THE NEW FEDERALIST

December 2, 1988

Pages 6-7

American Almanac

J.S. Bach's Campaign for an

Absolute System of Musical Tuning
by Renee Sigerson

Johann Sebastian Bach at the organ.

From the outset of his public life as an organist and composer, the great
German Johann Sebastian Bach participated in a conspiracy to set an
absolute system of values for musical tones, based on the pitch, Middle C =
256.

Recently, Socialist-linked European media outlets have issued slanders

against the Schiller Institute, prompted by the institute's historic conference
on the topic of musical pitch in April 1988. At the Milan, Italy conference,
musicians and policymakers joined hands to call for the absolute standard of
musical pitch of C = 256 to be legislatively adopted today. The recurrent
theme of these slanderswhich have cropped up in different corners of the
worldis the characterization that a scientific standard for musical tones is
"authoritarian," and thereby fascist. That was the assertion, for example of
the Danish radio announcer last August who howled, "They are absolutists,
up to the level of totalitarianism," in his broadcast report on the Schiller
Institute campaign.
Johann Sebastian Bach was denounced in a similar fashion, both during his
lifetime and after. Oligarchical and liberal academic circles ran witchhunts
against Bach, even after he was dead, attempting to eradicate the very mention of his name from all accounts of history. Fortunately, the attempt to
bury Bach's name was defeated. However, there is a direct link between the
attacks launched by Bach's enemies, and the slanders circulated against
LaRouche-associated musical-scientific efforts today.
As we show here, LaRouche's enemies believe, in part, that they just may be
able to "get away" with their use of the labels "totalitarian" and "fascist"
against the campaign C = 256, because of the existence of a voluminous
amount of academic disinformation claiming that J.S. Bach was indifferent
on the matter of musical tuning. All academic, conservatory sources argue
either that Bach didn't care what pitch his compositions were performed at,
or, that he arbitrarily "preferred" a pitch value nearly a half-tone below C =
256.
We begin here the process of ripping this academic fraud to pieces. The
fraud is neatly summarized by such formulations as the following, published
by Arthur Mendel, a leading falsifier in this field, in his recent book, Pitch in
the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries: "It is clear that absolute
pitch could have relatively little importance to the musician before the late
eighteenth century." This statement is a lie.
In materials soon to be released by associates of Lyndon LaRouche, a
leading spokesman for the Schiller Institute's campaign for absolute musical
pitch, it will be shown that C = 256 is a value at the center of the entire
process of life within our universe. These materials further document why C
= 256and the associated major sixth in the scale, A = 432 are the only

pitch values which permit the proper development of the singing voice.
Singing is the wellspring for musical thought.
As illustrated in Figure 1, when musical pitch is set at C = 256, the values of
the musical scale coincide with the harmonic sectioning of the human voice.
The line illustrating the soprano voice type shows what occurs when a child
or adult soprano, starting on the tone C = 256, sings up the scale. As the
child completes the tone F, in order to continue up the scale, he or she must
now change the way in which the tone is produced. The voice will pass over
an instability, called a register break, and the next tone, F-sharp, or G, will
be the first tone in a new register.
The tones sung in the first, and then in the second, register form two groups,
whose qualities differ in the same way that colors contrast in the visual
spectrum. Proceed to the next voice type, the mezzo-soprano. This voice
changes register on the tone E. Go through the six species of voice types in
the human population. Each voice type has definite values where the
register breaks occur. When the pitch is set at C = 256, the register breaks
form a harmonic-geometric series, which establish the differences in the
"keys" in the well-tempered system.
The value C = 256 also sets the musical scale as a continuation of the Earth's
rotation around its axis, as illustrated in Figure 2. Scientific work defining
music as the audible form of transformations in the geometric relations
governing the universe began in ancient Greece. The name given to this
work, since ancient times, was "Harmony of the Spheres." This term was
then chosen by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, in the 1620s, for
his work on music and the planets. Bach's circles were familiar with this
work.
The Cult of Helmholtz
All published academic material claiming that Bach was indifferent to pitch
standards originates with the same source: the circles around Hermann
Helmholtz, the nineteenth-century pseudo-scientist, who joined with British
academia to crush continental European science and culture. In 1862,
Helmholtz vowed, in print, to crush the tradition of the "Harmony of the
Spheres" in classical music.
His declaration appeared in a tome entitled Sensations of Tones. There,
Helmholtz wrote:

