Tuning forks as time travel machines: pitch standardisation and historicism

ABSTRACT

Recent research at the intersection of music and science has described standards of musical pitch as the result of an increasing circulation of actors and artefacts and the rise of science in the musical field; like the metre, the kilo, or the second, the unified musical measure was invented to create a unified space. I argue here that there was another key factor in standardisation: the canonisation of music. As scores acquired unprecedented authority, fixing pitch over time became both a practical necessity and a constituent part of national musical canons, complete with sonic relics of a glorious past. This interest in history ultimately fostered the production of an archive of diverse sonic worlds, which contradicted the project of creating a uniform measure. Even today, pitch remains a “sonic thing” that escapes objectification within a unique material and immaterial standard. Analysing how pitch was invested with the ability to reference specific time periods, I show that tuning forks and other technologies embodying pitch became time travel machines, attesting to the entanglement of sonic standardisation with the constitution of the Western musical heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• Acoustics
• standardisation
• historicism
• global politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A 440 was introduced for the first time in the United States by the percussion maker John Calhoun Deagan at the end of World War I. In 1925, the American Music Industries Chamber of Commerce adopted it as a national standard, and in 1935, the Bureau of Standards first broadcast it over the radio.

2. From the Surrey History Centre, Broadwood Piano Manufacture, 2185/49/31 and 32. The programme of this outdoor concert was: William Byrd (1543–1623), “This Sweet and Merry Month of May”; John Wilbye, “Sweet Honey-sucking Bees”; Thomas Tomkins, “See, See, the Shepherd’s Queen”; “Brigg Fair,” folk song arranged by Percy Grainger; “Wassail” and “The Turtle Dove,” two folk songs arranged by Vaughan Williams; Anon., “Cuckow”; Orlande de Lassus, “Thou Knowest Fairest Maiden” and “Un jour vis un foulon”; Orlando Gibbons, “What Is Our Life?” It was followed by an indoor performance of popular songs and one early nineteenth-century song. “Reception at Lyne. Capel. Surrey to meet the Delegates of the International Committee on the Standardisation of Concert Pitch (International Standards Association) invited to England by the British Standards Institution. Saturday, May 13^th, 1939,” Surrey History Centre, Broadwood Piano Manufacture, 2185/JB/71/4a.

3. “The success of the Conference was a happy vindication of the decision to go forward with the plans for bringing the delegates of the different countries together, despite the troubled nature of times. The delegates further consorted in complete and amicable accord on the occasions of visits to the Acoustical Laboratory by the kind invitation of the Director, and to Lyne, Capel, Surrey, at the invitation of Captain Broadwood, whose beautiful house and estate, in all the glory of the spring foliage, formed a lovely setting for his genial hospitality and the delightful unaccompanied old English melodies of the famous Tudor Singers under the direction of Mr. Cuthbert Bates” (Kaye 1939, 905–6).

4. On the conference, see (Gribenski 2018, 181–84).

5. Myles Jackson offered the first account of the history of pitch standardisation (in nineteenth-century Germany) to link the invention of “normal” As with other processes of standardisation in the fields of science and technology (Jackson 2006, 183–230).

6. On this question, see especially (Ellis 2000).

7. For the first, see especially: (Norton 1995; Gooday 2004; Porter 1996; Schaffer 1998, 149–80). For the second, see, for instance: (Yates and Murphy 2019; Lampland and Starr 2009; Brunsson and Jacobson 2000).

8. De La Fage 1859, 65–66. Quoted by Hervé 2010. Rossini’s first opera to be performed at the Paris Opera was Le Siège de Corinthe (premiered on 9 October 1926).

9. “Religious music and dramatic music suffer the movement without being able to defend themselves against it, or trying to escape it” (Rapports 1859, 10).

10. Recipients of such letters included the Windsor & Eton Royal Glee & Madrigal Society, the London Sacred Harmonic Society, the Musical Society of London, the Vocal Association, the Canterbury Musical Union, Trinity College Dublin University Choral Society, the Philharmonic Society, and a few soloists (Campaign 1860).

