The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Valecnik wrote:UPMG Publishing thinks they own this recording. Appeal in process...

They sure as hell don't…..

I like these pages by Norman Field on the correct pitching of 78 RPM records, in which he's talking about jazz and dance bands, where we don't have access to the dots and where we have to make assumptions about the original keys that the music was played in. Clearly for the piece under discussion we know it's in E flat and it's played by a brass band, so it's fairly simple. Classical instrumental music should be equally straightforward, but it's singers who are a law unto themselves chosing keys that suit themselves - probably more so in the 78 era, because generally recordings were of individual pieces without the context of the work that they came from.

Lucius1958 wrote:

Valecnik wrote:UPMG Publishing thinks they own this recording. Appeal in process...

They sure as hell don't…..

Appeal won! This one is cleared now unless someone else makes a claim too.

Henry did a thorough job of explaining the whole band / key thing...

I'll just add that A=440 hz was not established as the "International Standard of Pitch" until sometime around 1939, and some countries / conductors still try to push higher...

A few years back we had a tango orchestra come through the performing arts center I was working at, with no less than four (count them: FOUR )Bandoneons, all of which were pitched at A=442 hz, and we had to pull the house piano up to 442... I thought it would explode.

At any rate, between about 1870 and 1900, there were two competing standards of pitch in brass-band world: "Low-pitch", where A=435 hz (also the common pitch standard in Western Europe and the US), and "High-Pitch", where A= 456 hz.

It was mostly the French that seemed to have had the dalliance with High Pitch...

I don't know if Sousa's band ever went down that path.

It was quite common to speed-up instrumental selections to get the whole piece to fit on single cylinder or disc-side.

This tuning thing is one of the issues that complicates any discussion of recording/playback speed. So many variables are introduced thereby, that it's impossible to isolate cause and effect. Two things are for sure: faster playback speed = higher pitch level = faster tempo; slower playback speed = lower pitch level = slower tempo. Bringing recording speed into the equation increases the possibilities to the level of near incomprehensibility. With the further addition of which (what?) tuning standard---well, it's enough to drive a person to drink. Mmm, that's an idea....

BTW, I understand that it's possible with today's digital technology to alter the tempo of a recording without altering the pitch! The converse is also true, I think (i.e, alter the pitch level without altering the tempo). Amazing. It will not be any easier for future generations to sort out the answers to questions that confound us today.

Make mine a double, Henry !

I find myself listening for untunable things like cymbal crashes and woodblocks, which should get you pretty close to the correct recording speed. In this case, the cymbals in the 160rpm example DO sound too high-pitched !

Whoever conducted Albany Indestructible's band records must have loved the cymbals, because there are usually multiple, loud PASH!PASH!es in the arrangements.

In the original post, the top video, the Triumph playback "sounds right", both in terms of pitch and tempo (almost right-on quarter-note = 120) .

The boys at Orange probably fudged the recording speed to get the entire piece on one BA.


I have a very nice 10" Victor "Patent Label" recording of "The Florentiner March" by Julius Fucik, recorded by either Sousa's or Pryor's Band, and they cut most of the repeats ( if not all ) to get all the tune on the disc. Played with all the repeats, the march is nearly 6 minutes long...


When Paul Whiteman & George Gershwin recorded "Rhapsody in Blue" on the Victor 12" double-sided disc, they both trimmed the arrangement, and pushed the tempi in some spots to almost hysterical levels, to fit it on one disc.

The 1940's Columbia version I have with Philly Orchestra and Oscar Levant occupies three-sides, 12".

Since we're discussing historical pitch, I'm going to quote from a post I did the last time we visited this issue. Where Steinway led, the music community on this side of the Atlantic followed.

Let me say, speaking as a professional tuner-technician, that certainly by 1905 A=440hz was the most common pitch standard in North America. Steinway, in fact used 440 for the purposes of piano scaling and tuning from the time they became acquainted with the work of the eminent German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, that is to say the late 1870's. It was Helmholtz who felt that the French were off base when they established A=435 which was known then as International Pitch...or French pitch. He writes extensively about this in his magnificent opus On the Sensations of Tone ( I'm using the 1885 edition as my reference.) The old French pitch being termed " International" throws a lot of writers off the trail because as we have noted, International Pitch was standardized at A=440 in 1939. That and the fact that a certain number of turn of the century American pianos have A=435 emblazoned on their corpus. This was,I feel, to alert the tuner NOT to use his usual 440 fork. I have never found an antique 435 fork, but I certainly have found a significant number of 440 ones. I have a matched octave set from 1900 that is firmly rooted at 440. This is not to say that 435 forks weren't common in 1900, but by the same token so were those at A=440. Didn't I quote on this Board ( maybe it was the old one) the amusing story from the memoirs of the marvelous piano accompanist Andre Benoist? ( good Edison artist he, with Albert Spalding. ) He outlines the trials of touring with Lillian Nordica in 1905 and the frenzies that she went through to ensure the piano was tuned to A 435! The fact that she had to stipulate that pitch in her contract and sent poor Ben to check EVERY piano speaks volumes about pitch use: namely that by 1905 440 was the usual standard.


Jim Tennyson

Thanks for that history, Jim. The piano tuning standard may differ from whatever was going on in the orchestral and band worlds during earlier times. Having played in symphony orchestras for over 40 years, I know that the tuning A is the pitch of a' on the principal oboe, since that's the note the orchestra tunes to. My wife was an oboist, and while she (and practically all professional oboists) are very aware of their responsibility to "give the A" and therefore expend much time and sweat to make their reeds to that 440Hz standard, "it ain't necessarily so" that the tuning a' will actually be 440Hz. Other factors, among them ambient temperature and humidity in the hall, often dictate otherwise. Also, some orchestras may have tuned to a different pitch standard well beyond the 1939 date. Things are even looser in the band world, because brass instruments are easier to tune higher or lower than are woodwinds and strings. In the case of my instrument, trombone, it isn't as critical because we trombonists have to constantly adjust pitch on every note that comes out of the horn, and that's easy for us to do because of the slide. My point is that a pitch standard is only a goal toward which to strive; it is certainly not to be assumed to obtain in any given situation.