The relation of whole numbers to consonance became in

ancient times, in the Middle Ages, and especially among
Oriental nations, the foundation of extravagant and fanciful
speculation. "Everything is Number and Harmony," was the
characteristic principle of the Pythagorean doctrine. The same
numerical ratios which exist between the seven tones of the
diatonic scale, were thought to be found again in the distances
of the celestial bodies from the central fire. Hence the harmony
of the spheres, which was heard by Pythagoras alone among
mortal men, as his disciples asserted. The numerical speculations of the Chinese in primitive times reach as far. . . . The
whole numbers 1,2,3, and 4 were described as the source of all
perfection . . . references of musical tones to the elements, the
temperaments, and the constellations are found abundantly
scattered among the musical writings of the Arabs. The harmony of the spheres plays a great part throughout the Middle
Ages. . . . Even Keppler [sic], a man of the deepest scientific
spirit, could not keep himself free from imaginations of this
kind. Nay, even in the most recent times, theorising friends of
music may be found who will rather feast on arithmetical
mysticism than endeavor to hear upper partial tones.
Helmholtz's reference to Kepler assumes that anyone reading Sensations of
Tones was either already illiterateor would certainly soon become so. The
giveaway that Helmholtz never hesitated to put forward a lie for evil purposes is his lumping of Kepler into the phrase "arithmetical mysticism." As
Helmholtz's circle fumed, it was precisely due to the fact that Kepler never
had anything to do with corrupt "arithmetical" approaches which drove them
to fiercely hate Kepler and his legacyfor which Bach was a leading representative.
The method of Kepler, Bach and all others associated with the humanist
current in European history, was that of constructive geometry, in which the
only self-evident basis for knowledge of the universe is the least action of
conical rotation. The astonishing fraud of Helmholtz's construct will best be
appreciated after one has read Kepler's works; for this situation, the following comment from Kepler's own Harmony of the Spheres will simply set the
record straight.
In the appendix, Kepler compares his great work to the three books on
harmony of the astronomer Ptolemy. Kepler states:

Since Ptolemy, along with the ancients, seeks the foundations of

harmony in abstract numbers, whereas I deny the significance
of the pure numbers; and I, in place of their named numbers,
i.e., things which are governed by those numbers, pose the
regular plane figures and the divisions of the circle which serve
for their construction as the principle of harmony; so did I have
to organize this book differently than Ptolemy organized his.
Similarly, in an earlier location, Kepler states,
Numbers have nothing in themselves, which they would not
have received from quantities, or from other actual and real
essences, or from actions of the mind.
Soon after release of the disinforming Sensations of Tones, the British
Museum hired a tone-deaf linguistician named Alexander Ellis, to translate
Helmholtz's tract. As part of his assignment, Ellis was paid by the British
Museum to codify a vast amount of historical "evidence" on tuning practices
since the beginning of European history. Ellis's data on this subject, establishing a "historical" school of musical practice, in opposition to the method
of constructive geometry associated with Kepler, is the source of the massive
confusion on this subject today.
Helmholtz also disagreed with Kepler's conviction that human hearing
perfectly conformed to the geometrically provable well-tempered system.
Helmholtz argued that the human ear is very imperfectand that music
theory should be directed toward dissecting how tones "really work," since
man can't hear them. This section of Sensations of Tones so disgusted the
great mathematical physicist Bernhard Riemann, that he told his friends that
disproving Helmholtz's theory of the ear was the most important work he
had to complete in the final months of his life.
Helmholtz first voiced the doctrine later seized upon by anti-Semite Richard
Wagner, that music is hermetically sealed off from all other human activity:
"Music alone," he scrawled, "finds an infinitely rich but totally shapeless
plastic material in the tones of the human voice and artificial musical
instruments, which must be shaped on purely artistic principles, unfettered
by any reference to utility as in architecture, or to the imitation of nature as
in the fine arts, or to the existing symbolical meaning of sounds as in poetry.
There is a greater and more absolute freedom in the use of the material for
music than for any other of the arts."

