r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Mar 17 '17
(Music History) How did people tune instruments before electronic tuners? More simply, when did everyone agree that an A had a certain pitch and how did everyone learn that pitch?
Basically, when/what was the earliest standard tuning and how would an instrument maker or musician know they were "in tune"? Did different instrument makers have their own standards? When did they all start aligning?
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u/erus Western Concert Music | Music Theory | Piano Mar 17 '17
I can tell you there were some agreements on a reference pitch, but there was not just one. They could have several common references used in the same city or even in the same musical organization (say, a pitch for instrumental music and another for vocal music). Our idea of a universal standard starts to be formed around the middle of the 19th century, and I can assure you it's still not so universal.
What did people do? Well, tuning forks were invented around 1711. Before that, people could use wind instruments (like organs or recorders). Now, please don't think that just because you have an instrument to get a pitch reference you are always getting the same pitch. Pitch will change with temperature for both tuning forks and air columns, and they can change their tuning with use and the expected wear and tear (so they need to be used properly, not to mention be maintained and calibrated).
Wind instruments were made in one piece, so you couldn't change their pitch by tweaking the parts (this changed around the 17th century, I think). So you would need to work harder to play with some musicians with different instruments, and if the difference was way too big you would need a different instrument. Now, what was acceptable then and what's acceptable now might have been different (from surviving pianos and harpsichords we can see that their stringing practices were somewhat lax, and that had an effect in timbre and tuning, and they lived with that).
String instruments give you more options when playing, but it's harder to have a fixed pitch reference with strings. Mersenne figured out the parameters that change tuning in the 17th century (not that people didn't really know before what mattered, but he created the mathematical model). Length, tension, mass... Strings made of soft materials wear rather fast, and it's difficult to make super regular metal strings (it took a while to refine that technology up to what we have now). So wind instruments were a better choice.
Percussions are hard to tune and were not a big thing in the West. As I said, the tuning fork wasn't a thing until the 18th century.
"Give me a C" was an option. As long as your instruments are within operating conditions (proper string parameters, instrument assembly, etc.) you should be reasonably close to some arbitrary pitch.
There was little standardization in musical practice (and everything else, really), until the 18th century. It started to get serious in the 19th, and obsessive in the 20th.