th Street studio in New
York City to record the first four tracks of Kind of Blue.
They recorded the rest of the album on 22 April. Kind of
Blue was an immediate critical and commercial success. It
remains the best-selling jazz album of all time. In 1992 Mark
Wilder, senior mastering engineer for Sony Music Studios, undertook
a new remastering of the famous album. During the project he
discovered an error. The three-channel tape deck used to record the
2 March session had been running slowly. Thus, the first four
tracks, which occupied side one of the original vinyl LP, ended up
faster and sharper than Davis had intended. Wilder corrected the
problem for his remaster. I'm not sure how much Ludwig van
Beethoven worried about pitch standards, or even whether pitch
could be accurately measured in his day, but the great composer did
care how fast his music sounded.
In 1817, two years after the
mechanical metronome had been patented, Beethoven went back to his
musical scores and marked the tempi at which each movement should
be played. To some conductors, Beethoven's tempi seem too fast, but
to others, like Carlos Kleiber shown here, the tempi are
exhilarating. Charles Day