Like Wagner, Helmholtz was a racist: "What is the smallest interval admissible in a scale," he wrote, "is a question which different nations have
answered differently according to the different direction of their taste, and
perhaps also according to the different delicacy of their ear." The wretched
view, that musical "taste" is biologically transmissible, was later enthusiastically endorsed by the Nazis and by the Russian Empire.
Today, in academic circles, Alexander Ellis is the godfather overshadowing
most work on the history of pitch standards. Arthur Mendel, cited above, is
considered his leading protege.
It is this Helmholtz circle which has invented the tale that Bach was a
proponent of a system which set the relative distances between pitches, but
that he didn't care on what central value the whole system was based. In the
minds of these liberal academics, the belief that relative values are admissible, but absolute values are "totalitarian" is a form of brainwashing, completely contrary to the outlook of a J.S. Bach.
It is time to burst the credibility of this tale, and to make clear that any
journalist who hurls the label pro-Nazi against those dedicated to an absolute
standard of pitch, is probably a simple lunatic. It is time for the evidence to
be assembled showing that Bach fought for a pitch standard; and that
moreover, this standard was based on the same geometric principle as the
standard adopted by Mozart, Beethoven, and called for by LaRouche and the
Schiller Institute today. A mere sample of the type of evidence readily
available is summarized below.
Bach's Mission
Johann Sebastian Bach was a scientist whose work was shaped by the same
effort that produced the "continental science," against which Helmholtz
pitted himself in the nineteenth century. Bach's life is a testimonial to the
way a man can adhere, fiercely, to scientific principles he shares with God,
even when there exists tremendous "everyday" pressure to let those
principles go.

Figure 1: The Six Species of the Human Singing Voice

All great music is based on the principles of register shift, as they occur in
the soprano voice.

Throughout his life, Bach wrote music to be played at the classical pitch of
A = 432, and worked with instrument specialists to produce instruments at
that pitch. Of specimens of instruments used by Bach that survive today,
many appear to have been built in the range of A = 422; in many cases, when
their temperatures rise after being played for awhile, the pitches come up to
a level A = 427-432, which is the largest acceptable range of variation for a
fixed system of tuning.
Furthermore, according to Bach's son Carl Phillip Emanuel, and to other
contemporaries, whenever Bach played on an organ whose the pitch
diverged from this range, he would instantly transpose the score.
The view that musical instruments should be constructed to imitate an
idealized choir of singing children and adults had been introduced in
Germany decades before Bach was even born. Nonetheless, in Bach's time,
chaos hung over Europe in respect to practices of tuning. A tone sung in
Venice, and called there an "A," would be named by many Germans as a "Bflat," and by a Frenchman as a "C." The problem, moreover, did not merely
exist from country to country. Wide divergences in tuning existed from
town to town, and in many towns of Germany, the church organs were tuned
close to the high pitch of Venice, while the wind instruments, imported from
France, were tuned low!
Bach and his closest circle of friends never accepted this status quo as their
starting point for practice. Over a period of decades, they fought for a
tuning based on scientific and moral principles, and Bach, personally, played
the most critical role in getting the job done.
One of the testimonials to Bach's effort in this direction appeared in 1752,
two years after his death. Johann Joachim Quantz, the most influential
representative for music policy at the court of Frederick the Great, called for
the establishment of a fixed system of tuning, in a widely circulated manual
on how to play the flute. There is little question that Quantz's call was a
result of an historic visit made by Bach to the Berlin court in 1747, an event
that has been immortalized by Bach's composing of a six-part fugue and
canons for the King, as a "Musical Offering." The King talked about the
visit for decades.
In his flute manual, Quantz writes:
The diversity of pitches used for tuning is most detrimental to
music in general. In vocal music, it produces the inconvenience

