Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science, and Politics (1859–1955)

the tuning of the A above middle C to 440 Hertz (Hz) is a relatively recent correspondence, having only been standardized formally in 1939. Fanny Gribenski's Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science, and Politics (1859–1955) is a remarkable historicization of the process by which this pitch-to-frequency correspondence was standardized, and then broke down. Gribenski draws from archives of pitch negotiations to demonstrate how A 440 or "concert pitch" was enacted through uneasy collaborations between musicians, instrument makers, scientists, and numerous other individuals who were invested in the idea of a "unified pitch" in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Proponents of a so-called international pitch standard attempted to socially engineer a standard tuning note. Ultimately this ambition proved difficult to popularize and even more difficult to enforce. Yet the A 440 pitch standard persists to this day in various guises, the subject of debate, disagreement, and conspiracy theories.1 Gribenski's critical history vivifies numerous actors, actions, ideologies, and technologies that were involved in the historical pitch negotiations that led to and directly followed the setting of that standard. Recognizing the exclusionary logics of these pitch negotiations, she provides a framework for "de-tuning of the world" (23)."De-tuning the world," for Gribenski, means recognizing the relativity of Western musical sounds, as well as the ways in which musical standards have been reified as natural and ahistorical. "Standards are regulating systems," she writes, "often created in reference to the natural world, but regardless of the knowledge used to substantiate their authority, they remain inherently political" (2). The idea of a "normal" pitch, or diapason normal, was exported from France to various parts of Europe and the United States. Like other technical standards such as "the meter, the kilo, or the second," pitch standards promised uniformity across social groups and markets, but also created new problems (6, 28). Pitch standards required the cooperation of vastly different groups of individuals, from piano tuners and acousticians to instrumentalists and engineers. These negotiations were not lastingly successful. Although an unlikely consensus at a 1939 conference in London established A 440 as an international standard, its regulation stalled immediately, leading to unexpected and lasting effects within and between musical communities, as Gribenski persuasively demonstrates.The archive material discussed in the book ranges widely, including instruments and technologies, such as tuning forks; correspondence between various pitch diplomats including instrument builders, academics, government officials, and engineers; and papers detailing the activities of institutions such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and the British Standards Institution (BSI). The book combines resources from musicology, history of science, and transnational history. Raymond Murray Schafer's (1977) The Tuning of the World (The Soundscape) provides an important methodological guidepost.2 Schafer's influential book describes how sonic environments were affected by modernization. Gribenski describes her own book as a prehistory of the situation outlined by Schafer, an ambitious enterprise that she achieves with aplomb.The book's narrative begins in nineteenth-century France and tracks the spread of pitch standards across twentieth-century Europe and North America. Although various attempts to select an official pitch standard had been tried across Europe, diplomatic efforts to create a "localized character of pitch" were mostly unsuccessful. The nineteenth century "French pitch" was initially a standard of 870 vibrations (or, in modern terms, 435 Hz). But the standard would keep shifting—442, 443, 392, 465 Hz, and so on—as the idea of a pitch standard spread across Europe and North America and the reality of enforcing uniformity across musical contexts proved difficult, if not "impossible."3Chapter 1 takes us to France in the first half of the nineteenth century as various musicians, acousticians, and instrument builders began to coordinate their efforts to unify musical pitch. These early efforts were defined by competing standards. For makers of instruments such as pianos and organs, the idea of pitch standardization implied various commercial advantages and disadvantages. Jules-Antoine Lissajous, an ambitious acoustician, expanded his work on measuring the vibrations of tuning forks to propose an intervention into pitch debates. This helped to spark a major French (and later, European) fixation on the idea of a unified pitch. The Lissajous commission, established by the French government in 1858, recommended a diapason normal or French pitch of 870 "vibrations" in France.4 The French pitch (really Parisian pitch) "may not have had actual authority over musical practices" but nevertheless "provided a seal of authority for the musicians," Gribenski writes (51). In other words, this standard was largely symbolic.Chapter 2 explores how the diapason normal spread. The author asks, What do the travels of the French pitch tell us about the role of musical sound in diplomatic ambitions toward globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century? Why