I think your points about pitch impacting tempo, dynamics, and phrasing are extremely deep and open onto the basic questions of musical interpretation. I appreciate your forcing me to sit with them. I wonder whether the answers are to some degree unknowable, particularly if the artist is dead.
I'm reminded of the harpsichordists vs the pianists on Bach. Is it Bach if you're playing it on an instrument he never imagined? Or to choose a directer analogue - European pitch varied wildly before A=440 became the international standard, with artists as eminent as Verdi joining the c=256 movement. Is Furtwängler's 440 Otello really Otello, if Verdi wanted 432?
I think that historically informed performances are extremely rich and rewarding, and the movement has produced a lot of knowledge that's deeply worthwhile and gratifying. But I think it also has its limits, and that we modify recordings all the time, through the tuning of DACs, amps, and transducers—to say nothing of the great EQ revolution currently underway. I think that the artifice of listening to the Mass in B minor with my KSE1500 while jetting across the Atlantic should not be lost either.
I don't necessarily think that Bach is unknowable or unreachable outside the Sunday morning pews of an eighteenth-century Lutheran church. But I think the comparison gives us some context around the acoustic re-production of sound. And as always, Jason's Scotch Mod is an important baseline: we are ourselves so changeable and subjective, day to day, hour to hour, that objective experience will always be a challenging hill.
This kind of pitch alteration is a novel change, and one I'm grateful to Mike for championing. But it's just one of many ways we remove ourselves from composition and from performance.