that singers performing in a place where low tuning is used are

hardly able to make use of arias that were written for them in a
place where a high pitch was employed, or vice-versa. For this
reason it is much to be hoped that a single pitch for tuning may
be introduced at all places.
Similarly, six years after Bach's death, the town of Leipzig installed a new
organ at St. Thomas's Church, where Bach had been cantor for twenty-seven
years; for the first time in Leipzig, the pitch of the organ was the same as
that for which Bach composed for human voice.
The Task Defined: The Role of Gottfried Leibniz
Bach's conviction that musical practice had to be made scientific was
instilled during his youth, by the towering scientist-statesman Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz. As a youth, Bach was brought to study and sing at the St.
Michaelis school, in the kingdom of Hanover, where Leibniz was the
director of education. Leibniz continued the work of Kepler, and inspired
every political and scientific breakthrough over the following century and a
half that was hated and fought against by the circles of Helmholtz.
In his library, Bach had a pamphlet written by Leibniz in 1707, entitled "On
Wisdom." Usually, Leibniz wrote in French or Latin, but this pamphlet was
part of a series addressed, in a very personal way, to the German nation. It
included a challenge to the musicians of Germany, to help bring true happiness to the men and women of their nation; it urged that such happiness
depended on showing them how to perfect themselves, with the example of
beautiful music. The power of musicians to accomplish this, Leibniz
warned, could only develop if musical practice were made more scientific.
The pamphlet stated, in part:
Wisdom is nothing other, than the science of happiness itself,
thus teaching us how happiness is to be achieved.
Happiness is a condition of a continuous joy Joy is a desire,
which the soul feels as part of itself. The desire is a feeling of a
perfection, or an excellence, be it within ourselves, or in
something other; . . .

Figure 2: Astronomical Definition of C=256

The pitch of Middle C at 256 cycles per second has a uniquely defined
astronomical value. The period of one cycle (l/256th of a second) can be
constructed as follows: Take the period of one rotation of the Earth. Divide
this period by 24 ( = 2 x 3 x 4), to get one hour. Divide this by 60 ( = 3 x 4 x 5)
to get one minute and again by 60 to obtain one second. Now divide that
second by 256 ( = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2). These divisions are all derived
by circular action.

The image of such perfection, impressed upon us, makes it so

that something of that is also implanted within us and awakened. . . .
We do not always take notice, wherein the perfection of pleasing things rests, or on behalf of what perfection within us things
serve, even as our mental processesthough not our understandinghas feeling of them. We say in general: It is, I know
not what, which pleases in this matter, we name that Sympathy;
but they who research the causes of things, find the reason more
often than not, and grasp, that something lies behind that,
admittedly unnoticed by us, but nevertheless to our benefit.

