Why orchestras tune to oboe




















Up to the late 16 th century, most sacred music was vocal, so the instruments — organs mainly, were built to suit the range of the human voice hence lower.

However, when secular instruments such as violin and cornett were introduced into service, tuning became an issue, as sacred pitch differed from the opera pitch, chamber music pitch and military pitch, with heavy local variation; Composers of early 17 th th century were commonly notating music in more than one key on a need-to basis, to overcome regional and instrumental differences. Many travelling musicians started to look for a portable solution to this problem.

Handel carried his own pitch pipe, John Shore in the early 18 th century used a fork to tune his lute. The pitch pipes were like a small recorder, often fitted with a movable wooden plunger or piston, on which a scale of notes with a range of about one octave was marked. In Vienna, even piano technicians were using them for keyboard instruments, as recently as And some pipes were made to suit a few different pitches.

After Lassus began to incorporate string instruments into sacred services for the Bavarian Court in Munich around , other instruments started to trickle into the church, and the limited flexibility of woodwind instruments often determined the pitch setting: sackbuts were employed in sacred services in Emden in s, and Catharinenkirch in Hamberg was regularly using cornetts by s.

The best cornetts were made in Venice, and they were often sold in sets with a common pitch system; and though much of the sacred music was made to match the human vocal range hence a bit lower , cornetts at a lower pitch were very difficult to master, as the tone-holes had to be placed wider in a longer body, requiring incredible finger stretches, which made it impossible for mere mortals to play.

Instrument makers had no choice but to make cornetts in a higher pitch. Before long, all instruments, including the organ! Chamber organs, though, at Venice, Padua, Vicenza, and other cities, are a tone lower, corresponding to the human voice, which is called corristi. This difference in pitch is used to accommodate voices and instruments, since organs that are high work well with lower voices and violins, which are for this reason more spirited. This tuning pitch, Cornettenthon , remained constant from 16 th through 18 th century, and was used widely in Italy, Germany and Austria.

When the ambitious Lully came to the French court, he began to integrate wind instruments into the string orchestra. The Mannheim orchestra contributed immensely to symphonic music, making big impressions on the first Viennese School composers — Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, in its experimentation and growth in balance, virtuosity and dynamic range. The first Viennese composers extended their orchestral development from the Mannheim Orchestra.

Beethoven, with his nine symphonies, completes the first milestone of the modern symphony, musically and logistically. Many even think that this is the symphony that elevated the piccolo to its modern role as a permanent member of the orchestra. And from Beethoven on, the rest is history: additional symphonic expansion continued, especially with Strauss and Mahler, and to this date, the orchestra as an ensemble is still expanding and experimenting.

But funnily or frustratingly , not much definitive explanation has been found as to WHY the modern orchestra tunes to the first oboe.

In the early 18 th century, the common tuning practice for an orchestra involved preluding : Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann in his publication, Musicalischer-Trichter , explains that in a church, the organ should improvise, and the instrumentalists to play along in the same key, and tune during this prelude.

But later musicians, including Quantz, worried that playing and tuning simultaneously would just put the instrument out of tune, and by the midth-century, there were a few different thoughts on tuning protocol:.

It seems that well into the late 18 th century, many orchestras tuned to the concertmaster:. I will then proceed from one player to the next, checking whether his A string agrees with mine. After this, the string players, all at the same time, should tune their remaining strings as quickly as possible, while the wind instruments play the various notes of the D major chord. As soon as I give a sign, tuning is over, and everyone should remain quietly in his place. How to Play An instrument that is difficult but worth it!

The most attention is paid to the reeds Various oboe tips and tricks Oboe fingering table. How the Instrument is Made Opening tone holes in the pipe The sound is adjusted based on the shape of the tone hole? Adjusting the pipe Assembly and adjustment. Choosing an Instrument Before choosing an instrument What are the key points when selecting an oboe?

Care and Maintenance Basic care and maintenance How to use maintenance paraphernalia Seasonal maintenance Maintenance using swabs. Do the reeds have a front and a back? The keys recoil via springs! This is how the oboe and the cor anglais differ The charumera was the oboe's cousin You can reduce time spent breathing using circular-breathing techniques? When the sound waves move faster through the column of air, the frequency pitch rises.

Relationship of frequency to speed of sound in wind instruments Relationship of temperature to speed of sound moving through a gas Note: humidity has a small enough effect that it can be ignored for our purposes here.

I disagree. A group of 10 cars passes by me driving 20 miles an hour, and each car is exactly 5 seconds after the next.

The cars are analogous to sound waves. I only care how often they arrive. For higher precision, a couple of other aspects of bore geometry can also be brought into play. So the air temperature within the instrument affects the pitch produced. Maybe a more complete way of stating it then would be ….

When the sound waves move faster through the column of air, this causes the reed to vibrate faster, thus raising the frequency pitch. Bret, this is a great opportunity to acknowledge the stellar accomplishments of the late, great Bruce Haynes April 14, May 17, American and Canadian oboist, recorder player, musicologist and specialist in historical performance practice.

Haynes wrote a full book on this very complex issue. It is fitting, then, that this, the first book-length study of the history of musical pitch, has been written by a player of the hautboy or three-keyed oboe. Bruce Haynes has tackled the subject with the insightful zeal of a dedicated early music specialist.

And Haynes steers a methodological middle course between the doctrinaire empiricism of Ellis, who gives all pitch frequencies to an accuracy of 0.

This title seems vaguely familiar now that you bring it up, though I had forgotten about it. I understand principal oboists are often among the most highly-paid members of the orchestra. My understanding is that a reed produces many different frequencies. The oboist can change these frequencies somewhat through changes in air pressure and embouchure, but the main part of what determines the resulting frequencies harmonics and such is the length of the tube.

In ancient times, the shawm precursor of the oboe was sounded in the village to let everyone know something was about to happen — a village meeting, etc. Additionally, the shawm was used to alert enemy forces to an impending invasion or battle.

The shawm, at the time, was the loudest, most raucous instrument available — and playing 20 or 30 of them at the same time let EVERYONE know what was about to happen….

The point of playing in an ensemble is to listen to eachother and play together, but a starting pitch has to be found in order to begin. The pitch generated by the instrument is a function of its length and the speed of the wave through the medium, which is air mostly Nitrogen. Pitch in different gasses is mostly a function of the molar mass of the gas and its modulus, or compressability. The pitch of a wind instrument will go up if it is fed Helium, and down if fed Carbon Dioxide.

The speed of sound is a distance per time, such as meters per second. The pitch is a measure of frequency; i. The pitch in a closed pipe oboe will be affected by the speed of sound in the pipe. But once that pitch is produced, and the sound begins to travel away from the pipe, the speed of that sound will not further affect its pitch.

If an oboist plays a A, you will hear a A at the back of the hall, regardless of the temperature. In other words, due to the current temperature, the oboist may have had to lip the note up or down in order to produce a A. But once that A is produced, the speed at which the sound moves away from the oboe will not further affect its pitch. The frequency pitch with which the cars pass has nothing to do with their speed.



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