1929 Glen pitch statement

Bagpipes (Non-Uilleann)
1

I recently got the new edition of Highland Bagpipe Makers (Jeannie Campbell MBE) and in the extensive Glen section is reproduced the 1929 J&R Glen catalogue in which this page appears:

"IMPORTANT NOTICE.

Referring to the pitch of Pipe Chanters.

The particular attention of Pipe Band Presidents is drawn to Army Council Instruction No. 544 of 19th December 1928 authorising the change in all army bands from High Pitch to Low Pitch. This instruction must, in time, effect the Pipe Band as well as the Military Band*, and where massed bands play frequently together the necessity of the change is more urgent.

The High Pitch chanter hitherto supplied cannot be played at Low Pitch any more than a Bb Clarionet can play A nat parts.

For a number of years we have produced a Low Pitch chanter, A=439, more particularly for the use of stage artistes who desire to play along with Low Pitch orchestras (and) combined playing of Military Bands with pipes."

(On the catalogue page listing Bagpipe Chanters)

"All Pipe Chanters are made to Standard Army Pitch, Old Philharmonic, A=452.

Low-pitch Chanters are made to order only, A=439."

I believe that the terminology used doesn’t mean what us modern pipers probably think it means.

Certainly old chanters, if we label them as being in the key of A, are around A=452, that is, halfway between Concert A and Concert Bb.

But it makes no sense to make chanters, if we label them as being in the key of A, to the pitch of A=439 in order to play with Military Bands.

Why? Because Military Bands were based around instruments in Bb and Eb. Flutes were made in Eb (old terminology, Db in new terminology) for these bands.

And the mention of “Low Pitch Orchestras” almost certainly doesn’t refer to Symphony Orchestras but what we would call “dance bands” which included saxophones and clarinets in Bb and Eb.

So my assumption is that these chanters pitched in A=439 were not in the key of A, but in the key of Bb, in other words chanters that we nowadays would call “466” chanters.

*For those not familiar with British terminology “Military Band” is what we would call a “marching band” in the US, brass instruments, percussion, and woodwinds such as clarinets. It doesn’t mean military Pipes & Drums bands.

2

The pitch standard of A=439 hz is a historical tuning frequency. It was the British “New Philharmonic” standard, before being replaced by A=440 hz. The reason it came about was to align with the French diapason normal standard, which was defined as A=435 hz at a temperature of 59 F (15 C). This temperature was considered unrealistically cold for most performance situations, so the British recalculated it for realistic temperatures, and it came out to be A=439 hz at 68 F (20 C). That New Philharmonic “low pitch” standard was formally adopted in 1896.

It was subsequently changed to A=440 hz because 439 is a prime number which made it much more complicated to generate electronically for radio broadcasts. 440 was easier to synthesize because it can be divided into factors for electronic oscillators and radio tone broadcasts. Hence, the A=440 standard was adopted (internationally) in 1939.

So, given the date of the catalogue (1929), I think they probably meant exactly what they said.

3

Yes they meant what they said, but they only said half of what needed to be said to make clear exactly how these chanters were tuned.

This is because Highland pipers usually confuse the concepts of pitch and key.

“Legit” musicians understand that these are separate, a perfect example being the clarinet listings I saw in a catalogue listing clarinets:

Key of Bb available in 440 or 442

Key of A available in 440 or 442

This wouldn’t make any sense to most Highland pipers. How can a Bb clarinet be in 440? It’s impossible.

Highland pipers would list those clarinets as being in 466, 469, 440, and 442.

The Highland pipes are regarded as a transposing instrument, the music being written in two sharps but sounding a half-step higher in three flats. But few pipers understand this concept, and name all the notes by the written pitches.

Thus Glen stating that they make a chanter pitched to A=439 could mean a chanter in the key of A at that pitch, or a chanter in the key of Bb at that pitch. I think it’s the key of Bb due to a chanter in the key of A being useless for the stated purposes, being playing in tune with brass instruments, saxophones, and clarinets. As I mentioned special flutes were played in British military bands which were a half-step sharp.

Also the evidence of surviving vintage chanters tell us that the pitch of chanters actually rose in this period, the so-called “A” of the chanters rising from around halfway between A and Bb (Old Philharmonic Pitch) to 466, Concert Bb at the pitch of A=440.

Chanters don’t seem to have ever existed that had the so-called A concert A until quite recently. This was due to a composer not understanding that the pipes are a transposing instrument and writing a symphonic work for pipes and orchestra where the pipes had to play in their written pitch, which they never had previously done. An entirely new kind of chanter had to be created, and for years were only ever played for that one purpose.

4

Yep, Paddler’s right. The terminology used meant exactly what we think it means. If, say, an army pipe band and an army brass band were to play together at that time with the pipe chanters and band instruments intended to tune to a reference pitch of A4 = 439Hz, then yes, they all would have been expected to play the tunes in the same pitch with the music transposed accordingly for band instruments to the pipes playing in “A.”

Granted, this reeks of top-down military standardization, and it probably would have sounded pretty unpleasant for a variety of reasons.

First, I don’t know to what extent British military bands a hundred years ago would have been kitted out with Eb “band flutes”, but for some wind and brass instruments, A is simply not a great reference pitch for tuning. Case in point: the trombone. Anyone who ever played in a school band knows that bands tune to Bb, unlike orchestras that tune to A. A is more or less fine for most any modern woodwind instrument, and it’s an open string note on all the strings, but it’s a second position note on the trombone, so it’s not something you’d want to tune to. Before the siren song of the bagpipes led me astray, I was a pretty serious aspiring trombonist in my teens, and when I started playing in my local youth symphony, I very quickly learned that the trick was to actually tune to the rest of the orchestra by playing a first-position D over everyone else playing A. Anyway, I digress.

The other reason this arrangement would have sounded unpleasant–and the reason why it continued to sound unpleasant up until relatively recently, even after the convention changed to pipe chanters pitched around Bb and the music transposed accordingly for other instruments–is that certain notes on the pipe chanter would not have been in tune with corresponding notes on other instruments anyway. Then as now, the third and sixth degrees of the scale on the pipe chanter (nominal C# and F#) would have been a hair flat of equal temperament to properly harmonize with the drones. A bigger problem would have been that the fourth and seventh degrees (D and G natural) tended to pitch VERY sharp. There’s still some debate among pipers about whether the teeth-gnashingly sharp pitch of these notes was a deliberate feature intrinsic to the aesthetic of the Great Highland bagpipe and its music or a maladaptive bug.

If I’m not mistaken, I think it was Donald MacPherson who was the first solo competing piper to make a point of tuning his chanter to what modern pipers would consider to be a normal and “in-tune” scale, and that would have been in the late-'40s or early '50s, I think. It took a few decades for this practice to catch on and become the conventional standard.

We often take for granted what a recent development A4 =440Hz is. I read recently that one of the reasons orchestral pitches tended to vary so widely from one European city to another in the past was that the original reference pitch local musicians used was the bells of the local cathedral.