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Musical terms<\/a> can be confusing, and sometimes we think we understand what something means but actually struggle to pin down its exact definition. Here, we’ll be explaining pitch in music: what it means, how it fits into all parts of life and why it’s important in music. <\/strong><\/p> Pitch refers to how high or low a musical note is.<\/p> The composer Glazunov hated going to Moscow. It wasn\u2019t the arduous journey, or the \u2018direct\u2019 manners of the Muscovites that pained him. It was that the A to which the Moscow musicians tuned was minutely sharper than the A he knew in his native St Petersburg. He found it agonising. <\/p> Confronted with stories like that, most of us would think ourselves unmusical clods in comparison. But unless we had a pretty refined sense of pitch, we wouldn\u2019t be able to catch the minute inflexions in the speech of relatives and friends that can tell us so much more than their words. <\/p> Nor would music say so much to us: along with rhythm and tone-colour, the relationship between notes is a fundamental ingredient of music. <\/p> Take the two emphatic chords that open Beethoven\u2019s Eroica<\/i> Symphony<\/a><\/strong>. If the top note in those chords, G, were just a semitone flatter, the character of that opening would be changed irrevocably. <\/p> Listeners familiar with Western \u2018equal temperament\u2019 tuning \u2013 and thanks to the universality of recorded music that\u2019s just about everybody \u2013 would no longer experience those chords as bright, positive, joyous, but tenser, darker, more ominous. <\/p> Or take jazz. Most listeners know intuitively what a \u2018blue note\u2019 is, and will probably only have to hear the term to remember the kind of physical and emotional effect produced by that minute flattening of the pitch. In most cases it\u2019s much narrower than the semitonal modification that would radically alter the character of Beethoven\u2019s Eroica<\/i>. <\/p> The story of our modern \u2018equal\u2019 tuning system \u2013 in which tones and semitones are more or less equal throughout the pitch universe \u2013 is long and complicated. But at least until the mid-18th century the tuning of a scale was much more variable: closer to the \u2018natural\u2019 overtones that shimmer like a halo around any note struck, bowed, blown or sung. <\/p> In terms of physics, these overtones obey a strict proportional relationship, but to our conditioned ears they jar. The horn solo that introduces Britten<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings<\/i> is tuned to these natural overtones, and how gloriously \u2018wrong\u2019 some of them sound \u2013 and how important that \u2018wrongness\u2019 is to the character of the music that follows! <\/p> So even if you\u2019ve never given pitch relations a moment\u2019s thought, you\u2019ve probably been stirred by them and the patterns they form as often as you\u2019ve responded to the meanings in words and phrases.<\/p> We left the composer Glazunov in Moscow, suffering agonies because the Moscow \u2018A\u2019 was minutely sharper than the St Petersburg \u2018A\u2019 he was used to. He, though, had it good \u2013 improved communications in his day meant that musicians were able to travel much more, which led to increasing standardisation in the tuning of the concert \u2018A\u2019.<\/p> It also led to standardisation of relative<\/i> tuning: the distance between the notes of the major, minor or chromatic scales.<\/p> Just imagine Glazunov\u2019s pain if he\u2019d been able to travel back in time. The old \u2018natural\u2019 tuning, based on the halo of \u2018overtones\u2019 which reverberate above any struck, blown or bowed note, may have made sense to Pythagoras, who argued that relationship between these overtones revealed nothing less than the fundamental harmony of the universe. <\/p> But to our ears, they can sound weirdly out of tune \u2013 if you try tuning a keyboard using natural overtones as your guide, you will end up with something which sounds relatively secure in, say, the basic C major, but the further you get from C major, the weirder it sounds. <\/p> Baroque composers exploited this to heighten expressive effects. <\/p> When Handel<\/strong><\/a> wanted to depict the agonies of Christ in Messiah<\/a><\/strong><\/i>, or Vivaldi<\/a><\/strong> the asperities of \u2018Winter\u2019 in The Four Seasons<\/a><\/strong><\/i>, both chose the key of F minor, which in most early 18th-century tunings would have sounded relatively out of tune: the harshness of the harmonies and jaggedness of the melodic lines would have intensified spectacularly. <\/p>What is pitch in music?<\/h2>
Why is musical pitch important?<\/h2>
The story of tuning standardisation<\/h2>
How this transformed composers’ approaches<\/h2>