this video is sponsored by Skillshare.
hey, welcome to 12tone! recently, I fell pretty deep down a research well, and I came back
with possibly the most absurd thing I've ever learned.
this is the story of a century-long battle between different orchestras, instrument-makers,
and performers that only ended when governments passed actual laws restricting what and how
those orchestras could play.
this is the story of the Sharpness Wars.
before we get to the history, though, we need some background on my favorite topic, tuning.
you see, when you play a note, what you're really playing is a sound wave with a specific
frequency, and in order for an entire orchestra to sound good together, they all have to agree
on which frequencies are represented by which notes.
traditionally, we do this by defining the frequency of a note called Concert A, which
these days is pretty universally played at 440hz, or cycles per second.
this means that if you took a violin from Paris and used it to play with a London orchestra,
no one would notice the difference.
now why did I use those specific cities as examples?
...no reason.
point is, same note.
but here's the thing: this wasn't always the case.
for a long time, there was no effort whatsoever to standardize pitch.
it wasn't necessary: music didn't tend to travel very far, and when it did, you could
just adapt to the local tuning. this was especially true because in the medieval period a lot
of local music scenes were based around the pipe organ in their church, and standardizing
those is a huge pain, so it was easier to just tune everything else to match it.
it was so disorganized that in 1880, a theorist named Alexander Ellis performed a review of
old pipe organs and found that their Concert A ranged from around 374hz, basically a modern
F#, to 567, which is higher than C#. that's over a perfect 5th between two notes that
are supposedly both A.
over time, though, as music began to spread more widely, tuning started to settle down,
and by the late 17th century, while we had no universal standard, most instruments tuned
their Concert A somewhere between 415 and 430 hz. Ellis was even able to determine that
Mozart's own pianos were tuned to around 421.6. still pretty flat by modern standards, but
at least we were reaching a consensus.
so what happened?
well, the 19th century happened.
this was a time marked by rapid pitch inflation, colloquially known as the Sharpness Wars,
where Concert A skyrocketed, and the culprit appears to be a seemingly-innocent cultural
shift: concert venues were getting bigger.
this may not sound like a problem, but the size of the room you're playing in actually
has a profound impact on the tone of your instrument, and it all comes down to how sound
works.
we said earlier that a note is a sound wave with a specific frequency, but in practice,
playing a note on an instrument will actually produce a bunch of different sound waves at
the same time.
you get your fundamental, which is the frequency we've been talking about, but you also get
what're called harmonics, which are higher frequencies whose values are multiples of
that fundamental, so if we play A440, we get 880, 1320, and so on for free.
the pattern of harmonics your instrument produces is most of what determines its timbre, or
tone. for example, this piano has a fairly simple harmonic structure, tapering off pretty
hard after just the 9th harmonic, whereas this guitar is playing the same fundamental
note, but it's producing about 40 different detectable harmonics, including some near
the edge of human hearing.
how exactly we convert a harmonic fingerprint into a specific timbre could be a whole video
on its own, but a good rule of thumb is that the presence of higher harmonics is generally
perceived as brighter.
this presents a problem in large venues, because higher frequencies are more easily absorbed
by things like fabric, construction materials, and human bodies, so as the rooms got bigger,
the instruments started to sound dull.
raising the pitch helps with this in a fairly obvious way: if your note is higher, all the
harmonics will be higher too, so even if the pattern stays the same, you still wind up
with a brighter sound.
imagine taking a melody (bang) and playing it three octaves higher.
(bang) this is basically what orchestras were doing, but since the effect was small and
gradual they got to pretend they were still staying true to the composer's intentions.
this fight to tune instruments higher and higher was also fueled by technological advances
in the 19th century that allowed instrument-makers to produce more durable strings than ever
before, creating a sort of musical arms race to see who could make the brightest, highest-tuned
violins.
but there's one instrument whose range they couldn't improve with better manufacturing
techniques: the human voice.
as pitches rose, songs that were already difficult to sing when they were first written were
becoming impossible.
instruments near the end of this period reached a Concert A of 455hz, more than a half-step
above Mozart's intended pitch, and singers were damaging their voices attempting to keep
up.
resistance from singers was one of the few things holding back the Sharpness Wars, but
the greater prestige of the instrumentalists meant they were losing the battle.
and then the French government intervened. in 1859, Emperor Napoleon III appointed a
special commission to investigate the issue, and on their recommendation issued a decree
requiring that all State-authorized musical establishments tune using something called
the diapason normal, or standard tuning fork, which was set at 435hz, halfway between the
450 that instrumentalists prefered and the 420 that singers wanted to return to.