Music gives a beauteous example of this. Everything which

rings, has a tremor, or a back-and-forth-going motion in it, as
we see in the case of strings; and thus, what rings, makes
invisible beats; when such proceed not unnoticed, but in an
orderly fashion, and with a certain interchange, they are
pleasant, as we observe also otherwise a certain interchange of
long and short syllables and the coming together of rhyming in
verses, which possess a certain silent music in themselves. The
beats upon a drum, the pulse and the cadence in dances, and
similar other motions according to measure and rule, receive
their pleasureableness from an ordering, for all ordering appeals
to mental processes, and an even-measured, though invisible
ordering is discoverable also in the beats, or motions of trembling of strings, pipes, or bells, caused artistically, yes, even of
the air, which thereby is made to excite evenly, and which then
also creates within us, by means of the hearing apparatus, an
echo agreeing in tone, according to which also our living soul
excites. Thus is music so suited to move our mental processes,
though in general such a primary goal has been insufficiently
observed and examined.
Leibniz's correspondence shows that Leibniz viewed musical science as a
political organizing tool. In a letter to Conrad Henfling, a scientific cothinker and friend, he wrote:
Our understanding seeks the simplest measurable thing, and we
find this in music, even if those who do not know this, do not
realize [it is there.] I have noticed an entire series of typical
passages, and so to speak, phrases, in music, which are able to
be the most obvious cause for the excitement of the passions. . .
As you, so I, believe, that this science is not yet sufficiently
grounded and cultivated, particularly the science of its practice,
in respect to the art, by means of music to move even the world
of feelings of the most rough-hewn person. We can proceed
with music in two fashions. One way is like with physics,
mathematically provisioned through a geometry which explains
the laws of force, and thereby strives to draw out what the
figures, the magnitudes and the motions of the portions might
mean. The chemist does not go so far, because he is all too
limited, as he must conclude everything a priori, and take what

nature offers as a given, and use it the way one uses acid for
engraving. It is in this way that the practical musician uses the
phrases, about which I spoke, which are similar to the more
sensitive [physical] components. . . .
Theory must explain, how these elements are composed and
wherein the effect of these sensitive elements exists in practice.
Theory must show the pathway, where it is otherwise formed
from instinct.

Saint Thomas's Square in Leipzig, with St. Thomas's Church in the right
foreground. Here, Bach was cantor for nearly three decades in the first half
of the eighteenth century; Mozart visited here to study Bach's manuscripts;
here, Beethoven's teacher, Christian Neefe, was trained by Bach's successor as
cantor.

Bach and Kuhnau

Although he was employed as a practical musician, Bach's work was never
tainted with the flaw of treating music like a known chemical compound.
He dedicated himself to examining "the causes of things," which is why he
and his associates resolved upon their efforts to establish an absolute system
of pitch.

One of the people with whom Bach collaborated, starting early in his life,
was Johann Kuhnau, cantor of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. When
Kuhnau had assumed direction of St. Thomas School in 1702, the situation
he found was typical for much of Germany. The organ was tuned close to
Venetian pitch, somewhere between A = 460 and 466. This pitch was called
"choir pitch" or "cornet pitch," and it was widely recognized that it was
impossible for humans to sing well at this pitch. Johann Mattheson, the
Hamburg-based organist who was a bitter rival of Bach's, but who was privy
to the debates of the age, wrote in the 1720s:
Choir tone . . . is so . . . difficult for singers and unsuitable for
oboes, flutes, and other new instruments.
Georg Muffat, a leading woodwind player and composer from the late
1600s, who had worked in France, described the turn of the century situation
as follows:
The pitch to which the French tune their instruments is usually
a whole tone lower than our German one, and in operas, even
one and half tones lower. They find the German pitch too high,
too screechy, and too forced. If it were up to me to choose a
pitch, and there were no other considerations, I would choose
the former. . . . This [lower] pitch lacks nothing in liveliness
along with its sweetness.
The problem which Kuhnau faced, of course, was that simply choosing
French or Venetian pitch, did not answer what the correct criteria were upon
which that decision had to be made.
Kuhnau was not only a musician: he was a thorough scholar of ancient
languages and a mathematician. The problem he faced was not new, and the
solution he chose had actually been first tried in Germany in the early part of
the previous century.
In part, the wide divergence of tuning across Europe was one outcome of the
split between Catholicism and Protestantism. Catholic Rome and France
had, generally, the lowest pitches, while the German Protestants tuned their
organs high to symbolize the importance of the church. In the early 1600s,
the Protestant composer Michael Praetorius intervened to correct the damage
this was doing to singing, by introducing a practice already in use at
Catholic chapels around Prague and Bohemia.