did a lack of centralized pitch come to be seen as a problem? One of the principal forces in the spread of the French pitch was the perception of economic opportunities. Pitch reforms were bound up with imperialism and globalization, alongside the dissemination of news, military expansionism, religious missions, tourism, and the global market for Western musical instruments. This was a large but diffuse market. Britain and Austria were among the first to try to adopt the French pitch, hoping it would help establish their centrality in a globalizing world.Chapter 3 tracks the arrival of the French pitch in the United States. During preparations for the St. Louis World's Fair in 1903, there was some debate over the diapason normal. Such a standard seemed to portend a united market of musical instruments and people. In the next decade, the United States began to dominate conversations over pitch standards. In this chapter, we find one indication of this reconfiguration of transatlantic power relations in the 1917 adoption by the American Federation of Musicians of a pitch standard of A 440 Hz—in other words, not the French pitch of 435 Hz. "This shift," Gribenski writes, "from the French norm was barely audible, but it forever changed the course of pitch negotiations" (119).A significant figure in this chapter is John C. Deagan, who introduced the marimba to the Western musical market, subjecting the instrument to Western scales and the latest pitch standards. As Gribenski puts it, "Deagan was not interested in simply reproducing non-Western artifacts, but in musicalizing, rationalizing, and 'civilizing' them" (121). Moved by motives that were ostensibly rational and philosophical, but also commercial and ethnocentric, actors such as Deagan worked to uphold their preferred pitch standards through the production of instruments and maintenance of tuning devices.Chapter 4 is in many ways the crux of the narrative. In 1939, on the brink of World War II, a marvelous concord sounded amid international tensions—or so the proponents of a universal pitch standard believed. The scene is a 1939 London conference of representatives from Europe and the United States, where a concert pitch of A 440 was approved in the spirit of integration. "The speed with which pitch standardization was ratified at this moment—on the eve of World War II—underlines the spectacular empowerment of representatives of the world of electroacoustics in pitch negotiations," writes Gribenski (134).In the twentieth century, pitch standardization became the territory of broadcasters, instrument builders, and electro-acousticians. Consider a letter exchange over the idea of a concert pitch. Gustav Schwaiger, chief engineer of the Austrian Radio Company, and L. W. Hayes, head of BBC's Overseas and Engineering Information Department, discussed in writing the question of the engineering implications versus the artistic implications of a standard pitch—a metonym for "the entanglement of sonic knowledge with industrial developments" (134), as Gribenski puts it. The involvement of sound engineers was not just due to the technical demands of instrument making, but also the product of ideologies of music as a symbol of peace. "Considered a universal language," Gribenski writes, "music appeared to be the best medium to communicate transnational cooperation"; "The broadcasting of 'good' music was a highly political project, seen unanimously as a way of building a pacific supranational community;" thus, pitch remained a "diplomatic object, inscribed with romanticized notions of music as a universal language" (137). The head of the BBC, Sir Cecil Graves, emphasized the project to construct a consensus among European nations in his opening speech to the 1939 London conference, arguing for the artistic and commercial advantages of pitch standardization, which was "very much bound up with the emotional factor. General agreement on principles and practices might well be a promising portent, in these days of emotional stress" (qtd. on 139). In Gribenski's words, "Graves explicitly designated the international context as justification for broadcasters' project to tune the world" (139). In other words, figures such as Graves helped justify a hegemonic pitch standard through a rhetoric of universal peace and harmony.Chapter 5 concerns the postwar aftermath of A 440 Hz. Here the author explores how the standard was sustained, but also how it broke down. Problems arose constantly from the standardizers' efforts to popularize and spread their pitch standard. Standardizers needed the cooperation of musicians and the public, most of whom were unaware of the standard in the first place. Some of the standardizers thought a better advertising strategy would convince people to take interest in concert pitch. In 1946, the music director of the BBC noted it "might be helpful . . . to permit the public to hear the tuning up of an orchestra to the standard note" (qtd. on 166). This idea was met with a mix of interest and incredulity from other members of the BBC and took decades to catch on.The epilogue offers a critical synthesis of the book's evidence and arguments. Throughout the book, Gribenski demonstrates that pitch standards represented a complex clash and blend of internationalism and nationalism, globalism and localism. These clashes were not easily resolved, historically