pitch inflation was now illegal in France, and with that example in hand, singers pressured
other orchestras to adopt the French standard, and slowly 435 became the norm, most notably
with a conference in Vienna in 1885 where leaders from eight European nations resolved
to adopt the diapason normal in all their countries.
however, this adoption was still far from universal: no one but France was bound to
the French standard, and different orchestras in different countries could still do whatever
they wanted as long as their own governments didn't stop them.
this all changed in 1919, though, 60 years after Napoleon III's decree, when 28 nations,
including the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, all came together
to sign a document agreeing to abide by the 1885 conference's decision.
that document was the Treaty of Versailles.
that's right, the same treaty that ended World War 1 also included a clause requiring that
all signatory nations accept that Concert A was 435 hertz, which…
what?
why?
how?
ok, if that sounds completely impossible to you, good news, it did to me too, so like
a good academic I went back to primary sources and looked up the actual Treaty of Versailles
on the Library of Congress's website, and there it was, article 282, subsection 22.
it's part of a list of conventions that are mostly about establishing manufacturing standards
to facilitate trade between the League of Nations, which sure, that makes sense, but
still.
can you imagine negotiating that clause of the treaty?
like yes, of course we all want this war to be over but until you tune to 435 there will
be no peace.
international diplomacy is wild, y'all.
anyway, that's the complete story of how we all agreed to… wait.
did I just say 435? because at the beginning it was 440, which…
oh no. we're not done, are we?
there's still one last piece to this puzzle, one rogue state that refused to play by the
rules and ultimately wound up changing them instead.
and where can we find this scrappy little underdog nation? where else but a small island
off the coast of France known as the United Kingdom.
you see, Britain wasn't at the 1885 conference, and while they basically agreed to abide by
the decision anyway, they weren't super happy about it, so London's Royal Philharmonic Society
came up with a rather… creative workaround. when France made the diapason normal, they
included an indication that it was made to ring the correct pitch at 15 degrees celsius.
now, since sound is generated by vibrating an object, the temperature of that object
can change how fast it vibrates, thus changing the pitch.
for a tuning fork, though, this isn't particularly relevant: it's made of metal, after all, and
it produces roughly the same pitch at any temperature that's comfortable to humans.
the marker was included for verification purposes only, so the fork could be more accurately
reproduced.
but orchestras don't actually tune with a tuning fork: they're far too quiet, so you'd
have to pass it around to each individual performer, and the process would take ages.
it's much more efficient to have one person tune with the fork, then have them play the
note for everyone else, and in the case of the Philharmonic Society, the tuning pitch
was given by an oboe. thing is, the oboe is a wind instrument, which means it works by
directly vibrating a column of air, making it much more sensitive to that air's temperature,
so the Society reasoned that they should tune their oboe to match the fork at 15 degrees,
but if they happened to play at the standard room temperature of 20 degrees, they could
hardly be blamed for winding up with a Concert A of 439hz, 4 higher than the rest of Europe.
and they kept using this version even after they signed the Treaty of Versailles, because
their system was technically an interpretation of the Conference's conclusions and was thus,
arguably, still valid.
this persisted for decades, until complications arose with a new technology: radio.
now not only could compositions travel from one city to another but actual recordings
could as well, and playing back-to-back pieces by different orchestras in different tunings
was drawing new attention to the problem of Britain's mathematical sleight of hand, so
in 1939 a new conference was held, this time including Britain and the US, who was also
cheating on tuning but in a less interesting way, and they all agreed to adopt 440 as the
tuning pitch, no matter what temperature you were playing in.
it was a great victory for standardization, but unfortunately adoption was slow because…
well, because a couple months later Germany invaded Poland, initiating World War 2.
in addition to its other, more important impacts, the war caused a rift in the tuning world,
where some European nations adopted the new 440 standard while others stuck with 435,
and that rift appears to have persisted until 1955, when the International Organization
for Standardization reaffirmed that Concert A was 440. then, 20 years later, they reaffirmed
it again, and the fact that they felt the need to do that implies that orchestras had
once again started tuning higher, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
come on, people.
in the end, though, I think the 17th century organists basically had it right: it doesn't
really matter how we tune our Concert A. all that matters is that we agree.
and if you want to learn to be a better musician in any era, I'd recommend this video's sponsor,
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if you've watched my channel you know I'm passionate about affordable education resources,
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plus they sponsored me, so you know they like good educational content.
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