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Thank you a lot for participating, you are great. 😉 I hope you find the other variations interesting.

This is a pretty-much-completed draft that wound up on the cutting room floor for my recent string quartet project The Arcana. I liked it well enough, but felt it didn't really fit in with the other movements for that suite. So here it is! A dark little thing, just about 3 minutes. All comments welcome! I hope you like it 🙂

I think if I lived in the Baroque era, I would have a different sense for pitch than I do now. That said, this is more of a theoretical question: whether I play on a keyboard or a string instrument, whether I'm in the present or the past, if I'm a good performer, I would play the notes based on muscle memory, rather than by ear, because when it comes to performing, I would play what I practiced regardless of the frequency. However, if somehow modern me were transported back to the early 1700s, and I only listened to music rather than performed music, then it would probably have a strange effect on me, hearing so many different tunings. Obviously, I'm more accustomed to the modern centralized standard tuning system, so hearing everybody playing at a different tuning would probably be confusing for me, if I did not have access to a score. (On the other hand, though, if I knew the piece that they were playing, I would know roughly how much different the tuning is.)

I love this part. Great contrast between the first part (Have you listened to Philip Glass violin concertos?) and the final part, which is a bit sad.

I like the dark (sometimes almost creepy especially near the end with the high tremolos) atmosphere you create here.

Yes... yes, it really does exist. Somehow, I have a hard time believing that Tchaikovsky didn't have perfect pitch, but whatever. I suppose you are right. They way I always saw it is that since both the number of composer and the number of people with perfect pitch is so small (at least compared with the rest of the world population), I assumed that a lot of those composers would have it. I guess I thought that there are more people with perfect pitch than there are composers, but you seem to say that it's the other way around! Or, at least, it's more complicated than that. Personally, when I hear a piece that's performed in A=432 hz, I can still tell what key it's in, and can identify all the notes. However, when I hear a piece that's in "Baroque tuning" (really, just tuning it down a half-step), I have to understand that the piece has been tuned that way already, in order to identify the key. Also, there are times when I listen to an old recording of a piece, especially from a old film, and unless I actually have the original score for the music, I can only guess they key based on the A=440 or 432 method (though often times, it turns out that the recording is a half-step higher 🤔). Take this recording, for example: Since it's a score video, you have the notes in front of you, and thus you would assume that the audio would match the notes in frequency. But here, this is not the case: the recording (for some reason) is actually tuned a half-step LOWER. Thus, if you didn't have perfect pitch (to 440 or 432 hz), you would have no way of knowing that the tuning is off.