Pitch is the most studied and taught dimension of music in Western societies, from the pitch-centered music notation that children begin with up to the classic “scale-fi rst” studies of scholars. Every note that reaches the ear and is defi ned by the brain consists of regular vibrations. They pulse through the ear so predictably that we can instantly decipher their “location”—in a fraction of a second—as part of a range of sounds we identify. The standard way to talk about them is “cycles per second” (cps), or “hertz” (hz), honoring Heinrich Hertz, an early physicist. Orchestras around the world usually tune all their instruments from the same standard pitch, A, defi ned as 440 cps. But all you have to know is that a couple of hundred years earlier, they tuned to 415, or even lower, to understand that pitch is a relative idea, varying locally over time and space as part of deep cultural patterns of listening. 440 is an “absolute” pitch, but most folk music relies more on “relative” pitch, as in early Europe, where each town organist might set his own pitch and tuning system (distances between pitches), depending on factors such as weather or local custom. As a scholar explains his experience in Afghanistan, it was clear that no one cared how many cps the local lutes were tuned to, but they wanted the distance between the pitches of the strings to be fixed. Once, a musician-bootmaker named Ghafur Khan put me on display in his shop, as his student. He showed passersby in the bazaar what he had taught me by untuning the two strings on his dutar, then having me tune the instrument. It wasn’t hard to pick any pitch I liked and just tune the strings to the correct interval, a perfect fourth in Western terms. Of course, the pitch had to be “relatively” accurate, since if it were too high or too low, the instrument would sound sour, and the foreigner would look inept.
Folk Music and Historical Memoirs
