A History of Musical Pitch
Soberly perceptive and quietly measured studies in pitch and tuning by Seamus Cater, re-sounding the groundbreaking research of Victorian polymath Alexander J. Ellis, a pioneer in expanding Western conceptions of tuning with his custom-built instruments
“In 1880, Alexander J. Ellis presented a paper, The History of Musical Pitch, to the Royal Society in London. Alongside the extensive footnotes in his English translation, the pitch history was also included in the translator’s appendix of On the Sensations of Tone by Hermann L.F. Helmholtz. The 74 tuning forks used in these pieces were tuned to represent the research of Ellis, where he succeeded in gathering 223 instances of the note ‘A’ from intact historical organs and assorted instruments and makers. These ‘A’s’ ranged between what we now call F# and C#.
Ellis was a measurer. As mathematician and inventor of the musical cent, philologist, collector and translator, he is commonly thought of as the initiator of comparative musicology, but what I looked for around all this data were traces of his private musicality. I knew he had been an amateur performer, who had demonstrated airs at the Royal Society with his experimentally tuned concertinas. While he didn’t leave us any music, I wondered if he might have considered how these pitches would sound, united in a single room or building. Vaguely resembling the Scheibler Tonometer, which he used to measure Victorian instruments, these 74 forks were tuned in just ratios of 480Hz. They make up a system comprising only one note name. A History of Musical Pitch tries to focus the most consonant tones of the system, moving slowly through an historical timeline of 1495 to 1880.
Checking is more concerned with the act of checking each fork with an instrument, an inversion of checking the instrument with a tuning fork. Musicians who brought their instruments to Ellis for measuring had to maintain a pitch for 20 seconds, which was unreasonably lengthy for the period, so that he could check their tone against a suitable fork from his tonometer. When the closest tuned fork produced the least beatings, a chronograph was needed to calculate the frequency. I like to think Ellis might also have used a concertina or a double bass to check the ‘A’s he encountered, to compare them to his own ‘A’ string or reed, and to see whether holding pitches for such periods could in fact be musical. The cover artwork is a painting of Epping Forest by Ellis’s son, the painter Tristram James Ellis.
Seamus Cater (July 2022)”
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Soberly perceptive and quietly measured studies in pitch and tuning by Seamus Cater, re-sounding the groundbreaking research of Victorian polymath Alexander J. Ellis, a pioneer in expanding Western conceptions of tuning with his custom-built instruments
“In 1880, Alexander J. Ellis presented a paper, The History of Musical Pitch, to the Royal Society in London. Alongside the extensive footnotes in his English translation, the pitch history was also included in the translator’s appendix of On the Sensations of Tone by Hermann L.F. Helmholtz. The 74 tuning forks used in these pieces were tuned to represent the research of Ellis, where he succeeded in gathering 223 instances of the note ‘A’ from intact historical organs and assorted instruments and makers. These ‘A’s’ ranged between what we now call F# and C#.
Ellis was a measurer. As mathematician and inventor of the musical cent, philologist, collector and translator, he is commonly thought of as the initiator of comparative musicology, but what I looked for around all this data were traces of his private musicality. I knew he had been an amateur performer, who had demonstrated airs at the Royal Society with his experimentally tuned concertinas. While he didn’t leave us any music, I wondered if he might have considered how these pitches would sound, united in a single room or building. Vaguely resembling the Scheibler Tonometer, which he used to measure Victorian instruments, these 74 forks were tuned in just ratios of 480Hz. They make up a system comprising only one note name. A History of Musical Pitch tries to focus the most consonant tones of the system, moving slowly through an historical timeline of 1495 to 1880.
Checking is more concerned with the act of checking each fork with an instrument, an inversion of checking the instrument with a tuning fork. Musicians who brought their instruments to Ellis for measuring had to maintain a pitch for 20 seconds, which was unreasonably lengthy for the period, so that he could check their tone against a suitable fork from his tonometer. When the closest tuned fork produced the least beatings, a chronograph was needed to calculate the frequency. I like to think Ellis might also have used a concertina or a double bass to check the ‘A’s he encountered, to compare them to his own ‘A’ string or reed, and to see whether holding pitches for such periods could in fact be musical. The cover artwork is a painting of Epping Forest by Ellis’s son, the painter Tristram James Ellis.
Seamus Cater (July 2022)”