OPEN A

When Science Dictates Art

I begin my warmup exercise, playing just five notes back and forth, arm high, bow straight, with perfect technique and form. Suddenly my teacher stops me and says, “hand it over”. He takes my violin, retunes it, and proceeds to play the five simple notes himself, but producing a tone sweeter and more resonant than I thought was humanly possible from my instrument. How was this possible?!

“It’s better to be sharp than out of tune.” This joke has become popular in the music world, but the joke quickly becomes harmful to our music when we take it to heart and apply it to our practice. In the past, as I furiously learned concertos for competitions and passages of Mahler for seating auditions, I felt I had no need or simply no time to match every note to a tuner, so I practiced carelessly sharp, always good enough to get by and meet my deadline. And as I went on this way for decades, slowly but surely, my ear had trained itself in this flawed manner. What I thought was perfect pitch had quickly become relative pitch, A#s became As in my head, and the whole system was ruined by about 26 HZ.

But today I learned that the Open A of 440 HZ is not open to interpretation. When fooled around with by even a few HZ, it comes at the price of the sound quality. The violin is a product of art and science — created by a series of formulas, that when artfully pieced together by the luthiers who spend countless hours placing each piece of carefully measured wood in its precise location, will allow a violinist to produce a beautiful tone. As a musician it is my duty to honor this scientific achievement and its maker by tuning it properly and placing the fingers in their appropriate relative positions.

Because no matter how hard I convince myself otherwise, a sharper Open A will never resonate more brilliantly on my violin than the perfect 440 HZ that it was built for.