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,...