A-432 Musical Wallpaper

Monday night I played a gig at Ruth Eckard Hall in Clearwater. It was one of those play while people eat, drink and talk gigs. Musical wallpaper, or as it's sometimes called, "Musician Abuse."

As a strolling violinist, I'm country and folk. Don't look for "Feelings."

The ambiance was country in honor of the featured artist in the big hall, Dolly Parton. My mix of hoedowns, reels, jigs and swing tunes fit right in.

It was the usual scene of me playing as if I had an audience in the palm of my hand. In other words, taking the music seriously and doing the very best I could do. In these gigs you con't get much energy from the audience. Well, none, really. And when you do get a positive reaction, it almost is a shock the first time. After that, you see that people are actually warming up to your performance.

It went well, I must confess. Nobody said, "Hey, man. Tune it up already! Sheesh."

Small victories. That's what we leading edge advocates of A-432 look for. And that's what we get.

Handling MP3 files

When you click on a link to an MP3 file, you either want to have a broadband connection, or plenty of time. They tend to be a little fat, even in the data reducing format.

This means a heads up for the tune Mississippi Sawyer

I played this with lots of open strings, to really get some resonance in the lower tuning. To me it all sounds very natural.

Florida Blues sounds like...

Credit to Gatorchick and her Florida Blues blog. Got me off the dime of inertia.

This blog is about A 432 and all the etheric baggage I can cram into this concept. It needs some sounds to show what it's all about.

When you click on Profile and then click on the audio, you get to hear someting. Right now you hear "Florida Blues," as I fiddled it on Nov. 12.

In a week, I'll change that to an intro that talks and plays fiddle. I may play new segments to create new audio files to go with that link.

Archived stuff will be at the A-432 section of my Grassapelli site.

Norbert Brainard and the Verdi A-432

Norbert Brainard was a violin virtuoso. He founded the Amati String Quartet. He passionately supported the use of the "Mozart A'" of 432 Hz "in opposition to today’s absurdly high “Karajan tuning” of A well above 440 Hz."

In Italy this came to be known as the Verdi A:
"In a parliamentary hearing in Rome, which became the basis for a parliamentary initiative to pass a law on the “Verdi A,” Prof. Bruno Barosi, the director of the world-renowned International Institute of Violin Making, in Cremona, Italy, invited brainin to his laboratory, recorded certain tones (and their octaves) both in the low and high tuning, did a spectral analysis, and finally evaluated the findings.

The other findings were not so surprising, but equally clear: The lower tuning created a larger sum of overtones, which explains the fuller sound; it was also proven, that Brainin’s Strad had its best resonance by far at exactly C=256 Hz, which is about A=432 Hz."

Passing a law to command the use of this frequency seems a little extream, (not to mention unlikely.)

Still, we can choose to use this frequency if we have a tunable instrument. Strings anyone?