LET'S SING HUMAN!!!!

VERDI PITCH, NOT GOEBBELS PITCH!!

DID YOU KNOW----That the "official tuning pitch" of A=440 cycles per
second (or higher), used for the past 75 years throughout
Europe and the United States, is {not} the tuning that was
used by Mozart, Verdi, Bach, Beethoven or anyone else
associated with Classical music from the birth of
Bach(1685) to the death of Dvorak (1904)?
--That "The first effort to institutionalize A=440 was a
conference organized in 1939 by Nazi Propaganda Minister
Josef Goebbels, who had standardized A=440 as the
official Nazi German pitch" (1)?
--That prior to that time, and even afterwards, musical
pitch was referred to as "physical pitch", and defined by
physical experiment to be at C=256 cycles per second
(cps), equivalent to an A=427 to 432 cps, but no higher?
--That in 1884, the composer Giuseppe Verdi, a member of
the first Italian parliament of 1861, campaigned for
national legislation to set A=432 cps?
--That in 1859, France passed a law setting the tuning pitch
at A=435, then the lowest pitch in use in that country, as a
result of a campaign led in part by Gioachino Rossini,
composer of The Barber of Seville and La Cenerentola, and
an acknowledged master of the {bel canto} singing
method?
--That the tenor Carlo Bergonzi established in a seminar
held, in conjunction with the Schiller Institute, at Carnegie
Hall's Weill Hall on April 8, 1993, the superiority, through
experiments with male and female singers, of the "lower",
that is {proper} Verdi tuning, over the Goebbels tuning,
saying on that occasion:
"It is particularly important to raise the question of tuning
in connection with bel canto technique, since today's high
tuning misplaces all register shifts, and makes it very
difficult for a singer to have the sound float above the
breath. When an F-sharp becomes a G.... Everything is
misplaced a half-step, and the technique fails.
...Also, instrumental music sounds false when played at a
high tuning; the sound is as unnatural in instruments as in

Giuseppe Verdi
voices...what is true for the voice, is also true for
instruments."
--That the adoption of the "official tuning pitch" was a
political, not a musical decision? "Professor Robert
Dussaut of the National Conservatory of Paris told the
French press that 'by September 1938, the Acoustic
Committee of Radio Berlin requested the British Standard
Association to organize in London a congress to adopt
internationally the German Radio tuning of 440 periods.
The congress was held in London, a very short time before
the the War, in May/June 1939. No French composer was
invited." (2)
If you didn't know this, why not? And if you did, why are
you destroying your voice, and the voices of hundreds of
thousands, potentially even millions of singers, to commit
the unnatural act of singing out of tune? In this 70th
anniversary of the defeat of fascism in World War Two,
isn't it about time to reverse the Goebbels tuning? Why
should a potential Enrico Caruso be condemned to wind up

sounding like Bob Dylan, simply because "that's the

official tuning pitch"?
Lyndon LaRouche, who in the 1980s launched the
campaign to return to C=256, said: "The proofs of the
natural principles of bel canto vocalization and voice

registration, are directly crucial-experimental reflections

of the biology of the human species." Human beings
should make human music. And C=256, as Rossini, Verdi,
and by implication Bach through Brahms also would have
agreed, is the proper tuning for the human voice.

Footnotes

1. A Manual on the Rudiments of Tuning and Registration, page 15, The Schiller Institute
(schillerinstitute.org)

2. Ibid.

EIRNS
Baritone Piero Cappuccilli, Tenor Carlo Bergonzi, Liliana Gorini
(Schiller Institute), Lyndon LaRouche, at the 1997 Schiller Institute
conference at the famous Barezzi House, Busseto, Italy

The Schiller Institute will be hosting a symposium on the

Verdi Tuning this Fall. If you are interested, sign up at
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/about/order_form.html

Join the Schiller Institute Community Chorus! We

rehearse every Thursday evening at 6:30 PM at the Verdi
Tuning. Call Margaret at 646-509-5451