Why Does Scordatura Change More Than Pitch?

Scordatura means tuning one or more strings away from an instrument’s usual tuning. Treating it as merely “changing a few notes” misses its real interest. A change in tension also alters vibration, open-string resonance and the physical feedback of the bow. Chords that were awkward may fall naturally across open strings and double stops, while familiar finger positions produce unfamiliar sounding pitches.

Biber’s Mystery Sonatas assign a different tuning to almost every sonata. At times the notation still represents the gestures of ordinary tuning: the player reads where the fingers should go but hears a different set of pitches. Notation therefore becomes not only a picture of sound but also an instruction for movement. Sustained open-string resonance can colour a key as unusually bright or dark, an effect that cannot be reproduced simply by transposing the melody.

Listen for two things: whether chords gain an open, continuous resonance that standard tuning would make difficult, and whether the colour becomes more immediate when a phrase touches an open string. This is why scordatura matters. It binds composition, instrument design and the performer’s body together. Retuning one string changes not only a pitch coordinate, but the entire field of available gestures and resonances.

https://imslp.org/wiki/Mystery_%28Rosary%29_Sonatas_%28Biber%2C_Heinrich_Ignaz_Franz_von%29
https://blogs.loc.gov/music/2013/08/biber-fever-baroque-remix/
https://www.yamaha.com/en/musical_instrument_guide/violin/mechanism/mechanism002.html