Referenced Sounds
This sound recording is of the UNCSA (University of North Carolina School of the Arts) Symphony Orchestra tuning before beginning a concert at the Stevens Center, located in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which is UNCSA’s best concert hall. When an orchestra tunes, every musician adjusts the pitches of their instrument to ensure that when everyone plays simultaneously, the overall sound is uniform. Tuning is an essential part of any musical performance, but it is especially important for a large ensemble like a symphony orchestra. If just one member of an orchestra is not in tune with the rest of the orchestra, the whole sound becomes so unpleasant that even the least musically trained audience member will notice. When an orchestra tunes, an oboist typically begins by playing an “A” with a frequency of 440 Hz. Then, the other wind players will play the same note (or a note that is a certain interval above or below the oboe’s “A”), and will adjust their notes’ pitches until they are in unison with the oboe. Next, the string players will do the same. All parts of this process are demonstrated in this sound recording.
In this recording we hear a frenchhorn player with piano accompaniment performing Mozart Horn concerto No. 2, second movement. A concerto is a three movement piece for a solo player with some kind of accompaniment, usually an orchestral accompaniment. Mozart wrote four concertos for the french horn. These four concertos are some of the most standard repertoire for the french horn. The high school student is performing in performance hour in UNCSA’s Crawford Hall. Performance hour is held for one hour every week and it is a class that all high school students and freshman and sophomore undergraduate students must attend. This class gives students the opportunity to perform for their peers and also gives students a chance to hear their peers grow as musicians. Crawford Hall is UNCSAs largest concert hall. It seats 560 people and is the only hall on campus that is large enough for a full orchestra.
This is a recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in C Major, the first piece in his set of pedagogical piano books titled “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” In music history, Bach and his music hold great significance, as he was the last great Baroque composer, his death having marked the end of the Baroque era. In this performance, however, the prelude is played on a guitar in the key of D Major. It shows the interplay between the history of the music and the performance of it. The original piece was written for a well-tempered piano, a different tuning method than the even-tempered guitar, not to mention it was performed in a different key. This just goes to show how older music is constantly being reinterpreted to fit the times with great success, even though the piece was written almost three hundred years ago. Performance is always being adapted to fit the times, and this is no different.
This recording was made in Watson Hall, located on the main campus of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). In this recording we hear Hana Kim tuning her violin before she is about to perform in a violin masterclass. Tuning is an extremely important aspect of any instrumental performance; it is vital for all of the musicians to be tuned correctly in order to produce a unified sound that is in tune and pleasant for the performer, as well as the audience members. The piano gives an "A" (frequency of 440 Hz.) to Hana, who then tunes her "A" string to match the sound of the piano's pitch. she then plays her "A" and "D" simultaneously. She then uses her "A" string to help tune her "D" string to a perfect fifth below the "A". She uses this same process in order to tune her "G" and "E" string.