![]() ![]() ![]() Nonetheless, it seems quite likely that, allowing for significant variations, the pitch of Shore's tuning fork was fairly similar to what might have been used in the early days of piano tuning. At the other end of the scale, some organs in Germany that were played by Bach have A as high as 480Hz - a difference in pitch of nearly a major third! However, there was no consistency - some church organs built during the period have A as low as 390Hz, and some chamber instruments (according to contemporary measurements) were as low as around 410Hz. A fork belonging to the instrument maker Johann Andreas Stein in the 1780s, whose pianos were played by Mozart, comes in at a similar value of A=422Hz, so this is likely a tuning that would have been familiar to musicians of this period. A fork made by Shore, which he gave to the composer Handel, still exists today and has a frequency of A=422.5Hz. The tuning fork had been invented in 1711 by John Shore (1662-1752), a prominent British musician, so it would have been possible to have a convenient portable reference of relative pitch from this time onwards, and it may have had at least some effect in reducing the enormous range of standards in use. Apparently, Sauveur's efforts were not particularly welcomed by musicians in his own time, and this pitch has never been widely used as a musical standard (though Italian musicians briefly adopted something similar in 1881, actually A=432Hz, before agreeing to the A=435Hz at the Vienna conference of 1885) however, medical tuning forks, employed for the measurement of hearing, are quite commonly found at this frequency. It should also be mentioned in passing that the French mathematician Joseph Sauveur (1653-1716), who worked extensively on acoustic theory, was an early advocate of pitch standardization and in 1713 proposed that middle C should be 256Hz (known as "scientific" or "philosphical" pitch as each "C" has a frequency which is a power of 2), which would correspond in an equally tempered tuning to A=430.54Hz. At the time, absolute pitch could only be measured with limited accuracy - for example, the Italian mathematician, Vittorio Francesco Stancari (1678-1709) had experimented with a toothed wheel as a tone generator. It should be noted that during this period, there was no standardization of pitch. To work out the origin of all these pitch standards, we should transport ourselves back into the late eighteenth century, when pianos were becoming widely produced and available for the first time. From the fact that tuners were carrying these sets of forks around, it would seem likely that these may all have been used at various times depending on the requirements of the customer, and no doubt all of this caused considerable confusion! ![]() If we recalculate these frequencies (assuming equal temperament) to values for the note A, which is the generally accepted standard for orchestral tuning, we get A=435Hz, A=439Hz, A=444Hz and A=454Hz (none of these corresponding to modern standard pitch, though "New Philharmonic" is close). It seems to have been a feature of the British piano trade that people were traditionally (and commonly still are) taught to tune using middle C as the reference note (although the forks are actually an octave above this). Two modern forks (C523.3 and A440) are on the right. These are "C" forks which probably would have been used by a piano tuner in the early part of the twentieth century, and there are four different pitches as inscribed on the side of the prongs:Īn set of tuning forks (left) used about a hundred years ago. ![]() The situation can be summed up fairly well by looking at this set of tuning forks, which would date from around a hundred years ago. So I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the different pitches pianos were tuned to in the past, and how the current standard came about. This is a difficult question to answer, since prior to A=440Hz, there was no single universally agreed standard. However, someone recently asked me what pitch would originally have been used for a late nineteenth-century Broadwood grand piano. In a previous post I explained that "standard" or "concert" pitch means that the note A above middle C has a frequency of 440Hz (cycles per second), and that this was settled upon at a conference in 1939. ![]()
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