speaking, nor when it comes to constructing a book-length narrative about the pitch archives under study. Gribenski does an excellent job of balancing these various competing concerns and conveying their densely layered nature in the book itself. The density of storytelling is one of the most impressive aspects of the book. In the process, the author gestures toward a critique of the "global turn" in sonic research and a need to reinscribe "complexity" into what she calls the "often overtly simplistic narratives" that have emerged from musicology and sound studies' global turns (189). Scholarly efforts to synthesize "music" across times and places have created problems of their own, she asserts. This is partially why she makes the case for detuning rather than tuning the world. Gribenski claims that the global turn has become "hegemonic" and "performative" in its own ways (189). It is difficult to assess her critique, however, because she does not cite specific scholars or discourses.Even as Gribenski hints at an important critique of the global turns in sound studies and musicology, the book nevertheless reifies an ideology of music and sound all its own. This ideology surfaces, for instance, at the start of chapter 5, as the author turns to the breakdown of pitch standards and asserts "the impossibility of submitting music to the rules of techno-science" (161). I would have put this a little differently: not the impossibility of music's submission to techno-science, but the limits of constructions of music and sound as standardizable. Gribenski does not always go far enough to denaturalize music as a thing; rather, the book reifies music as something to be defended. Earlier critiques by Martin Scherzinger (2004) and James Currie (2012), among others, remain pertinent. For these thinkers, "music" may be what we think it is, it may not be; to figure music and sound as things to be protected (such as from "science" or "technology") is to suggest a different kind of ideology, to further a different kind of politics of exclusion. Still, this should not detract from what Gribenski has accomplished here. We can continually consider the extent to which hidden standards, not just pitch, may be subject to the same rigorous historicization. Indeed, Tuning the World has created a conceptual path for further studies of this kind, and for that it should be commended.Tuning the World is an original, powerful work of research and an engrossing read. It draws from archives of pitch negotiations and offers a much-needed historical analysis of Western musical pitch standards. In addition to its potent analyses of underconsidered pitch archives, the book touches on many timely theoretical topics in music research: the construction of artistic standards; how "music" has been defined and redefined alongside such standards; how human expression, politics, and scientific methods may be traced historically in pitch negotiations; and how a specific standard cohered as a practice, a symbol, and a symptom of power. Gribenski's narrative of the emergence of standard pitch will be of value to students, scholars, and anyone interested in historicizing such standards, for many years to come. I sense its importance will only increase as we witness the inevitable next wave of pitch negotiations. This is a history that is also present.I sense the importance of this book in my own pitch negotiations. As a child growing up in the 1990s in Southwest Virginia, I was surrounded by competing tuning systems—but I did not know it. The singer, the teacher, the fiddler, the piano, the place of worship, audio recordings, cartoons, the movies, the internet, the computer: pitch systems were a Borgesian list.I have long wondered where these various competing systems came from. One of the pleasures of reading Gribenski's book has been finding new answers to this question, reflecting on my own learning experiences, and revisiting them with new historical perspective. It has meant new context for how I hear and how my listening practices have changed, not always by my own design. Even if standard tunings were never universal, they nevertheless can shape the practices of composers and musicians like me, as Gribenski emphasizes. Tuning has become "an essential part of the aural aesthetic," she writes (191). Whether one tunes to A 440 or not, the standard's place in history is not easily tuned out. If this is a problem, I can think of at least five ways to solve "the problem" of artistic standards. One is an utterly anarchic, relativist, formless world ("no standards"). Another is a conservative solution ("we must all do it this way because of tradition"). There is the fascistic solution ("there is only One Truth"). There is the neoliberal solution (favor standards that promote free market capitalism). And there is the pluralist solution ("many standards"), an acknowledgment that subjective universals can exist, as can many individual and group subjectivities. Who we play with is significant here.Pitch standards are the result of a potent cocktail of ideological, artistic, emotional, and technical concerns. The standardization of pitch in the West was a gradual process wherein an empowered group of diplomats, broadcasters, artists, and engineers attempted to flatten the jagged terrain of pitch practices into a single measurable plane. Tuning the World brings this flattening into sharp relief.