Posted by Rick Denney on March 10, 2003 at 00:17:48:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Different Question About CC vs. BBb posted by Klaus on March 09, 2003 at 22:35:19:
Klaus, it is not a social goal to avoid the beats of out-of-tune pitches. Not everyone in a community band will have the hearing or the ability to play as well in tune as you do, and if you expect such, then you really cannot expect to play in purely amateur ensembles. And to insist on your own tuning concept in competition with others just tears down the ensemble for the sake of making an academic point. However right the point may be, destruction is the result. You may have the upper hand in demanding those with whom you play to conform to your tuning concept, which I'm sure is the correct one, but I, like most people, do not.
Therefore, it makes sense for a returning amateur to play an instrument with tendencies shared by his amateur musician friends. This reduces the amount of effort required to avoid noticeably out-of-tune unisons within the section. This may not meet your standard, but then you will have to live with that, my friend.
Your solution of sending players with intonation problems home to sort them out would quickly weed out the musicians with intonation problems from the band. In many, many cases, you'd have to send home 50 amateurs who all have problems, and the two or three ex-professionals that remain will be left to play in-tune duets or trios.
Following your advice, the original poster would get a CC and learn to play in tune before joining a band, at which time he would encourage the others to play in tune so that he could be in tune as well. That's not how it works. Instead, he gets an instrument, joins a band, and then over many years works on playing in tune, just like the folks sitting next to him. It is not a perfect world, and we accommodate imperfections as best we can if we want to live in it.
I regularly listen to professional peformances and have done so for the last number of decades. I believe I know an in-tune ensemble when I hear one. But I fight intonation demons myself, and probably always will.
By the way, which "in tune" do you want all players to conform to? Is that D on the staff, in the key of Bb, to be played according to equal temperament, just temperament, the pythagoran scale, or what? It would be quite an accomplishment for many ensembles, even some professional ones, for all the players to agree on any of the above, let alone play the correct one.
Rick "who knoes professional CC tuba players who adjust their pitches to match BBb instruments, for the good of the group" Denney