Both for reasons of cost and political pressure, it was generally not possible
to alter the organ pitch. What Praetorius did was to "transpose" the parts.
To perform a piece in the key of C, for example, he would have the organ
play a whole step lower, in B-flat or even a third lower, at A. Praetorius
viewed human singing as the standard for musical practice. This was
consistent with the handbook he wrote on musical instruments. Returning to
a practice started during the Italian Renaissance, Praetorius grouped musical
instruments in "families," composed of recorders, cornets, viols, etc., in
which each member of the family was intended to imitate one human voice
type, such as the tenor, soprano, or bass. For Praetorius, the first criterion
for setting the pitch for performance of a piece was the physiology of human
singing, not the structure of instruments.
Kuhnau, who knew of Praetorius's work, wrote in 1717:
Almost from the moment I took over the direction of church
music [in 1702], I eliminated the use of cornet pitch [A = 460466] and introduced Cammerton, which is a second or a minor
third lower, depending on the circumstances.
The primary constraint which caused the pitch to be varied at that time was
that the woodwinds, imported from France, were built at the French-Roman
standard. In 1714, Bach, who lived in Weimar, but who worked with
Kuhnau on repairing organs, came to Leipzig to perform a cantata, Nun
komm der Heiden Heiland. Up to this point, Bach, just like Kuhnau, always
wrote his cantatas in two keys, either a whole step or third below the organ
pitch. In 1714, when they entered into more intensive collaboration, Bach
wrote five cantatas featuring oboe "obbligato" accompaniments to soprano
solos, in which for the first time, the oboe part is only one whole step above
the organ part. The oboe was manufactured in Germany, not in France.
One modern-day historian who has succeeded in gathering useful information on this collaboration between Bach and Kuhnau states that the events of
1714 "all suggest the possibility that a pitch standard was consciously agreed
upon among German musicians, beginning the second decade of the
eighteenth century."
Later, Quantz provided a very clear indication of the preferred pitch of the
German composers, when faced with the choice of Venetian or Roman pitch.
He wrote:

I do not wish to argue for the very low French chamber pitch,
although it is the most advantageous for the transverse flute, the
oboe, the bassoon, and some other instruments; but neither can
I approve of the very high Venetian pitch, since in it the wind
instruments sound much too disagreeable. Therefore I consider
the best pitch to be the so-called [German] A-chamber pitch,
which is a minor third lower than the old choir pitch. It is
neither too low nor too high, but the mean between the French
and the Venetian; and in it both the stringed and the wind
instruments can produce their proper effect.
The mean between the French and Venetian pitch is A = 429.
Further evidence that Bach's circle was associated with a broad effort to
adopt the C = 256 standard comes from France. In 1713, parallel to
Kuhnau's efforts, the French scientist Joseph Sauveur completed more than a
decade of experiments in waves, establishing the field of acoustics. Sauveur
concluded that C = 256 was the only correct pitch, revising an earlier view
that C should be tuned to 100 cycles per second, and presented the work to
circles with whom Leibniz would have had access.
Elementary Principles
Above all, Bach's music is the best proof that his criteria for tuning were the
same as Mozart and Beethoven's. There are two features to his compositions
which show that C = 256 was the pitch standard from which he composed:
first, the placement of the registral shifts in the musical lines; second, the
highest and lowest notes which he wrote for the vocal sections (that is, soprano, alto, tenor, bass) in his choral works. This span between the highest
and lowest note for each voice is called the vocal range.
There is an unlimited number of musical examples that illustrate this
principle. We take three examples here.
The first example, shown in Figure 3, is from an instrumental composition,
the Well-Tempered Clavier, written for keyboard. Even though it is written
for keyboard, the piece is a very transparent illustration, (in idealized,
instrumental form) of vocal species characterized by unique register
passages.

Figure 3: From Prelude I, of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier

This phrase illustrates the vocal principles in composition. The highest note
in the soprano line, A, is "answered" by introducing F-sharp, the note at
which the shift occurs from the first to the second register for the soprano
voice.