11. Heschel’s letter was published a few weeks later (Herschel 1859).

12. One of the main promoters of the French pitch in the United States in the 1860s was John Sullivan Dwight. Many articles published in his Journal of Music reflect his attempt to introduce the overseas standard in Boston.

13. The first edition of On the Sensations of Tone was published in 1875. On Ellis’s central role as a source for recent studies on performing pitch, see (Haynes 2002).

14. Handel wrote an anthem for a charity concert held in the hospital’s chapel in 1749 and donated several objects, which formed the foundation of the current Gerald Coke Collection at the Foundling Museum, London.

15. The whereabouts of this fork before and after it was Driffield’s property remain unknown. The Foundling Museum holds a fork associated with a similar history to that described by Ellis. See (Bickerton and Barr 1987, 771). According to curator Katharine Hogg, who gave me information on this object, it is actually a C fork (and the one Ellis and associates wrote about is an A fork).

16. Fortepianist, harpsichordist, and early music revival pioneer Isolde Ahlgrimm used A 422 in 1937, a gesture that musicologist Peter Watchorn considers “a unique insight” and “decades ahead of its time” (2007, 113). In 1968, the American musicologist Arthur Mendel introduced Ellis as a founding figure of this research trend by reissuing his last history of pitch with a substantial commentary (Ellis and Mendel 1968). On the importance of Ellis for performance practice studies, see also (Mendel 1978; Haynes 2002).

17. See, for instance, explanations by one of the central figures of the early music revival: Barthold Kuijken (2013, 19–26).

18. On the musical policies of the League of Nations, see (Sibille 2013, 2016).

19. On 29 May 1947, the BBC transmitted a show entitled “Can we have an A?” designed to explain to the public the change in their radiophonic soundscape Technical General 1947). Telephone ringtones in Europe are still mostly tuned to 440 hertz.

20. See, among others: https://www.conversion-tool.com/432hz/, https://www.432player.com, https://432music.org/gb/content/9-logiciels-432.

21. Ruth Rosenberg, associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is currently leading a project on the controversy.

22. Composer and librettist Maestro Boito, one of the Italian delegation’s two members, said that “the rays of the sun of science heat and pierce all disciplines of human knowledge and the arts. Choosing 435 hertz instead of the scientific standard would therefore be sort of anachronism.” University of Vienna professor of physics Josef Stefan replied: “The number 432 has the advantage of the mathematical aesthetic. But one has to consider it in light of the fact that in France, Belgium, and Russia, the French pitch has already been introduced, so that [this change] would represent a great cost for German institutions as well as for Austria and one has to adopt the French pitch” (Beschlüsse 1885, 16).

23. On this anti-A 440 campaign, see Fixation1933–1936 and 1950–1954. See also the material held in the file “Commission du diapason” at the Académie des Sciences.

24. Robert Dussaut to Claude Delvincourt, 30 March 1951 (Fixation1933–1936 and 1950–1954). Dussaut’s emphasis.

25. Verdi’s biographers have shown that the composer only briefly endorsed A 432. After the Vienna conference, eager as he was to facilitate the diffusion of a standard pitch, Verdi advocated the adoption of the French norm.

26. Korteweg 2017. I thank Leendert van der Miesen for bringing this to my attention.

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Notes on contributors

Fanny Gribenski

Fanny Gribenski is a Research Scholar at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and IRCAM, in Paris. She studied musicology and history at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon, the Paris Conservatory, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. She obtained her PhD in 2015 with a dissertation on the history of concert life in nineteenth-century French churches, which served as the basis for her first book, L’Église comme lieu de concert. Pratiques musicales et usages de l’espace (1830–1905) (Arles: Actes Sud/Palazzetto Bru Zane, 2019). She has been a Fondation Thiers fellow, a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Dibner fellow in the history of science and technology at the Huntington Library (San Marino, California). In 2018 and 2019, she was a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin within the research group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics”. She is currently working on her next book project, Tuning the World. She is a book review editor for the Revue de musicologie.