The program "Absolute Pitch" acquaints audience with the brightest phenomena of world musical culture. Unknown angles in well-known, rediscovering of undeservedly forgotten, solving unanswered riddles - all this is in the program "Absolute Pitch".

We often estimate how famous musicians sing or play violins or other instruments not only by their concerts, but also by numerous recordings. It is perfect that recording systems have preserved for us the recordings of the performance of the prominent Rachmaninov or other great musicians of the 20th century. Unfortunately, we will never know how great musicians like Mozart or Beethoven, Liszt or Paganini played. After all, the technical means to perpetuate their art did not exist. In the era of technological progress, we do not even think about what a long way humanity has traveled in search of opportunities to encapsulate sound.

The Museum Collection senior associate V.А. Lebedev reported how a person learned to record and play back music and, subsequently, any sound - human speech, singing, the sounding of various musical instruments and whole orchestras, the sounds of nature. The first attempts to automatically reproduce musical pieces, undertaken in ancient Greece, Byzantium and Persia, led to the emergence of self-playing organs, the descendants of which are barrel and fairground organs. Over time, the way of automatizing other musical instruments was found, the last and most advanced of which was player piano. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, devices for recording and reproducing sound - phonographs and gramophones - were invented and widely developed. During the 20^th century, gramophone recording reached perfection, while phonographs and playing pianos fell off the scene by the 1930s.

Link to publication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1VpR7zSPKk

TV channel "Kultura". Absolute Pitch Program
Release dated 10.10.2021