The piece opens with three voices, beginning on C (male voice), E (mezzosoprano) and G (soprano). The soprano voice moves the fastest, (has the
most number of notes). Each voice begins in the second-register position.
The composition opens with an elementary four-measure statement, in
which the two lower voices each get the chance to move, momentarily, to
their first register. The second four measures "answer" the first four.
To create this apposition, the soprano must do something new: the soprano
rises to A, a third-register position, and then "answers" itself by introducing
the singularity F-sharp. This tone is a singularity, because it is not part of
the "family" of tones in which the piece began, which was the "key" of Cmajor, a grouping which has no sharps or flats. However, the F-sharp must
be in the second register to be heard in respect to the first four measures. If
the tuning is below C = 256, this tone falls over, into the first register, and is
not part of the first four-measure statement. The interconnected action

between registral and harmonic change is a fundamental feature of Bach's

method of composition; this phrase has to be "sung" at C = 256, or it would
not have been written this way.
Figure 4: From Bach's Mass in B-Minor

The bass voice ascends, on the word "ascends," to the high note E. At current
high levels of tuning, a chorister would strain his voice attempting to sing this
note.

Not only the lowest limits for tuning, but also the highest limits for tuning
are shown by Bach's choral works. In Figure 4, an excerpt from Bach's
Mass in B-Minor, the bass section of the chorus, singing on the words
"ascends to heaven," rises to an E, a third-register pitch for the bass. Bach
expects all bass singers, not just highly trained virtuosi, to be able to sing
this tone.
Such writing shows that Bach would never have composed at the value A =
440, (the pitch endorsed by Helmholtz), or at the even higher pitches
fashionable today. At such values, the bass voice is horribly strained and
cannot properly phrase.
How low did Bach expect his chorus to sing? In his four-part writing for
chorus, the second voice, alto, was sung by boys and, in some cases, women.
In earlier times, this voice part had been sung by men (with higher "tenor"
voices), and would descend even lower than the pitches indicated in Figure
5, an example taken from Bach's St. Matthew Passion. The voices are
descending deeply here to create suspense on the text, "the murdering
blood." The F-sharp in the second measure, alto part, is near the absolute
limit where this voice part, executed by boys, not men, could be expected to
produce a tone. The same is true of the final E in the last measure, bass part.

Figure 5: From Bach's St. Matthew Passion

As the chorus sings the text, "the murdering blood" (mrdrische Blut), the
alto and bass voices descend to the lowest tones of their vocal range. At a
pitch below Middle C = 256, only the best of professional singers could
properly produce these notes.

Bach's Legacy
It was Bach's campaign on behalf of scientific criteria for musical composition, including a fixed standard of pitch, which laid the groundwork for
momentous achievements by a subsequent generation of composers. In
1722, Kuhnau passed away, and one year later, Bach was chosen as his
successor as cantor of the Leipzig St. Thomas School. His work established
the school as a wellspring for scientific work for all posterity.
Bach's successor at the St. Thomas School, Adam Hiller, for example,
educated Christian Neefe, the musician and philosopher who educated the
child Ludwig van Beethoven. In 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited
the St. Thomas School, and joyously peered over the manuscripts and parts
stored there. It was one of the only places where Bach's works could be
found.
One of the testimonials to Bach's efforts were the organs built during his
lifetime. From time to time, Bach was invited to give organ concerts in
Dresden, events which became famous. Some of these concerts were
performed on organs built by Gottfried Silbermann, a proud and meticulous
craftsman with whom Bach had good-natured feuds on the principles of
tuning. Silbermann would build a keyboard, Bach would try it out; Bach

would criticize the instrument, Silbermann would bristleand then adopt

Bach's ideas. As a result of this back and forth, Silbermann built two organs
in Dresden during Bach's lifetime, both of which were set at the Cammerton
pitch adopted by Bach and Kuhnau, and for which no transpositions were
required.
Let the Helmholtzians rant and rave. The lid is being ripped off their frauds,
and the method of scientific inquiry is rightfully being established as the
basis for beauty in musical form.